The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories Part 19

"Justus? No. But they say it's a tie--a tie!"

For the news was already bruited throughout the town--in a ferment of excitement, because of the closeness of the contest--that the two candidates, racing gallantly neck and neck, had come under the wire together with not so much as the point of a nose to distinguish the winner.

Walter stood still for a moment, his dark eyes dilated with eagerness and anxiety. Suddenly he leaned back against the gate-post with a deep sigh of relief and relaxation.

"Then it's all right," he exclaimed breathlessly. "The coroner's my frien', ef I ain't got another in the worl'. Old Beckett will stan' by me, _sure_!"

As the coroner held the election, the sheriff himself being a candidate, it was his duty to give the casting vote. This prolongation of the jeopardy of the result heightened the popular interest, the more as the officer did not immediately decide upon his action in the matter.

"I want a leetle time ter think it over--a leetle time fur the casting vote," he said, as he gnawed at a plug of tobacco, then crossed his ponderous legs while he leaned back in a splint-bottomed chair in the register's office.

He was a tall, portly man, with a large, round imperious face, thatched heavily with iron-gray hair. He wore no beard, and was dressed in brown jeans, which imparted a certain sallowness to his dark complexion. He had small gray eyes, at once shrewd and good-natured, but his manner was bluff, imperative, and all the judiciary of the State could hardly have compa.s.sed an expression of a greater sense of importance.

He was observed with much interest by a number of men who lounged about the room. A tense sub-current of curiosity underlay the suspense natural to the occasion, for it was well known to the gossips about the court-house that he and the sheriff had not been on the best of terms; when their official functions had happened to bring them into contact they had clashed smartly, and the county rang with their feuds. His course was obvious to all--his hesitation only an affectation, lest a too vehement animosity be imputed to him.

"Poor Quigley's cake is dough," observed one of the inc.u.mbent's friends in an undertone, standing with his hands in his pockets, and gazing through the long dark vista of the hall out of the door into the sunlight's glow, as it fell upon the few houses and the great stretch of arable land beyond. A horizontal shadow of a cloud lay at its extremity, as definite as a material barrier, and far above it rose tiers of green and bronze hills like a moulding to the base of the lapis-lazuli-tinted mountains.

"This never happened in this county before," said the register, glancing up from a big book in which he was copying the doings of "the party of the first part" and "the party of the second part"--the familiar spirits of his den.

"Why, no!" exclaimed the coroner, with a pleased laugh. "To me the castin' vote is ez _phee_-nomenal an' ez astonis.h.i.+n' ez the comet." He chuckled--the fat man's unctuous laugh. "Something like the comet, too: it has its place in the legal firmament, but 't ain't often necessary to use it."

"That war a toler'ble funny tale 'bout the comet they air a-tellin'

roun' town," observed a young countryman pausing in front of the two, his hands in his pockets, his hat on the back of his red head, a wide grin of enjoyment on his freckled face,--"about the feller that hed his sweetheart a-courtin' out hyar in the yard last night, an' tuk ter lookin' at the comet through the spy-gla.s.s, an' whilst he war busy a-star-gazin' the comet, another feller stepped up with the Squair, an' married his gal--ha! ha! ha!"

Beckett looked up interested. Incongruously enough a vein of romance ran through the ma.s.sive strata of conceit, and intolerance, and vainglory, and pertinacity, and pugnacity that made up the very definite structure of his nature. He dearly loved a lover. He was as sentimental as a girl of eighteen, and he melted instantly into suavest amenities at the first intimation of a love-story in abeyance.

"I ain't heard 'bout that," he said in a mellifluous voice.

"Ye know I was tucked up in yonder"--he jerked his thumb over his shoulder--"tendin' to the countin' of the votes, bein'

returnin'-officer. Who married?"

"Why this hyar Walter Hoxon--him ez is candidate fur sher'ff,"

said the red-haired interlocutor, widening his grin.

