II.

When clouds gather over Tanglefoot Cove, and storms burst on the mountain slopes, the sounds of the tempest are redoubled by the echoes of the crags, trumpeting anew the challenge of the wind and reiterating the slogan of the thunder. For begirt on every side by clifty ranges the secluded valley lies. Ike’s mother, listening to the turmoil of the powers of the air and the sinister response of the powers of the earth, as the surly night closed in, waited with anxiety for the boy’s return, and welcomed him with a brightening face as he entered.

A great fire flared on the hearth, illumining the ill-laid puncheon floor; the high bed with its gayly tinted quilts; the warping bars; the spinning-wheel; the guns upon their racks of deer-antlers; the strings of red peppers, swaying overhead; the ladder leading up to the shadowy regions of the roof-room through a black hole in the ceiling. The fire-light even revealed in a dusky nook a rude box on rockers—which had cradled in turn these stalwart soldiers, and later Ike, himself—and, under a low shelf in the corner, a tiny empty chair.

The wind rushed down the chimney, and every cranny piped a shrill fife-like note, and the thunder rolled.

“I dunno when I ever hev seen sech a onexpected storm,” said Ike’s father as he hung up the ox-yoke on the wall, having turned out the team from his wagon.

“T’wouldn’t s’prise me none,” said aunt Jemima, “ef ’twar jes’ a big blow ez tore down the fodder-stack an’ rooted up yer orcherd’ an’ never gin ye nare drop o’ rain fur the drought;” she cast an almost reprehensive glance upon him, as if it were through his neglect that he was threatened with these elemental disasters.

“Waal,” he retorted, “I ain’t settin’ myself ter fault the Lord’s weather. An’ my immortal hopes ain’t anchored in a fodder-stack, nuther in the orcherd. An’ thar’s no dispensation ez kin happen ez I ain’t in an’ about able ter stan’.”

Even aunt Jemima was rather taken aback by this sturdy defiance of fate. She had nothing to say, which was rather rare, for she had given most of her declining years to argument, and much practice had developed her natural resources of contradiction, which were originally great. As Ike’s father was himself testy and dogmatic, and the blind man often proclaimed that he took “nuthin’ off’n nobody,” the family might have been divided by dissension were it not for the placid temperament of Ike’s mother. She received no credit, however, for—as people often observed—she was not born a Guyther and had “no call to be high-strung an’ sperited.” She had been a great beauty in her girlhood and had had lovers by the score, but care and age and poverty had bereft her of her personal charms, and she had neither culture nor grace of manner to fill the breach. Her hard experience of life, however, had failed to sour her temper, and her placidity had something of the buoyancy of youth, as she often declared, “It’ll be all the same a hundred year from now.”

“’Pears like ter me ’twon’t blow that hard,” she remarked as she stirred the corn-meal batter in a wooden bowl, “the wind don’t fool much with our orcherd nohow.”

“I’d ruther hev the wind ’n, no rain,” said aunt Jemima, plaintively.

“I’m a-thinkin’ we’ll git rain too, jes’ ’bout enough. Yellimints don’t neglec’ us noways ez I kin see. Seedtime an’ harvest shell never fail”—

“Kems mighty nigh it, wunst in a while,” said aunt Jemima, shaking her head. “Ef ye hed enny jedgment an’ forecast, M’ria, ye’d look fur troubles ahead like them ye hev seen.”

There was a shadow on the wasted placid face under Mrs. Guyther’s sunbonnet as she knelt to put the potatoes with their jackets on in the ashes to roast.

“Waal—let troubles go down the road. I wouldn’t hev liked thar looks no better through viewin’ ’em ’fore I got ter ’em. I ain’t a-goin’ ter turn roun’ now ter see ag’in how awful they war whenst they war a-facin’ me. Let troubles go down the road.”

And so she covered the potatoes while aunt Jemima knit off another row.

The next moment both were besprinkled with ashes; the chimney-place seemed full of a vivid white light never kindled on a hearthstone; there was a frightful crack of thunder, then it seemed to roll upon the roof, and the cabin rocked with the fierce assaults of the wind.

“That thar shot war aimed p’int blank,” said the blind artillery-man, thrusting his hands deeper in his pockets, and stretching out his long legs, booted to the knee. His gray hair had flakes of the white ashes scattered upon it.

“Suthin’ mus’ hev been struck right hyar in the door-yard,” said aunt Jemima. She had laid down her knitting with a sort of affronted and expostulatory air. “I’ll be bound it’s the martin-house.”

“I’ll be bound it’s nuthin’ we want,” said Mrs. Guyther.

There was a hesitating drop, another, upon the clap-boards that roofed the house; then came the heavy down-pour of the rain, the renewed gusts of the wind, and amidst it all a husky cry.

They turned and looked at one another. Then Hiram Guyther lifted the latch. The opening door let in the moist, melancholy air of the stormy evening that seemed to saturate the room in pervading it. A crouching figure, the sombre clouds, the slanting lines of rain, the tossing dark woods, were barely visible without, until a sudden, blue forked flash, of lightning played through this dusky landscape of grays and browns. As it broadened into a diffusive red flare, it showed an ox with low-hanging horns between the shafts of a queer little cart, piled high with household goods. Among them half smothered in the quilts—wound tightly about her shoulders—appeared the yellow head, and pink face, and big, startled gray eyes of a little girl. It was only for a moment that this picture was presented, then it faded away to the dark monotony of the shapeless shadows of the woods; and as Ike went to the door he heard the drawling voice of the man he had seen at Keedon Bluffs asking Hiram Guyther for shelter for the night.

