13 Books
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This file includes: Down the Ravine, The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains, The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountainand Other Stories, His Day in Court, The Moonshiners at Hoho-Hebee Falls, The Riddle of the Rocks, The Young Mountaineers, The Phantoms of the Foot-Bridge and other Stories, The Story of Old Fort Loudon, The Frontiersmen, The Storm Centre, The Ordeal, andThe Raid of the Guerilla and other Stories. According to Wikipedia: "Mary Noailles Murfree (January 24, 1850 - July 31, 1922) was an American fiction writer of novels and short stories who wrote under the pen name Charles Egbert Craddock. She is considered by many to be Appalachia's first significant female writer and her work a necessity for the study of Appalachian literature, although a number of characters in her work reinforce negative stereotypes about the region. She has been favorably compared to Bret Harte and Sarah Orne Jewett, creating post-Civil War American local-color literature."
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THE PROPHET OF THE GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS BY CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK
A NEW EDITION
LONDON CHATTO & WINDUS 1901
I.
Always enwrapped in the illusory mists, always touching the evasive clouds, the peaks of the Great Smoky Mountains are like some barren ideal, that has bartered for the vague isolations of a higher atmosphere the material values of the warm world below. Upon those mighty and majestic domes no tree strikes root, no hearth is alight; humanity is an alien thing, and utility set at naught. Below, dense forests cover the massive, precipitous slopes of the range, and in the midst of the wilderness a clearing shows, here and there, and the roof of a humble log-cabin; in the valley, far, far lower still, a red spark at dusk may suggest a home, nestling in the cove. Grain grows apace in these scanty clearings, for the soil in certain favoured spots is mellow; and the weeds grow, too, and in a wet season the ploughs are fain to be active. They are of the bull-tongue variety, and are sometimes drawn by oxen. As often as otherwise they are followed by women.
In the gracious June mornings, when winds are astir and wings are awhirl in the wide spaces of the sunlit air, the work seemed no hardship to Dorinda Cayce--least of all one day when another plough ran parallel to the furrows of her own, and a loud, drawling, intermittent conversation became practicable. She paused often, and looked idly about her: sometimes at the distant mountains, blue and misty, against the indefinite horizon; sometimes down at the cool, dense shadows of the wooded valley, so far below the precipice, to which the steep clearing shelved; sometimes at the little log-cabin on the slope above, sheltered by a beetling crag and shadowed by the pines; sometimes still higher at the great 'bald' of the mountain, and its mingled phantasmagoria of shifting clouds and flickering sheen and glimmering peak.
'He 'lowed ter me,' she said suddenly, 'ez he hev been gin ter view strange sights a many a time in them fogs, an' sech.'
The eyes lifted to the shivering vapours might never have reflected aught but a tropical sunshine, so warm, so bright, so languorously calm were they. She turned them presently upon a young man, who was ploughing with a horse close by, and who also came to a meditative halt in the turn-row. He too was of intermittent conversational tendencies, and between them it might be marvelled that so many furrows were already run. He wore a wide-brimmed brown wool hat, set far back upon his head; a mass of straight yellow hair hung down to the collar of his brown jeans coat. His brown eyes were slow and contemplative. The corn was knee-high, and hid the great boots drawn over his trousers. As he moved there sounded the unexpected jingle of spurs. He looked, with the stolid, lack-lustre expression of the mountaineer, at the girl, who continued, as she leaned lightly on the plough-handles:
'I 'lowed ter him ez mebbe he hed drempt them visions. I knows I hev thunk some toler'ble cur'ous thoughts myself, ef I war tired an' sleepin' hard. But he said he reckoned I hed drempt no sech dreams ez his'n. I can't holp sorrowin' fur him some. He 'lowed ez Satan hev hunted him like a pa'tridge on the mounting.'
The young man's eyes dropped with sudden significance upon his plough-handles. A pair of pistols in their leather cases swung incongruously there. They gave a caustic suggestion of human adversaries as fierce as the moral pursuit of the Principle of Evil, and the girl's face fell. In absence of mind she recommenced her work.
'Waal,' she gently drawled, as the old ox languidly started down the row, ''pears like ter me ez it ain't goin' ter be no differ, nohow: it won't hender ye none.'