Beckett elevated his heavy, grizzled eyebrows. A sudden, secret, important look, as if he were colloguing with some one vanquished in argument, crossed his face. He nodded once or twice, but only said acquiescently: "Ah--ha! Ah--ha! Toler'ble enterprisin'. Run fur office an git married 'lection day."

He smiled broadly. Any innovation on the stereotyped methods appealed to him with the grace and relish of a new metre to a neophytic rhymester.

"Wat's a nice boy, a mighty good boy, too," he went on, with his oily voice quite soft. "Run mighty well in this 'lection, too. He's a mighty smart, good boy."

He nodded his big head approvingly. "I don't wonder he cut the t'other feller out. Mighty fine feller Wat is."

"Well, now," said the register, suddenly putting his pen behind his ear, and leaving the party of the first part and the party of the second part to their own devices, "I'm blest if I don't think Justus is worth a hundred of Wat, lock, stock, an' barrel."

Once more the grizzled eyebrows went up toward the iron-gray thatch of the coroner's forehead. "_Justus!_ I'm free ter say I dunno n.o.body equal ter Justus. I hev known Justus sence he war knee-high ter a pa'tridge--the way he did keer fur them chil'n, an' brung 'em up ter be equal ter anybody in the lan'! An' smart--_smart_ ain't the word fur him! Ef he hed education he could do anything; but he hed ter stan' back an' let the t'other chil'n git it. Whar would Wat be ef 't warn't fur Justus?"

"That's what makes me say 't was a mighty mean trick he played on Justus," the register broke in.

"Who? How?" demanded the coroner.

"Why, Justus was the t'other feller. Wat an' the girl never let _him_ have an inklin' of it. They just fooled him along, believin' she was goin' ter marry _him_. An' las' night when it was reported all over town that Wat was elected, an' Justus took time from electioneerin'

fur his brother to breathe, they tolled him out to look at the comet, an' slipped off an' married."

The man of sentiment, with the election in his hand, sat looking loweringly about him. His satisfaction was wilted; his fat hung flabbily on his big bones; his small eyes were hard and cold.

"Waal," he said, rising at last, "these extry an' occasional opportunities like comets an' castin' votes oughter be took full advantage of--full advantage of; no doubt about that."

And thus it was that the casting vote tipped the scale in favor of the inc.u.mbent.

"He's ez hard-headed, an' _ty_rannical, an' _per_verse, an'

cantankerous a critter ez ever lived, with no feelin's, nor softness, nor perliteness in him--but he's a square man. He'll do the _fair_ thing--every time," the coroner said in explanation.

And so he braced himself for another term of official wrangling.

Poor Theodosia! She never forgot that return home, through all the dust of the drought and the glare of the midsummer sun. Even to herself her nature seemed too small for the magnitude of the various anguish which she was called upon to endure. The sharp alternations of certainty and doubt which she had undergone seemed slight, seemed naught, in comparison with the desolate finality of despair, the fang of hopeless regret, and the dread of the veiled future with which she had made no covenant of expectation or preparation, that preyed upon every plodding step as she went. Her anxiety as to the wisdom of her course was not a.s.suaged by the aghast dismay of her mother's face, when she reached the little house overlooking the encircling mountains,--as still, as meditative, as majestically unmoved, as if no more troublous world existed,--and unfolded the story of her visit to Colbury. She felt for the first time in her life how Justus Hoxon's friend merited his confidence. Her mother had no reproaches, no sarcasms, no outbursts of grief. She addressed herself to the support and the comforting of her daughter, but with so evident a hopelessness and an expectation of bitter things to come that the girl burst out sobbing afresh.

"D' ye think Wat air so wuthless ez all that!"