“We-uns hev been travelin’ an’ hoped ter git settled fur the winter ’fore enny sech weather ez this lit onto us.”

“Kem in, traveler! Ye air hearty welcome ef ye kin put up with sech ez we-uns kin gin ye,” the hospitable mountaineer drawled sonorously, raising his voice that it might be heard above the blast.

“We’ll all hev pleurisy, though, ef ye don’t shet that thar door, an’ keep it shet,” muttered aunt Jemima, in her half articulate undertone.

She was silent the next moment, for there was slowly coming into the room—nay, into the grim heart of aunt Jemima—a new power in her life. A yellow-topped, cylindrical bundle, much like a silking ear of corn, was set on end in the middle of the puncheon floor, and as the strange man unwrapped the parti-colored quilts from about it, there stepped forth, golden-haired, ragged, smiling, with one finger between her small and jagged teeth, with dimples that graced the poverty and atoned for the dirt, a little girl, looking quaintly askance at the group about the fire, and making straight for the little chair under the shelf. She did not move it. She sat there, under the shelf, smiling and pink and affectedly shy.

Aunt Jemima stared over her spectacles. She too smiled as her eyes met the child’s—a grim demonstration. Her features adapted themselves to it reluctantly as if they were not used to it.

“Kem up by the fire, child,” she said.

But the little girl sat still under the shelf.

“Warm yer feet!” aunt Jemima further sought to beguile her.

The little guest’s pleased smile took on the proportions of an ecstatic grin, but she only settled herself more comfortably in the small chair under the shelf.

Aunt Jemima, tall, bent, raw-boned, rose and approached the little girl with a seriousness that might have seemed formidable. She looked up with her big gray eyes all shining in the firelight, but did not offer to retreat. She only clutched fast the arms of the little chair that had taken her delighted fancy, and since she evidently would not leave it for a moment, the old woman pulled the chair, child and all, in front of the fire, into the full genial radiance of the blazing hickory logs. Ike and his mother and the hounds looked on at this proceeding, and one of the dogs, following close after the chair when it was dragged over the floor, squeaked in a low-spirited key and wheezed and licked aunt Jemima’s hand, as it grasped the knob, seeking to call attention to himself. “Now ain’t ye a nice one, a-goin’ on four legs an’ switchin’ a tail a-hint ye, an’ yit ondertakin’ ter be ez jealous ez folks,” she admonished him, and he frisked a little, glad to be spoken to on any terms, and sat down between her and the little girl, who still clutched the arms of the tiny chair.

“Waal now, it air a plumb shame fur her ter be bar’foot this weather,” said aunt Jemima, contemplating the little guest.

The old woman was abashed when she glanced up and saw the child’s companion, who, with Hiram Guyther, had just returned from the task of stabling the ox and sheltering the wagon, for she had not intended that the stranger should overhear this reflection.

“I know that,” he drawled in a desolate low-spirited cadence, his eyes blinking in the light of a tallow dip that Mrs. Guyther had set on the mantel-piece, and seeking with covert curiosity to distinguish the members of the group. He paused suddenly, for at the sound of his voice the blind man abruptly rose to his feet and stretched out his arms gropingly. “Who—who?” he stuttered, as if his speech were failing him—“who be this ez hev kem hyar ter-night?” He passed his hands angrily across his eyes—“Ain’t it Jerry Binwell?”

Blind as he was, he was the first to recognize the newcomer with that sharpening of the remaining senses which seeks to compensate for the loss of one. But indeed Jerry Binwell had outwardly changed beyond recognition in the twenty years since they had last seen him, when he and Abner were mere boys in the Cove, and had run off together to join the Southern army.

Binwell took a step toward the door as if he regretted his entrance and wished that he still might go.

“What hev gin ye the insurance ter kem a-nigh me!” Abner cried angrily, still reaching out with hands that were far enough from what they sought to clutch. The child, in her little chair at his feet, gazed up with awe. “Arter all ye done in camp, a-lyin’ an’ a-deludin’ me; an’ then slanderin’ an’ backbitin’ me ter the off’cers, an’ men; an’ every leetle caper I cut, gittin’ me laid by the heels fur it; an’ ev’ry time ye got in a scrape, puttin’ the blame on me. An’ at last—at last”—he cried, raising his voice and smiting his hands together as if overborne anew by the despair and scorn of it, “whenst we war flanked by the Feds ye deserted! An’ ye gin ’em the word how ter surround our battery! An’ cannon, an’ cannoneers, an’ horses, an’ caissons, an’ battery-wagon, all war captured! That war yer sheer o’ the fight.”

He paused for a moment. Then he took a step forward, his stalwart, soldierly figure erect, his face flushed, his hand pointing toward the door.

“G ’long!” he said roughly. “Go out. Haffen o’ this house is mine. An’ ye sha’n’t bide in it one minute. I hev hed enough of ye an’ yer ways. Go out!”

“It’s a plumb harricane out’n doors, Ab,” Mrs. Guyther pleaded timidly. “Won’t ye—won’t ye jes’ let him bide till the storm’s over?”