Her face was grave, but there was a smile in her eyes, which had the lustre and depth of a sapphire, and a lambent glow like the heart of a blue flame. They were fringed by long, black lashes, and her hair was black also. Her pink calico sun-bonnet, flaring toward the front, showed it lying in moist tendrils on her brow, and cast an unwonted roseate tint upon the clear, healthful pallor of her complexion. She wore a dark blue homespun dress, and, despite her coarse garb and uncouth occupation and the gaunt old ox, there was something impressive in her simple beauty, her youth, and her elastic vigour. As she drove the ploughshare into the mould she might have seemed the type of a young civilization--so fine a thing in itself, so roughly accoutred.
When she came down the slope again, facing him, the pink curtain of her bonnet waving about her shoulders, her blue skirts fluttering among the blades of corn, a winged shadow sweeping along as if attendant upon her, while a dove flew high above to its nest in the pines, he raised his hand with an imperative gesture, and she paused obediently. He had flushed deeply; the smouldering fire in his eyes was kindling. He leaned across the few rows of corn that stood between them.
'I hev a word ter ax right now. Who air under conviction hyar?' he demanded.
She seemed a trifle startled. Her grasp shifted uncertainly on the plough-handles, and the old ox, accustomed to rest only at the turn-row, mistook her intention, and started off. She stopped him with some difficulty, and then, 'Convicted of sin?' she asked, in a voice that showed her appreciation of the solemnity of the subject.
'I hev said it,' the young man declared, with a half-suppressed irritation which confused her.
She remained silent.
'Mebbe it air yer granny,' he suggested, with a sneer.
She recoiled, with palpable surprise. 'Granny made her peace fifty year ago,' she declared, with pride in this anciently acquired grace--'fifty year an' better.'
'The boys air convicted, then? he asked, still leaning over the corn and still sneering.
'The boys hev got thar religion, too,' she faltered, looking at him with wide eyes, brilliant with astonishment, and yet a trifle dismayed. Suddenly, she threw herself into her wonted confiding attitude, leaning upon her plough-handles, and with an appealing glance began an extenuation of her spiritual poverty: ''Pears like ez I hev never hed a call ter tell you-uns afore ez I hev hed no time yit ter git my religion. Granny bein' old, an' the boys at the still, I hev hed ter spin, an' weave, an' cook, an' sew, an' plough some--the boys bein' mos'ly at the still. An' then, thar be Mirandy Jane, my brother Ab's darter, ez I hev hed ter l'arn how ter cook vittles. When I went down yander ter my aunt Jerushy's house in Tuckaleechee Cove, ter holp her some with weavin', I war plumb cur'ous ter know how Mirandy Jane would make out whilst I war gone. They 'lowed ez she hed cooked the vittles toler'ble, but ef she had washed a skillet or a platter in them three days _I_ couldn't find it.'
Her tone was stern; all the outraged housekeeper was astir within her.
He said nothing, and she presently continued discursively, still leaning on the plough-handles:
'I never stayed away but them three days. I warn't sati'fied in my mind, nohow, whilst I bided down thar in Tuckaleechee Cove. I hankered cornsider'ble arter the baby. He air three year old now, an' I hev keered fur him ever sence his mother died--my brother Ab's wife, ye know--two year ago an' better. They hed fedded him toler'ble whilst I war away, an' I fund him fat ez common. But they hed crost him somehows, an' he war ailin' in his temper when I got home, an' hed ter hev cornsider'ble coddlin'.'
She paused before the rising anger in his eyes.
'Why air Mirandy Jane called ter l'arn how ter cook vittles?' he demanded, irrelevantly, it might have seemed.
She looked at him in deprecating surprise. Yet she turned at bay.
'I hev never hearn ez ye war convicted yerself, Rick Tyler!' she said tartly. 'Ye war never so much ez seen a-scoutin' round the mourner's bench. Ef I hev got no religion, ye hev got none, nuther.'
'Ye air minded ter git married, D'rindy Cayce,' he said severely, solving his own problem, 'an' that's why Mirandy Jane hev got ter be l'arned ter take yer place at home.'
He produced this as if it were an accusation.
She drew back, indignant and affronted, and with a rigid air of offended propriety.
'I hev no call ter spen' words 'bout sech ez that with a free-spoken man like you-uns,' she staidly asseverated; and then she was about to move on.
Accepting her view of the gross unseemliness of his mention of the subject, the young fellow's anger gave way to contrition.
'Waal, D'rindy,' he said, in an eager, apologetic tone,' I hev...
