Selections from
Katy of Catoctin

CHAPTER I.

MOUNTAINEERS.

“MARYLAND is only a rim of shore, a shell of mountain, but all gold!”

So said Lloyd Quantrell, the gunner, looking down from the South Mountain upon Middletown or Catoctin Valley, an October Saturday in the year 1859.

The mellow light of afternoon touched or bathed the hundred farms, the bridges, barns, hamlets, stacks, corn-rows, brown woods, streams and stone walls, and with a fruity smell, as of cider-presses, seemed to come up the tone of bells ringing the Marylanders home from the labors of the week.

He saw the red and white spires of Middletown in the lap of the valley like its babe, and thought he saw, beyond its Catoctin Mountain knees, the father Frederick, the good old burgher, holding his devout fingers up, like index boards at the junction of his many pike roads.

Then fancy spread other terraces of Maryland, farther and farther on, like descending steps of gold and marble, beyond the hills of Sugarloaf and Linganore, to where Potomac and Patapsco blended their cascades and ocean-tides at the shrines of Washington and Baltimore.

Lloyd Quantrell’s dog put his nose in the air silently, looking also downward, as if he scented, with the pheasants of the mountain, the sea-fowl of the Chesapeake.

A train of cars was crossing the mouth of Catoctin Valley from the dark chasm of Harper’s Ferry, as the dog started back along the mountain-top, “pointing” for a bird; and when Lloyd had followed and fired at and missed the bird, he saw another view in the west, all flooded with the sunset — the plateau between the Antietam and Potomac, stretching in woodland or crystal to the North Mountain and the Conococheague.

Here, amid equal abundance, a wilder paradise extended, as if nature’s ruggedness had somewhat delayed the gardener hands of man.

Beneath Quantrell’s eye, to the left, a short, bold mountain intruded, which had begun a race with the South Mountain for the Pennsylvania line, but stopped in sight of the white clusters of settlement toward Hagerstown, discouraged at their beauty and multitude, like Balaam’s stride arrested by the Hebrew camps.

Between this, Elk Ridge (or Maryland Heights) Mountain, and his own, and in the narrow peninsula beyond, where the Potomac begged a passage to the Shenandoah, a few wild farms found lodgment, as if poor, fugitive, and hermit men had clung there to a funnel, and now their white log and plaster houses and decayed black barns, in the midst of small mountain orchards, sent up to Quantrell light spirals of smoke, or flame of burning brushwood, or bells of milch-cows tinkling in alder-copses.

Where these wild homes and startled spurs of mountain halted, the basin of the great Cumberland Valley fell away indistinctly, and Keedysville lay in the foreground, like a bunch of the American flag.

The colors in the landscape were gold, purple, chrome, and all varieties of autumnal blue and gray, and, as if they were mixed in a cup, the young Baltimore sportsman drank them in and pined to understand the delight: for the love of scenery yearns to become an art.

In all this patriotic prospect there was no responsive heart, and Lloyd Quantrell was still unbeloved.

New pulses had beat of late in him, and, like the hair upon his lip, sentiment had begun to grow: the idea of woman followed him about — of no one woman but of womankind, and in this glowing Eden of his native State the scenery seemed to lack a sympathetic spirit to reach up her white arms from the vale and cry: “Come down, my love, appointed for me; and I will make thy soul at rest, to enjoy every prospect, which, lonely, thou never canst!”

Beautiful, detached time of life! when, like a mote of the Italian poplar’s pollen blowing in the air to find the female cup, the souls of two young, destined people, yet unknown, solicit each other in the world.

The crude, destructive instincts of the young man were expressed aloud in his emotion between savagery and art:

“What would I do if all this was mine, on both sides of the mountain?” Lloyd Quantrell said. “Let me see! Why, I would clean out the whole region, like a Norman king, and make it a hunting park. All the wild beasts once here should return again — none but native American beasts, you bet! I would let them make their dens and shelters in these towns. The people would have to go — go West, I suppose — and then these stone, brick, and timber villages would decay, and we should have real American ruins in a few years. Too many Dutch are in this up-country for me! Instead of a lot of Dutchmen going to Baltimore market, we should have hunters sending down deer and bear. I would bring the buffaloes back from the West — for they used to herd here too, in the early day — and let them make dust, like an army, as they galloped before my hunters. The wolf should howl again, to make the mountains romantic. I would have grizzlies hug each other, panthers sneak away and prowl nearer again, and foxes should be protected, so that every day would be a morning chase. My castle I would put on the South Mountain, right here where I stand.”

He stopped, thinking what would a castle be without a lady. But in a minute his mind ran along with the vision:

“I think,” he resumed, “that I would not disturb the Dutch beauties, for I would need a few vassals, and, to reconcile these and give me society, I might marry one of them. Yes, she should be the rosiest of all. I would educate her and make her my baroness; Baroness of the Blue Ridge.”

As his thoughts, like the predatory hawk, flew back to a domestic nest and mate, Lloyd basked a moment in the soft, languorous vision of a settlement in life, till the dog whined and pointed, and, looking where it indicated, the gunner saw, in the edge of the woods, a few steps distant, a strange, primitive old man, accompanied by two young companions, watching him.

The apparition was more lean than tall, and dressed in dark woolens, cut almost Quaker fashion, and his waistcoat was buttoned nearly up to a leather stock around the tough whip-cords in his throat, which were revealed when he took his bushy gray beard in one hand and drew it aside, looking meantime at young Quantrell with a pair of severe, gray-blue eyes.

The intruder’s hair was brushed straight up from a rather low, receding forehead. He had a hawkish nose, and the beard which encircled his face, and would have fallen low upon his breast, stood outward at his chin like autumn brush against a rock.

“If this is your land, you don’t mind my gunning on it?” spoke Quantrell.

“It is not my land, sir,” answered the man, not finishing his searching look.

“Then I don’t see why you look at me so hard, friend, unless I have stolen something.”

“Are you from Virginia?” asked the man.

“No, I am from Maryland — from Baltimore.”

“You have been walking around this country three days!”

“There’s no law against that, old man. I have been shooting, what little there is, and picking a few fish out of the brooks. Have you been following me all the time?”

“I have seen you around my dwelling, sir, on two occasions, yesterday and the day before,” continued the mountaineer, “and you are here still.”

“Upon my word, friend, I don’t see why I shouldn’t pass your dwelling every day of my holiday here, particularly as I don’t know where it is!”

An idea crossed Lloyd Quantrell’s mind that there might be robbers in these mountains, and he gave a glance at the two other men.

They were young fellows, and, in appearance, were so nearly the same, that observing one, answered for both; of good height, spare-faced and sunburned, sallow, worn thin, and with long, dark hair and beards; mere rustics to look at, with some passing alertness of curiosity now, but too docile and gentle to retain a predatory purpose.

This time Lloyd Quantrell guessed that they might be an old preacher and his two sons, of Mennonite, or Dunker, or some mountain Dutch sect. But the nasal tone of the old man, and his bold, grave address, made Lloyd think again that he had seen such men bringing horses to Baltimore market from Ohio and the West.

The only sign of offensive warfare they possessed was a kind of spear of steel, like a broad, double-edged knife-blade, with a cross-piece or guard below, and carried upon a wooden pole by one of the younger persons.

“What have you there, my friend?” asked Quantrell, walking over freshly. “It looks like what we called at school ‘a gig,’ to spear suckers and pike.”

“I calkelate you hit it right the first time,” said the possessor, smiling agreeably.

“We live over beyond the Short Mountain there,” explained the other young man; “down on the river road to the ferry. Since we’ve been here, so few well-dressed strangers have gone past, that father was a little surprised at you — that’s all.”

“Then we are all Marylanders,” exclaimed Quantrell, “and I’m glad of that, because I have been lonesome for somebody to drink with me. Here’s a flask of old Needwood whisky, I know I can recommend! Age before beauty, pop!”

He extended the flask to the old man and winked at the boys.

“It’s something I never drank, sir, in my life,” spoke the firm old man, shaking his head.

Lloyd then turned to the boys.

“We’re not accustomed to it, friend,” said the elder of these, “but don’t let us interfere with you.”

Quantrell drank, and liked it so well that he drank twice, and then, laying down his gun and calling in his dog, he felt familiar and companionable with all men. He produced cigars and a fuse, and offered his cigar-case to the party.

“We’re unfortunate,” said the younger of the sons; “neither father nor we boys smoke, or use tobacco.”

“Sit down, anyway,” said the young man from the city; “there’s the habit of talk, that is common to all. What is your name? — Smith will do; anything to begin on.”

“You’re a good guesser. Smith is what it is,” spoke the old man, taking off his wool hat and stretching himself on the rocks and grass. “Isaac Smith — and yours?”

“Quantrell, of Baltimore.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Mr. Smith, “that is the name of one of the slave-dealers there!”

“Yes,” said Lloyd, reddening a little, “that’s unfortunately an uncle of mine. He’s managed, by the notoriety of the business, to have me identified pretty generally. It’s a business I shouldn’t go into — because it’s not a gentleman’s.”

The young men, as if interested, now stretched themselves on the mountain-slope, and the older man, changing his look to one more neighborly, said, in an impressive yet kind voice:

“Hardly a good Christian business, Mr. Quantrell! A business has got to be good, I think, sir, to insure any prosperity. If nobody could be found to trade in slaves, the evils of slavery would be small, because they would not be sent to great distances and worked up on the plantations. It would then not be profitable. Slavery in Maryland, except in two or three counties, is a trifling matter.”

“Yes,” said Lloyd, “it’s small, except in the tobacco counties, and they, as you have said, don’t seem to prosper. But I hope you ain’t an abolitionist, Mr. Smith?”

“Unfortunately, I am a slaveholder,” said Smith, straightforwardly.

“How many negroes have you got?”

“Six.”

“Why, pop,” answered Lloyd, familiarly, “you’re a man of property! What are negroes worth, up this way?”

“They’re higher than they will be, I think,” said Mr. Smith, reflectively.

Quantrell looked at the old man’s Judaic nose and wrinkled bridge thereof, and wad of grizzly hair above his grizzled, updrawn eyebrows, with the gray-blue eyes wide apart, cool and deep as frozen springs, and that mouth, which was like a fissure in granite, and again it seemed to the young man that there was something wild in Mr. Smith.

“Yet,” he reflected, “Smith is a man more substantial every way than he looks. Six negroes and a farm, and reasoning so rationally against his interests — and with religious views, too!”

“What are your politics, Smith?” asked Lloyd. “I’ll be frank with you, and tell you, I’m an American.”

“Why, so am I, Mr. Quantrell!”

“Shake hands on it, old fellow,” cried Lloyd, while the sons laughed aloud to see the city stranger’s open temperament pushing the acquaintance.

“I’m just keyed up on that,” repeated Lloyd, clasping Mr. Smith’s hands heartily, “for there are too many Dutch and Irish in this, our country. Down in Baltimore we have got them on the run. I’m a cock-robin!”

“I don’t quite understand you, Mr. Quantrell. Is that a kind of fire company or political club?”

“You’ve got it, Smith! On every suitable occasion we turn out and have a parade, and go right through the foreign quarter, driving everything we see under cover. Our idea is that Americans are good enough to rule America!”

Mr. Smith reflected a minute, and said that good Americans ought to make the best rulers. “However,” he added, “Senator Broderick, of California, was an Irishman, I believe, and he has just been murdered, in a duel.”

“Well, he’s an Irishman’s son,” replied Lloyd; “he was born on the Potomac here, in the District of Columbia, and that’s almost as good as Maryland.”