The discipline of life began for her here. As the price of his political defeat, Walter had scant relish for the triumph he had scored in love. He was surly, taciturn, or else loud with reproaches and criminations, which grew more vehement and contumelious if she answered, seeking to exculpate or justify herself; and if she were silent, her submission seemed to exasperate him and to develop a crafty ingenuity in finding fault. He brooded grimly on his brother's probable exultation when he should return and hear the news of the casting vote. To fortify himself for the encounter he spent much time at the still, and his drunken, reasonless wrath was even more formidable to the object of his displeasure than his sober, surly resentment against her as the cause of all his disasters. But Justus did not come. Walter began to doubt if the news of the untoward result of the election, in which he had spent all his energies, had reached him. He also began to desire, contradictorily enough, that his brother should know it. For although Justus must needs recognize it as a mortal blow to his dearest foe, it had the capacity of doing much execution in its recoil. Justus had had the election so greatly at heart; he had struggled, and planned, and managed with such preternatural activity and tact and energy from the first, that it would smite him hard to know that it was all in vain. And then his vicarious ambitions, his pride, his pleasure, in the elevation of "Fambly"! Walter cast about futilely for an a.s.surance that he might have the satisfaction of reducing all this. He knew that Justus, in his mistaken certainty of the result of the election, would not ask for information, and that he could not read the newspapers. A letter--even if there were any remote presumption as to his address--would lie indefinitely in the mail, and find its way at last to the Dead Letter Office.

Walter realized after a time that Justus intended to return no more--the woman he loved was his brother's wife. Justus had probably put the breadth of the State between them, Walter sneeringly concluded.

He made haste to quarrel with his wife's mother, in his perverse relish of aught that might give Theodosia pain, and they quitted her home and took up their residence in the house in which Theodosia had once expected to live, the scene of the early struggles of "Fambly."

Theodosia's beauty could hardly be said to fade; it disappeared in the overblowing. She grew very fat and unwieldy as the years wore on; her face broadened, her florid complexion degenerated into a mottled red and purple. She was no prettier than her mother had been when she ridiculed her lover's eulogy of her mother's spiritual beauty. She had a hard life with her drunken, idle, slothful husband, who habitually imputed to her agency every evil that had ever befallen him, holding it to excuse him from all exertion to better their very poor estate, and whose affection had been easily kindled by her beauty and as easily extinguished.

Justus, self-exiled from the mountains, tramped the valley roads, hardly caring whither, and drifted finally to the outskirts of one of the large manufacturing towns of Tennessee. He worked for some seasons doggedly, drudgingly, on a farm near by, but found a sort of entertainment in the sights and sounds within the city limits, as having no a.s.sociation with the past which his memory dreaded. He prospered in some sort, for although he was ignorant of all methods of skilled labor, fidelity is an art with so few proficients that friends and opportunities were not lacking. His progress was somewhat hampered, however, despite his evident intelligence, by a doubt which prevailed concerning his mental balance. He was often observed to stand and gaze smilingly, fondly, after any group of ragged, dirty children; he, although of the poorest, was profuse in gratuities to any callow beggar who did not know enough of the world's ways to expect nothing of such as he, as did the older ones. He could not read, but he bought newspapers from the smallest of the guild of newsboys, and meditatively turned the sheets in his hand, and then softly and slowly tore them to bits. And these things created a doubt of his sanity, for who could know how "Fambly" looked at him from the pinched face of every poor, and cold, and hungry child?

At last, despite this unsuspected drawback, a congenial occupation came to him. He was night watchman at a great factory, and as he paced, all solitary, back and forth in the yard, he was wont to note the stars as the infallible seasons brought them into place; and he began to remember their names, and to trace the strange configuration of the constellations, and to con again the stories woven into their s.h.i.+ning meshes which he heard at the time that the great comet blazed among them.

And this is his never failing interest--dark summer nights, when the Galaxy opens a broad avenue of constellated light across the heavens, seeming a veritable road, as if it might be the way to G.o.d's throne, beaten hard and bright by the feet of saints and martyrs; or when the moon is full, and autumnal glamours reign, and only the faint sidereal outlines prevail; or when winter winds are high, and the snow lies on slanting roofs, and spires gleam with icicles, and Orion draws his scintillating blade; or when, all bedight in scarlet, "Arcturus and his sons" are guided into the vernal sky.