“They killed him,” figured up Mr. Smith, in his deliberate, nasal way,” on the 18th of last month. It will be four weeks to-morrow night, Mr. Quantrell.”

At this, the plain, independent old man, as Lloyd began to think him, looked at his two sons, and they raised their eyes to him.

“Next Sunday night will be four weeks,” repeated Mr. Smith, still looking at his boys, “since David Broderick was killed by a judge, in a duel. The newspapers say his last dying words were, ‘They killed me because I was opposed to the extension of slavery and a corrupt Administration.’”

There was a look of queer import, Lloyd Quantrell thought, between those plain people; for, as if forgetful of himself, they continued observing each other with a sense of some strong coincidence.

At this moment Quantrell’s dog started and ran a little way down the mountain and “pointed” at some low saplings with his fine white and brown nose.

Lloyd took his gun and followed out of sight of his new companions, and finally saw a mourning-dove sitting in a leafless tree. He raised his piece and aimed, feeling it unworthy work to shoot a turtledove, but as he withdrew the gun his dog still “pointed,” as if ravenous after the day’s barren sport.

Quantrell waved his hand, intimating to the trained animal to seek to the right and farther on.

The dog, for a minute, obeyed the order, and then returned, and, with tail straight out and one leg lifted, “nosed” the solitary dove again and made a slight, whimpering entreaty.

“Well, Albion,” thought his master, “I must either disappoint you or the dove,” and he aimed again and shot the bird.

It was so soft-eyed and so harmless, and seemed to look with such love and suffering at him as it trembled in his hand in the convulsion of death, the red rill of blood making purpler its brown plumage — like the blood of Abel sinking in the ground — that Lloyd felt some self-accusation.

With the dead bird in his hand he walked back toward the place of conversation, where he was arrested at a cedar-tree by the singular posture of Smith and his sons.

The old man was standing with his hands stretched straight out and their palms together, his body drawn up and his beard pointing upward, as his head was thrown back; while his sons, still seated, had crawled nearer their father, and had dropped their beards, as if assisting in prayer.

In the greatest wonder, Lloyd Quantrell looked at this scene, and for a minute doubted, as is natural with all men in a very practical land, seeing silent human marvels in lonely places, whether he saw anything at all; if the mountain at this point were not enchanted, and these three serious mountaineers only appearances or illusions.

But he heard articulated sounds proceeding from that old man’s beard, and the word “Amen!” pronounced with respectful inclinations of their heads, by both his tough, grown sons.

A new feeling then suddenly rose upon young Quantrell’s imagination; for the first time he had a sense of parental influence, something he had never known — confidence, consultation, and parental respect and discipline between a father and sons.

Before him was such a scene: absolute community of thought, directed by a strong-willed, plain-hearted father, who held his matured sons in the leash of his integrity and morality, till they loved his magistracy, and were like women to his counsel and authority.

“Such sons exist no more where I have been,” thought Lloyd, “at least not in the life I have seen. There the restraint of sons is broken by their waywardness and rebellion in early boyhood, even if their fathers desire to control them, or are worthy to do so.”

He thought of his own self-loving father, without moral restraints himself, or ever a rebuke for his son’s indulgences.

At the crackle of his approaching feet, the old man, Smith, and his boys ceased their apparent devotion and turned their heads.

“Mr. Quantrell,” spoke the old man, again examining Lloyd piercingly, “we do a little surveying on the mountains, and that is why we found you in this unexpected spot. They tell me, sir, who have lived here longer than I have, that General Washington was the first surveyor of these parts, and surveyed Harper’s Ferry tract itself. But what have you been killing?”

He took in his hand the little bird, and looked at Lloyd as he had at first, with a severe, almost domineering examination, and tight jaws.

“I have no respect for any man who will shoot a little dove,” he remarked, in a cold, reproving tone.

His sons also looked rebuke, and one of them said:

“Mr. Quantrell, that wasn’t fair game!”

“No, I am ashamed of it,” spoke Lloyd Quantrell, frankly. “My dog pointed so obstinately that I killed the poor thing against my better will.”

“I will forgive you, young man,” exclaimed Smith, the elder, “on condition that, if you ever see a man going to kill another dove, you will reprove him, sir.”

“I will,” said Lloyd, blushing, “unless he already feels as mean as I do.”

“Father,” interposed the younger Smith, “it was an accident, I calkelate. He’s owned it like a man. Let us show him our favorite view of the valleys.”

They looked again over the Catoctin Valley, and also at the Hagerstown Valley, both softer, paler in the descending sunlight.

It seemed to Lloyd, when he recalled these scenes in later years, as if that sunset was the last vouchsafed the world of heavenly peace and blessing.

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CHAPTER II.

THE LOOKER.

“FRIEND Smith,” exclaimed Lloyd Quantrell, “I was thinking to myself, just before we met, that if this high country of the Cumberland Valley, and the apron of it off here to the east, were all my property, I would make it a great baronial park, and stock it with nothing but American game collected from every State and Territory — a sort of Forest of Ardennes.”

Quantrell, who was a good singer, and of an unrestrained, hearty temperament, here recollected a bit of song, and without any ceremony raised his voice and sang, to the delight of Smith’s boys:

    “‘Under the greenwood tree,
       Who loves to lie with me,
       And tune his merry note
       Unto the sweet bird’s throat,
 Come hither, come hither, come hither:
       Here shall he see
       No enemy,
 But winter and rough weather.’

“Ha, ha, ha!” cried Lloyd, when he had ended, his melodious voice humanizing the place, and seeming to touch the younger son, whom the old man had addressed as Oliver, almost to tears, “that’s a song a friend of mine, a great young actor, sings like a real hunter. Now, if you and I and the boys here had control of this, we’d live like banished dukes. Is that your sentiment, Oliver?”

The young man with the sallow face and modest, sunken eyes, and careless hair and beard, put his brown hand to his throat, where there was a rising swelling, and said: “I think it is beautiful as it is. One log-house and — and my wife, would be enough for me.”

The old man, with a firm voice, interposed, glancing seriously at the son’s evident susceptibility to the song and the question.

“This is pretty scenery, gentlemen, and rich country,” he said, in a high, shrill tone, “and it delights the eye; but it fails to appeal to the mind, for the reason that history has not yet embellished it. Its great uses have not yet been perceived, I think. To grow grain and make butter and cheese, are agreeable to man; but even so fine a region as this can not compete with the great West in those respects — with Illinois, Iowa, and the Territory of Kansas. The political importance of the Alleghany Mountains far exceeds their agricultural importance. If I had been General Washington, and had his influence to locate the capital of the United States, I would have placed it behind the South Mountain, instead of in the clay gullies of the tide-water country.”

“O friend Smith,” cried Lloyd Quantrell, “there are too many Dutch up this way. They don’t know anything in the Dutch country but saving and slaving, and that would never do.”

“But hear father out, sir,” exclaimed the elder son. “He’s been a great reader and traveler. Father’s been to Europe!”

It was not common in 1859 to have “been to Europe,” and even the young Baltimorean looked at Smith with new interest.

The old man pointed over the valley with long fingers, his shoulders stooping a little, and his retreating forehead, hollow in the center, assisting the hawkness of his nose.

Lines of thought and an abstracted countenance marked his face while moving up and down and consulting the ground, but when he faced Lloyd Quantrell and his own sons, and gave them the full benefit of his steady and penetrating eyes, they felt that the narrow-shouldered, wiry old fellow must be a tall man.

He now took his beard in one hand, and with the other pointing over the autumnal-tinted plain and detached mountains, gazed out like some Hebrew seer.

“You want your political capital, gentlemen, where it has natural defenses against a military enemy, such as mountains interpose, and has population and agriculture enough to feed and defend it, and is also in a position to exert all its political influence with what I will call geographical directness on the country. The city of Washington can do nothing of that kind. It was easily taken and destroyed by a small army in the year 1814. Before it was established the people in its vicinity were getting their food from these German upland valleys. It has now no political influence at all, except a pernicious one, on the American people, having been governed for sixty years by the local ideas of two places — Richmond in Virginia and Baltimore in Maryland. Those cities were bound to influence it in the line of their very backward, or, as some say, conservative tendencies, because they received no other elements of population that lived around them in the old tide-water parts — people who continued to raise tobacco, catch herring, sell negroes, and marry their cousins. On the other hand, the country above the South Mountain ridge could subsist a very large population, and feed a large army, during repeated years of war. This mountain, with its natural ramparts, could be easily held by a few troops at the passes. The great valley behind it is the line of emigration and of easy communication from the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi, and, gentlemen, the inevitable line of war!”

Without paying attention to anybody, Smith reached out his hand and took the spear instrument from his son, and, gesturing with it against the blue air, looked to Quantrell to be a colossal and seedy school-master, illustrating a lecture on an enormous blackboard.

“It will cost more fighting men than can be levied from all that tide-water country,” he continued, “merely to protect the government and the public property located at the city of Washington. If the capital had been placed here, in the Cumberland Valley, it would have been able to launch armies against the enemy and protect itself from a perpetually flanking second army, moving up the valley and getting to the north of Washington. Here will the enemy invade once and again, and have the start in the race, and be deep in the resources and positions of your country before you can come up with him and make him turn and fight. I would remove the public effects from Washington. I would hold Baltimore to her allegiance by Fortress Monroe. I would take the valley of the Cumberland Mountains from them at the beginning, leaving them to scratch clay and eat fodder on the emaciated plains, and I would fight them from the west!”

“Crazy as a bedbug,” thought Lloyd Quantrell, a little awed, “and on the subject of the Revolutionary War.”

Sticking the fish-spear in the sward and apostrophizing it, Mr. Smith, now apparently aroused and in the depth of his subject, continued in the same plain, brief style of address:

“This is why God has established the Alleghany Mountains — for the refuge of his people! The geologist tells us that the first mountains in the world to be made were the Adirondacks. My schooling was all before these days of science, and I don’t just quite get the idea. But if it be so, that the first land to rise above the sea and give the raven foothold after the deluge was there, where our household affections look to-day” (he glanced at his sons), “even upon that Ararat, I was always thinking of my boyhood, when I was a tanner on these Alleghanies.

“Yes,” resumed Isaac Smith, after a pause, “in the year 1826 I was tanning leather near the spot where General Washington — at your ages now, and my age when I lived there — went on his long winter journey to stop the French at old Fort Le Bœuf. I used to look at the creek that supplied my vats, and wish I could follow it down to the Venango and the Alleghany, and ascend Washington’s path by the Monongahela to the mountains and cross them to the Potomac. I married there, and the desire of money arrested my dreams; but every energy I put out in that direction failed. At times great fortunes seemed within my grasp, but slipped from me. In Europe, where I went for business, I found my mind led to battle-fields and the study of war. I tried to drive the idea away, and regain my credit in the business of all my maturer life — grading and selling wool; for I could tell the difference in similar wools raised in different of our States if they were put in my hand in the dark! But the confused verses of Scripture would rise in my mind whenever I heard the military trumpets sound abroad: ‘He seeketh wool and worketh willingly, but all his household are clothed in scarlet!’”

“And now, old man,” exclaimed the irreverent Quantrell, “you think you are at last back in a good country!”

“Yes, Mr. Quantrell,” said Isaac Smith, soberly, “I am in the country of my destiny. I love this country, and hope it may be loved for me and my children.”

“You have made one mourner in advance, pop,” answered Lloyd. “I think you only need to have been born in a military age to have reached the consideration of Sam Houston or General Jackson. But, unfortunately, you could no more get these Dutch, up this way, to fight than teach them style.”

“We never can tell, gentlemen,” said Smith, “when war is, as you may say, at our elbow. I have been a great reader of the history of wars, particularly in the Old Testament. Most of the wars there recorded, were made by Moses, acting out the will of God. He led the Hebrews out of their bondage in Egypt and toward a land of promise. The people in that land, we may understand, had done no harm to Moses or his people. They existed as peaceably as the people of Virginia and Maryland, that we see from this elevation — working for the dollar and expecting no enemy whatever. But Moses, who was keeping his flocks on the back side of the desert, as we read, ‘went out on the mountain of God, even to Horeb,’ say the Scriptures. Something took him there not in the way of interest, perhaps not his desire. But there he heard his name called aloud from a burning bush, or heap of brush — ‘Moses, Moses!’ And he said, ‘Here am I!’”

Lloyd Quantrell was again convinced that the Smith family were crazy.

As he recited this old bit of Scripture, with a slow, shrill, nasal cry, Isaac Smith folded his arms, closed his eyes, and dropped his head upon his beard and breast, standing there a moment speechless, and his sons, also taking his attitude, looked to the ground as if all three were again to pray together.

“‘Here am I, Lord, on thy mountain!’” repeated Isaac Smith with rising inflection, unfolding his arms and stretching them wide. His strong jaws closed a moment, as he slowly turned his head, and with a steady eye, looking into Lloyd’s, finished the sentence: “These were the words of Moses.”

Some picture of Moses that Lloyd had seen, probably in the old Bible of his mother’s family, was revived by the appearance of Isaac Smith at this moment. His nose would have been quite the Jew’s, but that it came to an end too bluntly. His eyes, at spells, turned inward, like a lost thinker’s, and his manner varied from the hard, practical American to the introspective, tranceful Oriental.

“The poor man is crazy on religious subjects,” thought Lloyd Quantrell, “but how in the deuce did he get the military lunacy there too? Why, out of Moses, of course!

“So, General Smith,” interrupted the young hunter, pleasantly, “that was the way Moses got his military commission? He was made a general in the bush?”

“I was about to say, Mr. Quantrell, the general peace prevailing among many nations was broken — among the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Jebusites, the Philistines, and many others — who looked upon Moses, probably, as a sore disturber. They had not heard the voice he heard, nor seen the cause of war that lay among them. But in the deep prosperity of society often lies the live coal of war, as I have seen, at corn-harvest time, the fires break out in the woods and standing crops. One man might fail in this age — even one as obedient as Moses — to set in conflict the powers that now lie so tightly bound in cunning compromises that they can not draw back to strike each other. But the Power which sent the mysterious voice can bring the armies up, though the chosen captain look in vain to know how or where! He may excite only derision instead of war. He may be punished in a lunatic asylum. He may have the misery of utterly failing and involving others in destruction, but Moses thought all these things over, and they did not move him.”

Lloyd Quantrell arose and whistled to his dog.

“General Smith,” he said, “myself and your two sons have been greatly edified. To meet a man of your travel and intelligence on the top of the mountain is a refreshing surprise, sir. But the sun is getting low, and I have no shelter for the night. I would accept the hospitality of your house, if I knew just where it was.”

“We are not going home, Mr. Quantrell,” spoke one of the young men, “and there is nobody at our little cabin to entertain you. We are sorry, sir. You will do best to go down into the Catoctin Valley, here, where the settlements are close together. It is not very far to Middletown, where there is a tavern.”

“Yes,” said Isaac Smith, “we are out, Mr. Quantrell, on a night excursion to hunt minerals in the mountain. I use the divining-rod, sir, with much success. We expect to find lead in these hills, or iron, at least.”

“Ah, General Smith, you have got a universal head there! So all-night luck to you, and good-by. — Come, Albion.”

The dog started ahead at the cry.

“God bless you, sir!” said Isaac Smith, taking Lloyd’s hand in a large, fatherly palm. “Remember the queer old man’s sermon on the mountain, and — never kill a dove again.”

As the young man waved his hand and went on, he looked back once, and saw all three of the mountaineers watching him till he disappeared in the woods.

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CHAPTER IV.

KATY “P’INTED.”

Leaving the Smiths, Lloyd descends into Catoctin Valley, and at a “Dutch” farm encounters a farm maid and her friend. Albion encounters the farm’s mastiff, and in a fight emerges the worse for wear, upending Lloyd into a water trough in the bargain.

“I’m Katy,” declares the girl, after Lloyd emerges from his soaking, “Jake Bosler’s Katy. I’m goin’ on seventeen.”

Having asked farmer Bosler for dry clothes and a night’s lodging, Lloyd muses to himself: “A Dutchman’s guest! . . . Well, well! The last Dutchman I met I stuck in the thigh with a shoemaker’s awl for getting too near the polls. Can I ever respect a Dutchman? — even the father of little Katy of Catoctin?”

WHEN he came down to supper, several plain, uncultivated-looking men were already at the table, where Lloyd was accommodated with a place between Katy and her friend, who was introduced by Katy, saying:

“Tis is Nelly Harbaugh; she’s a Swisser.”

“You’re a Deitsher,” replied Nelly Harbaugh to Katy.

“What’s the difference, girls, between a Swisser and a Deitsher?” asked Lloyd of the two ladies alternately, looking his fondest. — “Jake, you tell me.”

“Nay,” said Jake, replying in kind. “Ich wais’s net, Lloyd. Ask Andrew Atzerodt; he’s quick.”

“Te Swisser,” spoke up one of the apparent serving-men — that only one whose face, as Lloyd now remarked it, seemed to have a little worldly restlessness — “te Swisser offers hisself for to pe bought. Te Deitsher gits sold and says nix. Dat’s so, py Jing!”

He raised his voice at the end in a way to exasperate Lloyd, looking at Lloyd, too, as if to say, “I am always positive.”

“Nelly,” insinuated Lloyd, “when you’re in the market, let me know, sweetness! — Katy, don’t you get sold without giving me the first chance!”

“Ha, ha! Lloyd,” Jake Bosler broke out, “you is a great feller for te girls.”

“Do you mean it?” Nelly Harbaugh asked Lloyd, giving him the whole sunflower of her attention.

“I reckon so,” Lloyd answered, but looking at little Katy.

“Py Jing!” exclaimed Atzerodt, across the table, fiercely at Lloyd, “Nelly, tare, is my gal, I haf you know!”

He looked to Lloyd now to have been drinking, or to be naturally a little drunk.

“There’s nothing like being impressive, Andrew,” replied Lloyd, looking straight at him, and mentally wishing he had him down the road. “Are you a Swisser or a Deitsher?”

“Me? Py Jing, I’m a Swisser. I lif in te Valley of Fergeenia, where tey fights at te drop of te hat!”

“You better go down there and fight, then,” Nelly Harbaugh said to Andrew. — “Luther Bosler, tell Lloyd about the mountain Dutch!”

“Te German-blood people,” spoke up Luther Bosler, after hesitation, and in a still and somewhat dignified way, “come to Pennsylvany first. Amongst te first was us Tunkers. We been here hundred and forty year.”

“You too, Katy?” interjected Lloyd. “A hundred and forty years here, and never sent for me?”

Everybody laughed loud. Andrew Atzerodt more boisterously than all, and Katy answered meekly at last:

“I’m going on seventeen.”

Stopping till he was requested to continue, Luther Bosler, whose dark eyes were like Katy’s, but his hair was coarser and of a deeper brown, said on:

“Yes, Lloyd, us Dutch is a hundred and fifty year in te United States. First off, te Germans come to New York, and didn’t like that much, so most of tem moved to Pennsylvany. Te Tunker Dutch was Baptists, and they spread all over Pennsylvany and Maryland and down Virginia way. After they got to valleys, te Swiss come and took te hills dat wasn’t good for much. So now we’re all mixed up. Katy’s got worldly; Nelly, she’s no Tunker. Andrew, he’s nothin’ but a Dutch coach-maker.”

“I’m te pest coach-maker in Fergeenia, don’t you forgit it!” Andrew said, with rising inflection and want of equipoise.

“No, Andrew,” put in Lloyd, “when Katy and I want our royal coach, we’ll have you make it. — But, Luther, what do these Dunkers vote?”

“They don’t vote in general,” said Luther. “It’s not religious. I voted three year ago.”

“I hope you voted for Mr. Fillmore, Luther?”

“No, I didn’t,” said Luther.

“Oh! of couxse, you Dutch folks had to vote for old Buchanan. You couldn’t go one of us Americans.”

“Because I was an American, I thought,” quietly remarked Luther, “I voted for Colonel Fremont. He got just two hundred and eighty-one out of ’most eighty-seven thousand votes in Maryland. So you can see my vote sticking up at te end, all by itself.”

“Luter ’most got turned out of meetin’ for votin’,” exclaimed his father. “But dey took him back.”

“Dat Fremont was a tam French abolitionist!” exclaimed the excitable Atzerodt. “I kill him, py Jing!”

“Go for him, Andrew,” said Lloyd, grimly. “He’s afraid of you, I know. But, pop” — to Jake Bosler — “can’t you take me to meeting with you to-morrow?”

“O father, do!” spoke up Katy, impulsively, “it’s love-feast!”

“We’ll all go!” Nelly Harbaugh cried; “Luther must take me.”

“Oh, you’ll laugh at us poor Tunkers, Lloyd,” Jake Bosler said.

“Nelly, you goes with me!” Andrew Atzerodt spluttered, hotly. “Didn’t I come all to way from Port Tobacco to see you?”

“I have got better company,” said the girl, negligently.

 Py Jing!” raged Atzerodt, “I kill somebody!”

“Don’t kill me,” exclaimed Lloyd, with humor. “I’ll run under the table if you look at me so.”

Superior in worldly confidence and speech, and with unchecked humor and feelings, the city guest surpassed himself that evening as the candles were lighted and the wood-fire flamed, and the presuming Atzerodt also felt his influence as Lloyd jested light and complimentary.

Luther Bosler was a good listener, and whenever Lloyd looked his way, Luther, with a certain sluggish softness in his dark-lighted eyes, seemed watching him, but not with any dislike; for, once when Lloyd cried —

“Luther, I see you’re a long-headed old sly-boots” —

“Oh!” said Luther, “my head, Lloyd, can’t keep in my poots when you’re a-talkin’!”

When they had partaken of the stewed chicken and smear case and cream, and what Jake called the “wedgable things” for vegetables, little Katy brought in pies for supper. Lloyd smiled to himself, thinking: “What heathens! pie for supper!”

“What kind of sweet things, Kate,” he cried, “are you trying to sour us on with yourself?”

“Oh,” said Katy, beaming joy, “here’s peach snitz and elder, and some kickelins. I cooked tem.”

Lloyd found the “kickelins” were sweet cakes fried in fat, and the “snitz” were dried peaches, and the queer pie was made of elder-berries. Said Katy, in their Dutch tongue, to Nelly:

“How I like to see him eat! He does it so easy.”

“I should like to see him in love, Katy.”

“Hush!” said Katy, trembling.

“Bedtime,” Jake Bosler nodded, setting back his chair and glancing at the clock. “Bi’m-by!”

“Jake, your clock is fast,” Lloyd observed, consulting his own gold watch, at which all the company looked, marveling.

“We keep it fast, Lloyd,” Luther Bosler said; “it’s te fashion up here, so we can go to work earlier.”

“My goodness!” Katy cried, “te apples is cut and you men must snitz.”

Two wash-tubs were brought into the whitewashed room, and sitting around them on wooden chairs all the men commenced to peel apples for drying, while Katy and Nelly produced two spinning-wheels and made them fly and hum on woolen yarn.

“We make all our own yarn,” said Katy to Lloyd, “and send it to to weaver. He makes it into Dunker cloth.”

Lloyd peeled apples awhile, till Nelly Harbaugh called him to unravel something at the wheel, and then he watched the two fine girls working on Saturday night, with a sense of reproof in his mind for so much avarice of time.

Nothing was here, he thought, but the physical beauty of these women to ornament life; no pictures on the wall but lithographs from Scripture, no books but the “Hagerstown Almanac” and Bausmann’s travels in the Holy Land, and a Dutch Bible; no ornaments but some horns of deer and a robe of yellow panther-skins sewn together, with the eye-holes embroidered around the red lining. The very peace seemed, to the strong-willed American, heavy with unspiritual content; but it had brought to these young girls the perfection of everything but mind.

The face he understood the best, and which seemed also to understand him, was Nelly Harbaugh’s; too open to his gaze, unretreating before him, ready to be admired whenever he turned toward it, and seeming to say, “You can make no mistake — I am ready to hear you.”

Had Katy not been there to drop her eyes before his warm admiration, he might have paid closer regard to Nelly Harbaugh’s sunny charms.

She was larger, fuller, taller than Katy, with a carriage erect yet indolent, as if Nature had given her such animal health that she could not droop, but like some strong-stemmed golden flower blinked not at the hottest sun, but took its color in every petal. Over Katy her influence might be strong, Lloyd thought, and he said:

“Nelly, I know I have seen your fine blue eyes in Baltimore.”

“No, I have never been there,” Nelly said, “except to market, and Luther made us come back as soon as we sold out.”

She looked coquettish reproach, with the same searching directness, at Luther as he came over and, putting his hand upon her shoulder, looked at her with mild interest.

“Nelly,” said Luther, “will you pe my girl if I drive you to Beaver Creek meeting?”

“I am always yours, Luther,” answered Nelly, examining him with even more wistfulness than Lloyd. “But you don’t want me.”

“I do,” said Luther, “but I want you all. I think you can not gif me all your heart. It is difided.”

“It is not,” said Nelly, “but you will not ask for it.”

Lloyd Quantrell was arrested at both the deepened interest in Nelly’s eyes and the finely contrasted animal perfection of her and of her admirer. Luther was dark and deep-voiced, and with a manly something in him, however rude. In her tall, well-rounded figure and long waist, which a bodice might adorn, and finely grained flesh and long braids of corn-colored hair, there seemed to be strength, fruitfulness, and power over man; yet in her undisguised ardor and will it seemed that she needed Luther’s reality and slower though not stronger impulses of character. He looked at her with mild, almost devout, eyes, as if he kept love back by reason.

“Kiss her,” said Katy. “I know you want to, Luther.”

Luther passed his arm around Nelly, but did not kiss her.

With disappointment, yet pride, the girl turned on Lloyd Quantrell again the same penetrating and steady look.

Thought Lloyd, returning the gaze in kind, “That girl a man might dress to look like a queen, but even then she could take a lesson in nature from little Katy.”

Katy had such large eyes, the pupils big and the eyeballs big too, that they turned in her head like poems, Lloyd thought, harmoniously rhyming in expression and so full of tender feeling that he said once, “Katy, I can almost see the water drip from those two buckets of your eyes as they rise on me a from the well of your fresh heart.”

“Why,” said Katy, “you’re a poet, Lloyd. I can make rhymes too.”

“Singsht?” Lloyd asked, having picked up a word.

“Yaw, Lloyd, and I play te accordion.”

Modestly Katy went for the instrument, and bringing it back began to draw forth its sounds, opening her lips to breathe inward the harmony, and Lloyd saw that her teeth were full and white.

Sitting there a mere child, her long braid of chestnut hair hanging to her chair, her long, expressive fingers at the keys, and shyness and fervor playing in her countenance like trout in springs, she suddenly raised a little German idyll, and her brother joined in it with his untrained bass, and all the farm-hands turned their faces up to hear:

“Oh was is shenner uf der welt
      Os blimlin roat un weis?
  Un blo, un gail, im arble feld —
      Wass sin de doch so neis!
  Ich wais noch goot in seller tzeit
      Hob ich nix leevers du,
  Os in de wissa, long un breit
      So blimlin g’soocht we du.”*

[* By Tobias Witmer: “My Old Woman’s Birthday.”]

Lloyd knew that it was a song about hunting bright flowers in the fields, and almost understood the timid peep of Katy’s eyes upon him, when she sang:

“I know yet well that in that time
      Naught would I rather do,
  Than in the meadow long and wide
      Such flow’rets seek as you.”

Jake Bosler, who had been nodding, awoke to hear the tune, and when it was done he wiped his eyes of some tears.

“Ich con’s net helfa — I can’t help it,” he said: “I tink of my olty—”

“My mother who is dead,” Katy explained, as Jake faltered; “she’s been dead two years.”

“Bettime—bi’m-by!” Jake Bosler managed to say at last, and Katy moved to the table and opened the old Dutch Bible. When she had read, in the sweetest tones, words intelligible to Lloyd only by their holiness, all present knelt and Jake Bosler prayed for his brood, for pure hearts and thoughts, and for the stranger within his gates. His daughter and son went up to kiss him.

“Goot-night, Lloyd,” he said. “Soon-up, bi’m-by.”

“Thinking of work even as he falls to sleep!” Lloyd exclaimed. “Now give old daddy a parting tune!”

He started up the little song by Samuel Woodworth:

“The pride of the valley is lovely young Ellen,
     Who dwells in a cottage enshrined by a thicket,
  Sweet peace and content are the wealth of her dwelling,
     And Truth is the porter that waits at the wicket.”

Katy caught the air and kept the accompaniment with her accordion, and Lloyd changed “Ellen” into “Katy,” and sang it to her with all his spirit, being in fine voice, and all the Dutch people listened with delight.

“Ah, Katy!” said Jake, going up-stairs, “I guess you got a beau, Katy.”

The serving-men took their departure too, and only Andrew Atzerodt remained.

“Luter,” he said, “git me some of Jake’s whisky. I hat a head on me yisterday.”

“Here’s some whisky we make ourselves, Lloyd,” Luther said, producing it. “Te Tunkers keeps little still-houses and makes a few bar’ls a year.”

The pure liquor soon brought a pleasurable glow to the men, Luther drinking sparingly, and for a while the influence was peculiar on Atzerodt, bringing out a vein of natural humor in him. Lloyd read him soon to be a man of such volatile nature that his forwardness was always getting him into predicaments. He challenged everybody, and probably had a brutal Hessian instinct, as Lloyd expressed it, but possessed no fortitude to carry it out. Seeing that Luther was now increasing his interest in Nelly Harbaugh, Andrew cried out:

“Now, py Jing! you haf been holting my gal’s hand tare long enough!”

“Sit down!” commanded Nelly Harbaugh, “or I’ll send you home to walk to Middletown in the dark.”

“I’ll go, den,” Atzerodt cried, making a movement toward his hat.

“Behave, you fool!” cried Nelly, making Luther release her hand, however.

“She’s got two fellows on the string,” thought Lloyd Quantrell, “and is fishing for me too. — Ah! Andrew,” Lloyd spoke out, “you are a courageous man. A desperate man, I call you. I have no doubt that you could take your hat and walk alone among these mountains all night, and not run from the ghost I saw to-day.”

“Geisht!” exclaimed Andrew, looking behind him and turning pale, “I walk past a shpook and shust laugh at him — ha! ha!”

“Give me your hand, my brave fellow,” cried Lloyd, standing up. “And you have got a strong grip too, Andrew.”

“If I shqueeze you hard, py Jing,” said the heedless mechanic, “you goes crazy.”

“Don’t squeeze me, Andrew,” exclaimed Lloyd, with a wink to the rest. “Now you are doing of it. Ouch! Let me go!”

As he spoke, Lloyd, who was a powerful man, trained in athletic games, closed his great palm around the coachmaker’s, and slowly tightened it. The poor fellow writhed and groveled in pain, but feared to cry out, since his oppressor kept saying:

“What nerve! what endurance! Don’t squeeze me so! Oh, take him off! Have mercy, Andrew!”

Thus shouting, the tears came to Lloyd’s eyes to see the poor braggart suffer, and all laughed but Katy, who cried:

“You’re hurting one another, I know.”

“Ah!” said Lloyd, looking at his own hand as if in misery, “never will I go into the lion’s den again.”

“Py Jing!” exclaimed the other, as soon as he could get breath and suppress his sobs, “you got a purty goot grip, too. But I’m a workin’-man. Better not tackle me, Lloyd!”

“Poor thing,” said Katy, taking Lloyd’s hand timidly, and looking at it. He raised her little fingers up as if to show her his wound, and kissed them.

“Don’t,” said Katy; “I been huskin’ corn all day in te field.”

“Do they work the women out in the fields?” asked Lloyd.

“Oh, yes,” Katy answered simply, while Nelly Harbaugh made an effort to restrain her, which Katy did not understand; “father gives Nelly half a dollar a day for huskin’ and plantin’ corn. She must be rich.”

“What ghost did you see on the mountain, Lloyd?” Nelly Harbaugh asked, evasively.

All seemed interested to hear this, and Lloyd, standing up to emphasize the story and test Andrew Atzerodt’s nerve-powers, looked quite the necromancer in his farmer’s suit and in a wide Dunker hat he now drew on.

“Andrew,” spoke Lloyd, “only your splendid courage could have resisted the feeling that the old man I saw to-day was not mortal. He had a nose that seemed to curl like an elephant’s trunk; his eyebrows stood up like a horse’s mane; his beard fell below his breast-bone and had silver fire in it like old punk. He closed his big jaw, saying: ‘Is this a dove you have been shooting? Agh-h-h!’”

“Stop! You lie! He wasn’t tare!” cried Andrew, sinking at the knees, at the stranger’s well-acted part.

“He was there, Andrew. I swear it! ‘Is this a dove you have been killing?’ the wild man said, his voice as cold as the October wind which blows that door open now — hoo-oo-oo!”

“Scat! Te wind is high,” chattered Atzerodt, as the door to the kitchen opened a little way.

“‘I have no respect,’ the phantom said to me, ‘for any man who will kill a little dove. No-o-o-o!’”

“You scare us, Lloyd!” murmured little Katy, leaving her chair and coming forward, as if to shut the creaking door. He held his hand out to detain her, and continued:

“‘I did not mean to do it,’ I said to that strange man; ‘my pointer dog was obstinate, and nosed the harmless bird. Forgive me, mountain-wizard!’ ‘No!’ pealed he, ‘a dove! A little, little d-o-o-ve!’”

“Pooh!” said Atzerodt, “if dot was all, a little pit of a dove, you wasn’t afeard.”

Atzerodt took a stout drink of the whisky. The loose door obeyed the wind again and opened inward. Katy stepped forward, but Lloyd held her at an arm’s length.

“‘My dog would nose the dove.’ I pleaded. ‘’Twas not my fault, indeed!’ ‘You killed a dove,’ said he, ‘a little, little d-o-o-ve.’ ‘Hist, Albion,’ said I, ‘seek farther on—’”

“Ha! what’s dat? I hears a kreisha!” Andrew muttered, as a sort of wail came from the kitchen.

“Albion!” repeated Lloyd, himself disturbed by the noise and his own zeal, for he had involuntarily exceeded his joke.

As he mentioned the name of his dog, Albion himself, mechanically walking as if in sleep, came through the kitchen door that was ajar, and advancing near the middle of the large room, threw back his body and threw up his white and brown nose, and whimpered as on the mountain-top. His torn ear was turned toward them and showed bloody yet.

“The hoond p’ints something,” muttered Luther Bosler. “What is it?”

“Ha! ha! ha!” Atzerodt replied, repeating his drink. “I tink it’s Katy.”

“Maybe it’s the Black Dog!” shouted Nelly Harbaugh. “Say ‘The Words,’ Katy!”

As both girls started to mutter something like an incantation, Luther Bosler advanced to take his sister, but Lloyd Quantrell had assuaged her terror in his own arms, and as he drew her tenderly to him he threw Jake Bosler’s big wool hat at the dog, which snapped at it and shrank back into the dark kitchen.

“Dear little dove,” Lloyd Quantrell said, attempting to kiss Katy, but she pressed his head away, “that wasn’t a black dog at all, only my English pointer.”

“The Black Dog,” said Nelly Harbaugh, “needn’t be black. It’s a spirit.”

“Spirit of what?”

“Trouble,” answered Nelly Harbaugh.

“Lloyd,” murmured little Katy, “it p’inted at me and you. We must say ‘Te Words’ together.”

“‘The Words?’” Lloyd answered. “I don’t know ‘The Words,’ Katy.”

“O Lloyd! ‘Te Words’ keep off te Poltergeist. I say them when I see a bad sign and when I am too happy, for when we’re happiest te bad man likes to come.”

“Say them now, Katy,” Lloyd whispered, pressing her close in his strong arms; “I’m very happy, for I love you!”

“Do you? Oh! you must tell to truth now; for I’m going to say ‘Te Words,’ and it’s wicked to say them with a lie.”

“I love you,” Lloyd Quantrell replied, his arms trembling. “I’ll say ‘The Words’ after you with joy, Katy.”

“Call on te three Highest Names, my love,” said Katy, in rapt awe.

As they said together in a country rhyme, he repeating after her, the dread names in the Trinity, they heard the dog howl in the kitchen.

“There,” said Katy, “te Black Dog heard us and is gone. Lloyd, you may kiss me now.”

“O blessed words,” Lloyd Quantrell murmured, “which brought this kiss to me. Teach me from your pure heart all that it knows, dear child, and keep me happy as I am.”

“You must peliev,” said Katy, “pelieve in te Three Highest Names and say ‘Te Words,’ and then love will be beautiful.”

“Who told you, Katy?”

“My dear mother, Lloyd, and my heart tells me, too.”

“Did you ever love before?”

“No, but I often tried to. When you came to te spring house, Lloyd, I was saying to myself: ‘I guess somebody is going to love me. But I wonder when he will come?’ I knew he was somewheres.”

“God bless you, darling! That very same was I thinking: that the country was beautiful, but I was lonely in it, for want of some gentle heart and glowing face. I have found you, Katy, and both of us are happy.”

Again the stranger in the mountains pressed to his lips the simple and unresisting face which had floated to him like a sunny cloud in this high vale, and for a little while he forgot that she was “Dutch,” hard as his native prejudices were against that humble race, longer in the land than his own name of Quantrell.

---

 

CHAPTER V.

LOVE AMONG THE SPOOKS.

WHEN they returned in consciousness to the whitewashed great room of Jacob Bosler, Nelly was sitting near the fire, which had burned low, with Luther on her right and Atzerodt on her left. Atzerodt was telling tales of spirits and frightening himself, and hence drew frequently upon the jug of whisky to give him what Lloyd called “Dutch courage.”

He told of the snarley-yow and the were-wolf; the phantom soldier and the white woman which announced a death; of the big Indian’s shade with a light in him; and of the fox-fire in the fields which lay on the meadow-grass at night and turned to silver, but like the fire-coals when stirred by avarice were silver only at night, but in the morning ashes.

Atzerodt’s sallow, furtive, somewhat anxious face, like that of one intense yet animal, brightened up between the drink, the superstition, and his enjoyment of the others’ fears; his voice was shrill and responsive to his emotions, his frame thick set and his movements were agile, his eyes a keen blue, and no repose was in his soul.

“He’s one of the best coachmakers to be found,” said Nelly to Lloyd. “If he’d be steady, he could marry any girl, and be a rich man.”

“Can’t you make him steady?”

“I don’t want to be a mechanic’s wife,” said Nelly, “unless I must.”

Looking at him again, as if trying to read him, Nelly Harbaugh said:

“Is your watch gold? Won’t you give it to me? What do you do in Baltimore?”

“Spend money,” said Lloyd, “run to the fires, turn out with the Grays, and guard the polls.”

“The Grays? That’s soldiers!”

“Yes, we’re all Union men. Not a foreigner in the company. Our motto is, ‘Put none but Americans on guard.’”

“I hope everybody is for te Union,” Luther Bosler remarked; “we’re all for it up this a-way.”

“Katy,” Lloyd said, “do you believe in ghosts?”

“Oh, yes, Lloyd.”

“Tell me about one.”

Katy shrank a little at being called upon to take so much attention, but her ready impulses carried her along.

“There was a girl over in Smoketown,” Katy spoke, “who wanted to sell herself to te divel” — Katy here seemed to be saying “The Words” again an instant — “she wanted to pe rich and not to work; she thought she was a lady, and not a poor Dutch girl. So she asked her mother to let her sell herself to te little lame man. Her mother told her to go sit by te spring and say:

‘I want clothes, and I want gold;
 I want nefer to pe old;
 I want peauty as long as I can —
 Gif it to me, little lame man!’”

“What a nice wish!” exclaimed Nelly Harbaugh.

“So te little lame man came right to te spring, and he said, ‘Put your right hand on te top of your head.’ She put it there. ‘Put your left hand on the soles of your feet,’ said he. She was sitting down, and she did that, too. ‘Now,’ said te lame man, ‘you must say, “All that is between my two hands belongs to te divel.”’ She started to say it, and had got to te last word, when her mother ran there and shouted ‘God!’ so she lost the words and said, ‘All that is between my two hands belongs to — God!’ Te little lame man run back to Smoketown as fast as his legs could carry him.”

“But didn’t the girl get any nice clothes, or anything, for being so good?” asked Nelly.

“She got,” said Katy, blushing, “a good husband, my mother told me, if he was a poor young man.”

“Dot Shmoketown,” cried Atzerodt, “is an ole Shpooktown, py Jing! I come along tare one night purty trunk, riding a horse, and joost as I crossed te leetle stream dis side of Shmoketown an begun to climb te mountain road dat comes dis way, and had got into de glen petween te Short Mountain and te Plue Ridge, I see pefore me a black man with a white face like a chiny plate. I said to myself, ‘Py Jing, any company is petter dan none!’ So I jined te black feller, and he was de nicest feller I ever did know; he was rale shentlemans.

“Says he: ‘It’s cold; we’ll drink together!’ He handed me a flask. When I got done trinkin’, tere was another man riding with us.

“As we come up te mountain through te chestnut forest, te moon shined on te road, an efery time we took another trink, tere was another man on horsepack, till, py Jing! I counted apout nine men, and de last man was a woman.

“Tey all seemed to know te black man with te white face; he was a rale shentlemans.

“He made speeches out of pooks and drilled us like a solcher company, and we charged at a gallop, an rode company-face, an right-countermarch, an had a good time, py Jing! I guess I was purty trunk.”

“You’re not far from it now,” said Nelly Harbaugh.

Atzerodt looked into the darker parts of the room apprehensively yet saucily, and continued:

“We got most to te top of te Plue Ridge, when te black man said, ‘Who’s dat long feller amongst te horses?’

“There was a man walkin’ in te road. He was a long man in black clothes. He looked up and powed and said, ‘Good-evening, friends; we’re ’most home!’ ‘Te devil you are!’ said te black man with te white face.

“We rode along awhile till te captain, as I’ll call him, begun whisperin’ to us an saying: ‘Look at dat feller! He’s eferywhere at once; he’s on dat side, and on dis side, and petween our horses, and I pelieve he’s joost a devil. Let’s ride over him!’

“So we looked, an tere he was, right amongst te horses, dis side, dat side, not a pit afraid—”

“Oh, don’t,” spoke Katy, “don’t tell us the rest unless it’s good.”

“Go to bed, Andrew, you desperate, brave man,” Lloyd Quantrell said, drawing his arm tighter around Katy.

“Yes,” Luther Bosler added, “it’s late, and this story is too long.”

“Go on,” said Nelly Harbaugh; “I want to know what became of the black man with the white face.”

“‘Let’s ride over him!’ said te captain. ‘All right, py Jing!’ says I.

“‘No,’ says some, ‘he’s a nice ole man, and he says he’s ’most home.’

“‘Put it to vote!’ says te black man with te white face.

“Py Jing! it was a tie; one half was one way and one half was te oder way.

“‘Leave it to te woman!’ says te captain.”

“That was the right way,” Lloyd Quantiell said. “The women are always for pity, Katy.”

“Te woman,” concluded Atzerodt, “looked a leetle queer an said nothing till te black an white man rode to her side and looked at her like a rale shentlemans. Den she leaned over an’ kissed him, and she joost yelled, ‘Charge!’”

Excited with the recital and the drink, Atzerodt had arisen unsteadily as he shouted this last word.

“‘Charge!’ yelled to woman, and on we put, py Jing! to trample dat long man in te road.

“The first ting I knowed, we was at te steep edge of te mountain, and te captain rode right over. Down, down he went, and efery feller after him, and I last of all, for my horse had stumpled—”

“Ah! ah! Andrew,” spoke Lloyd, “surely, with your splendid courage, you were not in the rear?”

“I was pitched off te horse joost pefore he jumped over, and I was fallin’, too, but I see te long man lyin’ in te road, an’ I took hold of his hand to save myself.

“Te moon showed him lyin’ there dead, all cut with te horseshoes. Te hand I took was slippery with something, and I couldn’t git a tight hold of it.”

“Not with your stalwart fist, Andrew?” exclaimed Lloyd.

“I couldn’t git hold of it,” said Atzerodt, with a changed and lowered tone, “because his hand was bloody. So down I went, hundreds of feet, and next mornin’ tere I was found underneath te mountain, and Nelly Harbaugh was py me. Py Jing! ain’t it so, Nelly?”

“Yes,” said Nelly, after a pause, “it was last April; he was coming to see me to make me marry him. I went out to hunt him, and there I found him asleep in the road, and his horse going loose. So I woke him up and sent him to the right-about.”

“Py Jing!” exclaimed the tipsy man, tears of various origin coming to his eyes, “I’m come agin to-day, Nelly, to ask you to pe my wife. Don’t say ‘No.’ You’ll preak me all up. I have got a shop at Port Tobacco, and all te work I want, but I can’t keep sober unless you marry me. Come, make me a home! You needn’t work in te fields no more. I’ll save you from want, and you’ll save me from wickedness. Oh, I’ll promise eferything!”

“It’s worth considering, Nelly,” Luther Bosler remarked, with grave emotion. “He’s a good mechanic.”

“Take the candle and go to bed,” commanded Nelly Harbaugh, looking at Atzerodt; “if you intend to obey me, begin now. I will not give you an answer till you are sober.”

She stood, beautiful and tall, with her blue eyes full of care yet spirit, like one with resources but in doubt.

“Oh, to-night,” pleaded Atzerodt, “or I may dream agin!”

“To-morrow,” said Nelly Harbaugh, pointing to the door.

The common fellow, in whom seemed some real sensibility now, took the candle and staggered meekly toward the entrance.

“Kiss good-night!” he muttered unsteadily.

“You are not obeying me,” answered Nelly Harbaugh.

He threw open the door leading into the night and stopped, with a trembling of the candle he held up, and the words, “It’s dark, Nelly!”

“Now, now, Andrew!” Lloyd Quantrell cried, “I know you’re not afraid to go to bed alone.”

“You’re a loafer,” shouted Atzerodt in sudden rage, uttering an oath. “You’ll pe no good to Katy!”

Lloyd made a push for the door, and Atzerodt fled, slamming it behind him.

“The cur!” exclaimed Lloyd Quantrell, throwing his arm around Katy, who had followed him. “You know he slanders me, Katy.”

“Oh, he must,” Katy said, “you are such a gentleman!”

Her brother’s eyes followed Katy tenderly to the fire, as if to reassure her of their guest’s good character; and then seeing her, without affront, caressed by the so recent acquaintance, Luther turned to Nelly Harbaugh, who had sunk into one of the wooden chairs.

“What will you answer Andrew to-morrow, Nelly?”

“Whatever you say.”

“Do you love him?”

“Luther,” exclaimed the girl, as a great sob escaped from her throat, “there is but one I love: you know it.”

“If I could make you happy,” Luther replied, “I would marry you. Your great beauty makes up for your poverty, Nelly. I haf a good farm next to father’s. Could I tepend upon your opedience?”

“For life, Luther! You are the only man I would obey with joy.”

“Girls nowadays, Nelly, looks at a man as a slave to gratify all their follies. My wife must do her part in toil and saving as our mothers did. Can you do that?”

“Luther, I can for you, I believe.”

“I haf loved you a year,” said Luther, deliberately. “Kiss me!”

Little Katy rose from her lover’s side and came forward.

“Oh, what a night of happiness!” she cried. “Hiresht se, Luther? Marry and call Nelly ‘wife.’ I hoped you would, for Nelly is willful. But she is beautiful, too.”

After Katy kissed them both, her friend, with a moment’s care, exclaimed:

“Luther, will you hitch up your horse and buggy and drive me home?”

“Now?”

“Yes, I do not want to face that man to-morrow. He may be dangerous.”

“Andrew? Why, stay and tell him. Be up and down about it.”

“No,” said Nelly, firmly, “I do not want to see him. He has once before threatened me, and, though he is a coward, he is unsafe. Tell him, Katy, from me, ‘good-by forever.’”

Her face expressed decision yet apprehension. Luther stepped out, and soon came to the door with the buggy.

“Nelly,” he said, putting on his hat and big over-jacket, “it looks as if I had pegun to obey you.”

“To-morrow, Katy,” exclaimed Nelly, nervously, “we will meet you and Lloyd at the forks of the road this side of the mountain, going to meeting.”

Lloyd Quantrell, as the door closed upon them, drew Katy to his heart again.

“Beloved,” he murmured to her, “who would have thought it this morning? That my empty, hungry heart would now be full? That you, dear child, were waiting for me?”

“I love you, Lloyd,” said Katy. “I hope te Lord sent you to me. Come, put your right hand on your head and this left hand under the sole of your foot, and say after me, ‘All petween my two hands pelongs to God!’”

“All between my two hands belongs to God,” Lloyd Quantrell repeated.

“Good-night, Lloyd.”

She slipped from his ardent grasp.

As they gave the long, wistful kiss of faith and future, pain and gladness, life and love, a door opened and Jake Bosler poked his head down the stairs, and saw them clasped together, without reproof.

“Soon-up,” Jake uttered, sleepily. “Bi’m-by.”

---

 

CHAPTER VI.

DOGS AND HOUNDS.

LOOKING through the small stone windows of his sleeping-room, as soon as he was awakened by the big bell, Lloyd Quantrell saw the red and white spires of Middletown peeping low to the south, and the bounding profile of the Blue Ridge overlap itself like elephants marching, and the Catoctin Mountain to the east leap out of the plain like a boy’s ball bouncing forward and falling again.

The Sunday morning dawn touched the high summits and crests of this double panorama with gilt as if it was the picture-frame, while between, just warming with the light, white farm-houses and gray barns, straight yellow-corn rows, sheep with brown backs, and next year’s wheat just spearing above the pebbly swells, made the valley of the Catoctin seem itself another mountain, only kept down by its abundance.

Jake Bosler opened the latchless door without knocking, and entered with Lloyd’s clothes dried and pressed.

“Soon-down. Bi’m-by!” Jake said, looking at Atzerodt asleep upon the floor.

“Who pressed these clothes so well, Jake? Katy, I think?”

“Yaw; she shtayed oop last naucht, Lloyd, to git tem purty.”

“God bless her!” cried Lloyd. “And you, too, Jake, for being her father.”

“Oh, yaw, Lloyd,” Jake Bosler said, taking the proffered hand humbly. “Katy’s my letsht — te last, I mean, Lloyd. Luter, he’s engaged now to Nelly Harbaugh.”

The man lying on the floor, in the second feather-bed, muttered here:

“I can’t keep soper unless you marry me. Come, Nelly! make me a home.”

“T’zu shpoat,” Jake murmured, “Nelly wanted Luter; Antrew wanted Nelly. When Antrew went to ped, Nelly took Luter. I don’t knows not’ing about it.”

“Nelly took Luter!” Atzerodt spoke, rising upon his elbow and looking through hot, dry eyes.

Jake Bosler looked still humbler, and, as he turned down the stairs, said compassionately:

“Soon-up! Bi’m-by!”

“Yes, poor fellow,” Lloyd Quantrell answered for Jake, “wait for sun-up. Bi’m-by it will shine bright, Andrew, from another pair of eyes.”

“Where is she?” whispered Atzerodt.

“Luther took her away last night. She thought it would distress both of you to see each other.”

“O my Gott!” — the unhappy man threw his face into the gay feather quilt — she wrote to me to come and marry her. Dis is her letter.”

He began to weep like a broken-hearted child. Lloyd reflected that even this unspiritual being had a heart.

“Don’t be too hard on her, my lad,” he spoke; “she’s poor and ambitious. She thought well of you, but your coming has brought the man she loved most, to the popping-point at last.”

Atzerodt finished his fit of weeping and rose up.

“Gif me a drink!” he pleaded, “I can’t eat none. I’ll git on te road an tramp agin.”

“Pull at it light, Andrew,” Lloyd interrupted, as he saw the deep draught the other took.

“She said she’d gif me her answer when I got soper,” Atzerodt exclaimed, pulling his slouched hat over his brows; “she’s run away from her promise. I’ll never pe soper agin, so help me Gott!”

Again bursting into a wail and tears, he went down the steps and reappeared from the barn, riding a horse. Pausing a moment at the foot of the hill and looking fiercely back, he shook his fist and shouted:

“Gott tam dat house an eferypody in it!”

Then, with a cruel blow at his horse, and another sob and gush of tears, he galloped away.

“Dutch, Dutch!” Lloyd Quantrell said; “not fit to have a wife. Yet the fine Swisser did deceive him. She is a Dutch Venus; I might have won her instead of Katy. Dare I marry either? Well, I can be in love.”

He took his gun and game-bag to carry them away. The dove was still in the game-bag, and he brought it out and looked at it again.

“By George!” he exclaimed, “Albion did point at little Katy, truly, just as he nosed this poor little bird. If I lived long among the Dutch I would get to believe in ghosts.”

Katy was finishing the setting of the table, and she went up and kissed Lloyd before her father.

“I reckon you think I’m familiar for a stranger, Jake,” Lloyd said.

“How else would you git acquainted?” queried Katy’s father.

“I told fadder you was my peau,” Katy said, blushing.

“Yaw,” Jake said, “if Katy didn’t tell her olt dawdy when she was happy, how could he pe glad?”

Katy spread her hands over the table and said the blessing in English, and Jake Bosler ended it with Amen.

“Lloyd,” asked Jake, after Katy had helped them to coffee and ham and eggs, “what religion is you? Is you Baptist or not?”

“I’m a poor sinner, Jake. I was brought up a Catholic. That’s how I was educated. My father is a convert; my mother was a Methodist.”

“Any religion is petter dan none, Lloyd. Us Paptists was pefore Martin Luter. We asks all to come to te Lord’s supper and to pe our friends.”

A big wagon, with clean straw in the bottom, drawn by two great gray horses, Jake Bosler drove to the door and cried, “Git in, Lloyd.” Little Katy had a bundle with her and a large basket, and Lloyd threw in his gun and kit.

“Stop,” said Lloyd, as they started off; “won’t you lock the house up?”

“Oh, no, Lloyd,” replied Jake, “nobody steals up this a-way, pecause nobody is lazy, and the poor is a-welcome.”

Jake Bosler’s cattle in the bottoms looked up to see them go — those roan, red, white, and speckled cattle, calling “moo” so tenderly, and each with the great mild Bosler eyes; and the turkeys, now fattening, sat under the cherry-trees in their white bodies with wings of gold and red and breasts of black, all agitated that Katy was going; the peacock spread his tail of eyes and fashions, and broke his heart in one long sob of protest; and pea fowls and Guinea-hens, cocks and pullets, came trooping from the barn to see the face which fed them smiles, as her hands had given them food, go away but for a day.

Along the row of cherry-trees, by a little mill-race flowing in the clover, near hedges of the new Osage orange from the blood-red fields of Kansas, and where gum-trees matched the sycamores in strength in some old sedgy pasture, they rolled in the reddish road, and now and then saw the Catoctin Mountain’s purple-green sides, and black crest and yellowing foliage, bound up and fall.

At the first little hamlet they turned their backs upon the Catoctin range and faced the South Mountain to the northwest, and Katy at the little towns pointed out the United Brethren and the Lutheran churches ready for worship.

Going between the high, billowy corn-hills to cross the main Catoctin Creek, they rose upon a bold mound in their way, and only three miles ahead saw their road scale the Blue Ridge, which, like a giant child playing through the sky, showed dimples of turning foliage in his austere countenance, and grace and sweetness nursed by storm.

Near the foot of the mountain, at a road coming in from the north, Luther Bosler and Nelly Harbaugh were waiting in a buggy.

Nelly now had a dress of bright colors and a straw hat of city jauntiness trimmed with natural flowers, and Lloyd smiled to see, as she put her straight foot from the buggy, that she wore hoops and flounces.

“Katy,” he said to his little girl, who sat in a black Dunker hood and cape and gown, her hair plaited down her back, and her white Dunker cap transparent at her little ears, “why don’t you dress like Nelly?”

“I am not so peautiful,” Katy said, looking down at her dark gown and white apron, “and, Lloyd, I want to love God, who has let you love me.”

“My child,” Lloyd said, not repelling some tears which came to his eyes, “why do you not see the wicked fellow I am and turn away from me? I am not worthy of your pure heart, Katy!”

“Yes, you are,” Katy said; “maybe I can pring you to God if I try hard. What else is woman for?”

The tears came again and yet again to the young man’s eyes; at last they streamed upon his cheeks, and he felt them dropping like blood from a fresh wound into his hands, as he held his palms open and thought they would fill. It was the first mention of God, the first affection bestowed upon him, so hungry-hearted, since his Christian mother’s death.

Katy threw her arms around him and drew his head upon her little neck.

“Tese is love-feast tears,” she said. “Our Saviour made tem holy, darling, at his last supper. Come, take it with me to-day and pe happy.”

He sobbed so hard he could not speak: a past world of love now faded in the grave, another world of fatherly affection he had sought but could not find; recollections of prayers long taught but long unuttered, of gentle feelings brutalized by coarse city contacts, of the sense of home not yet obliterated but blunted, and of being at this moment too well, too nobly, if humbly beloved, stirred all the nature of the young man up and melted into rills of tears the ice in caverns long denied the air.

“My God!” he spoke at last, “can love do this? Was I experimenting with love, and finding such religion? — Katy,” he suddenly looked up and pushed her from him, “you must let me go!”

“Nefer, now,” said Katy, looking with all her heart and great deep eyes upon him. — “God, gif me this soul, and let it feed with me of thy supper and drink thy precious blood!”

Coming to the wagon to find Lloyd in tears and Katy clinging to him, Luther Bosler exclaimed:

“Wass treibsht olla weil? Are you two quarreling?”

“No, Luther,” answered Lloyd, wiping his eyes; “Katy is trying to make something good out of me. Yonder mountains ought to be between us.”

“‘Faith,’” observed Luther, mildly, “‘can remove mountains,’ it says. Let us cross them together.”

He took the reins, and Nelly Harbaugh sat by him, and so they slowly went up the pebbly mountain-road, old Jake going before in the buggy, with the parting words:

“Love-feast. Bi’m-by!”

Sitting with his arm around Katy, and with sweetly troubled feelings, yet manlier than he had ever known, Lloyd looked back into Catoctin Valley and remarked:

“Luther, why can’t I see the houses and towns now?”

“Because te upper valley is hilly and tey puilt te houses py te springs petween te hills. But tey is all tere, Lloyd, and whoefer has pusiness with tem can find tem. When their country calls for tem, up will run te flag eferywheres and pe peautiful.”

“We’ll be there, Luther, won’t we? This great, free Union is worth fighting for!”

“Yes, Lloyd. A pity it ain’t free, too, and ten, I think, we should always have peace.”

“What a singular Dutchman!” Lloyd thought to himself. “What he says seems eloquent, because he is so honest. How came he to be so grave and parental? I am not so. He is like a father to his father because, I suppose, he is so good a son. My father! Why will he not give me his confidence? Do I deserve it?”

“I live yonder where the hills are all rocky and wild, past Wolfsville,” said Nelly Harbaugh, pointing north. “Mount Misery, where the counterfeiters had their cave in the Revolutionary War, is close by me. The Tories hid there, too, that were caught and hanged. I’m bad root, Lloyd,” blushed Nelly, with a deep look on Luther.

“The heart is the true rest,” Luther said. “Keep that steady, and your pad ancestors will not trouble you. But whose dogs are those?”

He pointed back, and coming together in the road were Fritz and Albion, the latter leading on, as if he had proposed the excursion; Fritz hanging back, yet looking at the carriage sturdily, as ready to take his reproof.

“Fritz, wo gaesht hee?” spoke Luther, without temper, to his dog, but looking serious, and stopping the horses on the mountain-top.

The Sugar-Loaf Mountain far away was peeping hazily over the giant ramparts of Catoctin, and up from the depths behind them followed the solemn green woods to where, upon this summit, lay ledges of sandstone, and the oak and chestnut trees shook with a coming tempest of wind and rain.

Fritz came straight up to the carriage, looked at Luther unhappily, and barked.

The city dog, with a vicious barking at Lloyd, took to the woodside and disappeared ahead in the road.

“Evil communications corrupt good manners, Luther,” Lloyd said. “My dog has tempted yours away.”

“Fritz,” spoke Luther to his dog, shaking his head, “was not in the hapit of leafing home, where he is my friend and guard.”

The dog came right up under the whip and barked with an excitement above apprehension, as if to say, “Whip me, but spare my pride!”

“Unfortunate dog!” exclaimed Luther, but more tenderly. “Can I do anything put send him home?”

The dog started back with head down, needing no further humiliation.

“Stop, Fritz!” Luther continued, his face lighting up, “does any person here speak for this tisopedient friend of mine, who has, perhaps, peen under pad atvice to-day?”

The dog had stopped, and when both Katy and Lloyd cried “Yes, do forgive him!” and Luther replied, “Very well, then,” the dog took his place meekly under the wagon, and they entered the summit forest.

The winding road-track through the fallen chestnut-leaves and stone-heaps reminded them of Atzerodt’s story, as they saw the pale, lemon-yellow leaves twirl in the rising gust like witches in a circle, and the squirrels run when mischievous lightning chased them from tree to tree. The clean trunks arose smoothly from stony ledges, and, ever young in form and foliage, though in their autumn days, the chestnut forest had an appearance pleasing even now in the grasp of coming storm. Something of the light and straight nature of the French was in it, tender in greenness, comely in maturity, engaging in the burr, and toothsome in the nut. However lofty the mighty shafts might rise, though monarchs of the forest, they had the complaisance and sentiment of kings in France.

Nothing crossed their way but wood-cutters’ paths barely traceable through the translucent goldness of the trees and litter, and the rail-splitters’ piles and chips seemed only larger yellow leaves and ferns that strewed the vistas. A cool, small cedar-tree occasionally appeared, like a green parasol in the bright sunshine; but nothing of man or domestic beast broke the Sabbath stillness of the mountain-tops — hardly the eagle yonder, so near overhead he almost touched the trees, like Jove taking his jealous watch and throwing from his eyes upon the woods below the citron glisten of Olympus.

“See!” whispered Nelly Harbaugh to Luther, “yonder are men — negroes — runaway slaves. There’s money for catching them, Luther! Quick!”

Across the road, not fifty yards before, passed two black men, one carrying the other.

The younger was barefooted and had no coat, and limped as he labored under the older man’s weight.

The old man seemed in the palsy of fear, or age, or disease, and, as he saw the carriage coming and women in it, a habit of courtesy, too old to be forgotten, made him take off the old straw hat he wore and bow almost idiotically and make a chattering noise.

Attracted by the movement, the young man turned and saw the carriage, and at a run, still limping, he bore the old man into the woods, flying to the north.

“Oh!” cried Nelly, “they’re gone; we might have caught them. Along this mountain they travel at nights. It’s hardly thirty miles across Maryland to the free State. We have got people here who live by catching them and get hundreds of dollars reward.”

“And a millstone it will pe around their necks,” exclaimed Luther.

“I reckon so, too,” Lloyd said. “Niggers oughtn’t to run away, but let somebody else than me do the catching.”

At this moment the pointer-dog, Albion, reappeared out of the place in the woods where the fugitives first emerged, and his delicate brown kid nose was trailing something.

“Hist!” cried Lloyd; “come here, Albion!”

Raising his head only to bark ill-naturedly, and striving to lick his torn ear once, the white and yellow pointer dropped to the scent again and darted into the opposite woods, barking.

“I hope he won’t petray those poor fellows,” Luther said, “but we can’t stop for him, for te rain is coming hard, and tere’s no shelter till we get to Smoketown.”

“Oh,” cried Nelly Harbaugh, “stop there at the fortune-teller’s!”

The storm now burst in half-sunny nonchalance upon the mountain they were on, and yet, while its lightnings leaped vengefully here, the parallel mountain, beyond the gorge they were overhanging, seemed to be serene as Sabbath, and through the mist of sheet-rain, at pauses, they could see its happy countenance of chestnut woods and sulphur-tinted leaves, waiting like one beatified martyr for another to pass through his fires.

With cool, executioner-like method, the spirits of the storm whipped the longer mountain’s back with rods of forked fire until it smoked, and the sound of riven trees beneath the thunderbolts seemed like the broken rods of Pilate’s soldiery shivered upon the unanswering Pioneer. Yet, sometimes red as blood, the electric current flowed along the hairy woodlands till rain, like floods of tears from heaven, streamed down to cool the mountain’s anguish, and groans, from none knew where, feebly or wail-like accompanied the tempest.

The road grew black; the steady gray wagon-horses shrank as if they would crawl upon their bellies; dust and water, thunder and flame mutinied against each other in their common purpose, and fought together without proceeding, while the great dike of the Blue Ridge Mountain buried itself in mystery or melted away.

“Why, this is hell, or the portent of it!” Lloyd Quantrell spoke, covering Katy with his body and arms.

“Say ‘Te Words,’ Lloyd,” he heard her whispering, “and we will pe happy.”

“Steaty, Jim! Steaty, Sam! Holt steaty, poys!” Luther Bosler’s voice spoke calmly; “it will soon pe ofer.”

A scream from Nelly Harbaugh at this moment, and the horses leaping in their harness and striving to break from the driver’s practiced hands, were occasioned by a sight in the road which seemed almost supernatural: a strange, half-transparent, rose-colored mist, like lava dissolved in wine, sprang up as if the lightning had been distilled and held a long moment in atmospheric solution, and through it were seen at the horses’ heads two men and two large hounds, gazing up at the carriage, and themselves surprised as much as its occupants.

The men were burly, coarse-looking, neither good nor evil of countenance, and clearly people of this world.

While the occupants of the carriage gazed at them for a period of time measured only by its vividness upon the nerves and heart, blackness, as of a cloud, came down again like a mighty crow alighting in the road, and with it a silence that was the Sabbath of the dead.

Slowly this yielded to the influences of a gentle shower and returning sun, and soon they saw the road before them plainly open, and the freshly twisted and prostrate trees embarrassing the way.

“What made you scream, Nelly?” asked Luther, stooping to kiss her.

“The slave-catchers,” cried Nelly. “Didn’t you see them?”

“Did you know their faces?”

“Oh, yes — Lew and Ben Logan. They watch at nights and on all the stormy days; for then the slaves are running. They’re rich, I reckon.”

“Not in conscience, I think,” mused Luther, getting down to examine his harness. “We must stop at te first house in Smoketown to tie up this breeching.”

“Oh, I’m so glad!” Nelly Harbaugh exclaimed. “That’s Hannah Ritner’s, the fortune-teller.”

“Lloyd,” cried little Katy, “I wasn’t frightened at all — you held me so close. And then you said ‘Te Words’ last night, and all your body was God’s.”

---

 

CHAPTER VII.

WITCH OF SMOKETOWN.

A LITTLE farther the South Mountain opened like an amphitheatre, and showed some patches of fields and farms at the base of their broken mounds; but the landscape was yet ragged and almost uninhabited till, on the descending road before them, some small houses of a poor appearance were finally seen straggling along, each to itself, as if they came together by accident and had hardly discovered each other, so embowered were they, in fruit-trees, weeds, gardens, and corn.

“There’s Smoketown,” Nelly Harbaugh cried; “some calls it Ginny Winders’s town. Old Ginny keeps a groggery for the blackberry-pickers, chestnut-sellers, wood-choppers, charcoal-burners, and slave-catchers. Oh, it’s a hard place!”

“I should think so,” Lloyd Quantrell remarked, looking at the near mountains and at a deep gorge behind him, like the wide-open throat of a wild beast ready to devour the scattered place; “it seems to me to be running away, like the children in the Bible chased by Elisha’s bears. Who is this Hannah Ritner?”

“She’s a stranger, but I reckon she’s lived here for years,” Nelly replied; “she’s religious, and teaches the poor children to spell and to sew. Some say she’s crazy, and that’s why they go to her to get their fortunes told. She tells them real true.”

By this time they had come to the first house in the place on the right-hand side — a small, very neat, whitewashed cottage, with an old blackened roof, and with a little portico in front, the latter covered with a trained blackberry-vine.

The house stood in a small arbored garden, and the mock-orange and gourd vines could be seen dropping their yellow or roan-gold fruit from these small arbors, and also from the locust-trees along the roadside paling. Yellow marigolds grew against the gable; bright flowers in whitewashed flower-pots showed along the path leading back to the door from the gate; and a willow-tree in the garden seemed to weep for an unmarked grave which was not there.

The fruit-trees and bean-poles and shocked corn added a look of rankness and weediness in the midst of such providence and taste, and the forest coming down from the stony hills behind, in bits of chestnut thicket and brush, seemed to wrap the small cottage in.

An old stable was at the edge of this forest, and paths went back from it into the rain-raveled mountain-spurs.

Nothing else Lloyd Quantrell could see but a large preserving-kettle in the garden, hung on a wooden crane; and while he looked at this, a gray and yellow fox, licking his chops of sirup, leaped up from the kettle and ran into the woods, followed hotly by Fritz.

Nelly Harbaugh stepped out first, at the entrance of a little lane, deeply shaded with cherry and plum trees, which crept back almost mysteriously to the stable; a horse was tied here, and she had barely seen it when a man came through the garden and stopped her in the lane.

“Andrew!” she exclaimed, and started to run back.

“Nelly!” cried Atzerodt — for it was he — and he seized her by the wrist.

The girl, a moment shrinking, drew her graceful figure up haughtily and cried, “If you strike me, I’ll have you repent in Hagerstown jail!”

“Going to haf your fortune told, Miss Nelly?” muttered the sallow, outcast man. “I’ll tell it to you, py Jing!”

His lips trembled with excitement. The girl tore her arm away, and with a quick gesture she picked up a stick from a flower-pot, rending out the deep-red rose which grew upon it. Lloyd Quantrell had quickly come upon the scene, and he marked the fine beauty of the girl thus impassioned and defiant.

“I declare, Nelly,” he said, “you’re as splendid now as a great actress on the stage!”

The words seemed to have a power to arrest Nelly Harbaugh’s attention even in her apprehensions.

“Am I, Lloyd?” she replied. “Oh, I would rather be that than anything in the world!”

“Dat is shoost what you are fit for, py Jing!” Atzerodt broke in. — “Luter Bosler, you got my girl; she’ll pe no good to you.”

“Come, Antrew, forget and forgive,” Luther remarked, coming forward from the horses; “pad words putter no parsnips.”

He reached out his hand, which the other repelled, and Atzerodt continued in a reckless yet suffering tone:

“Luter, she’ll get you in love and preak your heart. She is false to eferypody.”

“You lie!” exclaimed the girl, herself the dangerous person now, seeking to get past Quantrell and ply her stick on Atzerodt.

Lloyd interposed good-naturedly.

“She wants your money, Luter. She’s a cold-hearted Swisser, you pet. She’ll nefer marry you if somepody else will gif her petter clothes. Your poor heart will hang where mine is now, and den you’ll feel for me.”

He broke down in almost touching, though maudlin drunken misery, and the girl dropped her stake of wood and pushed past Lloyd Quantrell.

“I could not love you,” she said to Atzerodt. “You earn nothing; you can not support a wife. Never do you come near me again, but say good-by forever now.”

He called her an ugly word, which he had barely done when Lloyd, with a flat-hand blow, struck him to the grass, and stood over him, saying:

“What do you say before Katy?”

“Dear Andrew,” spoke Katy, coming forward, “come to church at Beaver Creek and be a petter man. If you don’t like us Dunkers, there is te Luteran church, and te Mennese church and te Brethren too, all close together.”

“Nelly Harbaugh,” continued Atzerodt from the ground, cowed but still revengeful, “you’ll nefer let me forgit you. Some day I’ll be hung on te gallows for you, I tink.”

He remained on the wet ground with his face in the weeds, and all left him there and went forward to the cottage.

As they approached it there was a sound of musical water, and across the embowered yard flowed a mountain stream so wide they could hardly step across it, and foaming now with the rain which no longer fell, but in the sky a rainbow took its place and spanned the mountain like an arch of beauty.

“My love,” spoke Lloyd, taking Katy’s arm, “the bow of promise is come already for us.”

“Lloyd,” she replied, “poor Andrew suffers so, it clouds my heart.”

The cottage seemed to be empty, and consisted of only one room and a kitchen, the latter low as the ground, the main room higher and containing a bed, an open Franklin stove, and a large flag-bottomed rocking-chair painted green. There was no other chair, but in a corner a glass-faced cupboard contained Delft plates and coffee service, and many bottles of cordials and home-made wines, and a line of jars of preserves, and also several books.

A Bible was on the window-sill and a candlestick beside it, and on the wall was a print in colors of Hagar and Ishmael, showing a large hand, as of a man, protruding from a door, with the palm raised against the mother and son, who were thus shut out.

Everything in this room was clean as it was plain, the bed-quilt sewn by hand from little rag savings, the wood scrubbed white, the stove polished, and flowers in water, on a little shallow mantel, diffused a subtle perfume.

“Hannah Ritner keeps no servant,” said Nelly Harbaugh. “See this beautiful candle! She makes it herself of bear’s grease and beeswax, and they say her light never goes out the longest night.”

Lloyd saw a movement at the stable in the rear of the house, and a tall woman came from it and walked at a dignified pace toward him.

She had coal-black hair, like the crow’s wing, falling in combed tresses below her waist, so that her shoulders and fine, straight, matronly form were half covered with these splendid waves of hair, in which some silver threads made barely an impression.

She was one of the finest women Lloyd had ever seen, with something almost grand in her stature and bearing, unbent, and her skin of a clear, pure tint, as if its roses could be called back if she would only exercise the will.

Her face was rather large than long, the jaws being of fine, ample mold, and her hair was cut off between the tresses in front, and the short tassel of jet-black frontlet there half covered her forehead, or nearly meeting the rich black eyebrows, and under these were dark eyes, large, melting, sad, compassionate, and full of thought, with black lashes sweeping her cheeks, and a nose long and fine, but neither straight nor aquiline, and like an inverted bow.

She was dressed in a dark gown, with a dark apron tied round her waist. No ornament was in her ears or on her neck or hands.

As she approached, this woman, seeing Lloyd, opened her large eyes wider, but did not stop nor hesitate, yet continued to look straight at him till his own eyes sank down under the soul-searching gaze of this noble-seeming and mysterious being.

Still advancing upon him — for he stood in the door between the house and kitchen, looking outward through another door — the woman made a grave, sweet inclination of her head and countenance, and said, nearly like a question, yet with recognition:

“Quantrell!”

He started with astonishment.

“Lloyd, is it not?” she continued, with a slightly German accent, but in a voice of deep music, worthy of a prophetess.

“Lloyd Quantrell is what they named me,” he exclaimed.

“Is your mother dead?”

“Yes, madam.”

“I read so. Have you come to see the fortune-teller? That is a sweet child I see behind you. Do you pretend to love her?”

“Pretend, madam?” Lloyd answered with indignation, yet also with accusation and fear. “I hope you are not tempting me.”

“God forbid!” she exclaimed, with stately reproof; “yet ye have golden tongues. What do you find to kill in these mountains like these simple birds of sex?”

She waved her hand toward the women.

At that moment Luther Bosler perceived the dog Albion come out of the woods and begin to scratch and whine around the little stable.

“Is that your dog?” the woman spoke, also looking toward the stable as if with some new interest. “Go bring him away, instantly!”

Luther, not Lloyd, started to do so. He found his own dog, Fritz, returned, and Fritz followed him obediently; but the English pointer was not tractable, and ran back into the chestnut and chinquapin brush, whither Luther followed, calling his name.

“Hannah,” spoke Nelly Harbaugh to the woman, “the harness is a bit broke, and we stopped to mend it. Won’t you tell our fortunes?”

“Idle request upon the Sabbath-day!” Hannah Ritner replied. “I have told one fortune for you to-day already. Is not your lover yonder?”

She pointed to where Atzerodt’s horse was tied in the secluded path.

Lloyd Quantrell, looking there, saw Atzerodt standing up and looking intently toward the stable.

“Give me your hand!” the seer commanded, taking Nelly’s in her own palm, and gazing with great candor and beauty of expression into her eyes.

Lloyd thought he had never seen together three more beautiful women than these.

Hannah Ritner then slowly spoke these lines, with such deep, distinct, and eloquent diction that Lloyd hoped she would speak more:

“Ebbes dunkel und weiss marrick ich,
 Mit dunkla soll’s b’marricka dich!
 Gaed der roth-fogel uf ’n reis’,
 Dann waersht net dunkel or net weiss!”

Nelly Harbaugh muttered something Lloyd believed to be the protecting “Words,” and dropped her fine blue eyes.

The fortune-teller, turning her own eyes to Lloyd, exclaimed:

“It is not my wont to tell on poor girls secrets that may smirch them in a man’s eyes. Here is her fortune as I gave it, put in English words.”

Still holding Nelly Harbaugh’s hand, Hannah Ritner recited to Lloyd and little Katy as follows, studying Katy meanwhile, and only once looking at the hand:

“Something dark and white I mark,
  It shall mark thee with the dark!
  When the red-bird takes his flight,
  Thou shalt not be dark or white!”

“Look out for the red-bird, Nelly,” Lloyd exclaimed; “the dove is my warning.”

Hannah Ritner caught the word and repeated it:

“Die Dowb: that was the bird of the Holy Spirit which descended on the baptizers, cooing as it flew from heaven, ‘This is my beloved Son!’ My well-beloved son!” she turned to Lloyd, with something very tender, yet sorrowful, in her great eyes, “you may be baptized with fire. Seek even in the fire for that immortal dove which bravely swept the Deluge with his tired pinions, and returned to the little ark of love at last. Why do you seek this simple maiden’s eyes as if their luster was the window of that ark to you? — She trembles while I ask. — Fear not, my little peasant-maid! I’ll tell your lover’s fortune, and, if I tell it true, never need you fear to come to Hannah Ritner and ask her counsel. — Lloyd, give me your hand!”

She took Lloyd’s hand, and little Katy, full of faith and yearning, took his other hand almost in stealth, and looked in Hannah Ritner’s eyes with simple pleading.

At that moment, Lloyd Quantrell, cool and undisturbed, saw the stable-door unclose, and a negro emerge, carrying an old man on his back, and, looking backward agonizingly, the negro stole down the embowered lane.

Lloyd looked again in Hannah Ritner’s eyes. He could not see them, for they were bent upon his hand, and, to his astonishment, some tears fell from somewhere on his palm.

“Why do you weep?” he asked; “I am nothing to you.”

“This is a large, strong hand,” answered Hannah Ritner, with deep feeling. “I see the marks of conflicts upon it, but not of toil. Oh, find some task to do, my son, and bless your Maker for sweet, constant occupation!”

“Tell my fortune!” spoke Lloyd. “I am not afraid to hear it. You will not hurt this little girl’s feelings, I know; for she is dear to me, Mother Hannah!”

At this familiar salutation, tears fell from Hannah Ritner’s eyes again, and she was unable to proceed for some time.

Throwing an arm around each, she drew both Lloyd and Katy to her breast, and, looking down on them, the silent tears fell from her splendid eyes all the more, and not like the tears of anguish, but of great commiseration.

Lloyd thought she was like the Virgin he had seen a picture of at the Catholic school, whose everl