Earth's Enigmas Part 5

Unbroken, and bending all one way, as if to look at something, it covered the wide, low, rounded hill that rose before me. Over the hill the sky hung close, gray and thick, with the color of a parched interminable twilight. Dew or a drop of rain could not be thought of as coming from such a sky.

Along the base of the low hill ran a red road of baked clay, blood red, and beaten with nameless and innumerable feet. I stood in the middle of this road and prepared to ascend the hill obliquely by a narrow footpath, red as blood, which divided the soft gray bending of the gra.s.ses. Behind me the road made a sharp turn, descending out of thick clouds into a little blood-red hollow, where it was crossed by an open gate. In this gate, through which I had somehow come, stood two gray leopards and a small ape. The beasts stood on tip-toe and eyed me with a dreadful curiosity; and from somewhere in the little hollow I heard a word whispered which I could not understand. But the beasts heard it, and drew away through the open gate, and disappeared.

Between the footpath (which all the time gleamed redly through the over-gathering gra.s.ses) and the rounded brink of the gulf there seemed to be a fence of some sort, so fine that I could not quite distinguish it, but which I knew to be there.

I turned my eyes to the low summit of the hill. There I saw a figure, all gray, cleaving the gra.s.ses in flight as swift as an arrow. Behind, in pursuit, came another figure, of the color of the gra.s.ses, tall and terrible beyond thought. This being, as it seemed to me, was the Second Death, and my knees trembled with horror and a sort of loathing. Then I saw that he who fled made directly for me; and as they sped I could hear a strange hissing and rustling of their garments cleaving the gra.s.ses.

When the fleeing ghost reached me, and fell at my feet, and clasped my knees in awful fear, I felt myself grow strong, and all dread left my soul. I reached forth my right hand and grasped the pursuing horror by the throat.

I heard the being laugh, and the iron grip of my own strong and implacable fingers seemed to close with a keen agony upon my own throat, and a curtain seemed to fall over my eyes. Then I gasped for breath, and a warm pungent smell clung in my nostrils, and a white light swam into my eyes, and I heard a voice murmuring far off, but in an accent strangely familiar and commonplace, "He's coming round all right now."

I opened my eyes with a dim wonder, and found myself surrounded by the interested faces of the doctors and the clean white walls of the hospital ward. I heard a sound of some one breathing hoa.r.s.ely near by, and a white-capped nurse with kind eyes stepped up to my pillow, and I perceived that the heavy breather was myself. I was lying with my head and neck swathed in bandages, and a sharp pain at my throat. Then flashed across my memory the crash and sickening upheaval of the collision. I wondered feebly how it had fared with my fellow-pa.s.sengers, and again I saw that instant's vision of wild and startled faces as the crowded car rose and pitched downward, I knew not whither. With a sense of inexpressible weariness, my brain at once allowed the terrible scene to slip from its grasp, and I heard a doctor, who was standing at the bedside watch in hand, say, quietly, "He'll sleep now for a couple of hours."

The Romance of an Ox-Team.

The oxen, lean and rough-haired, one of them carroty red, the other brindle and white, were slouching inertly along the narrow backwoods road. From habit they sagged heavily on the yoke, and groaned huge windy sighs, although the vehicle they were hauling held no load. This structure, the mere skeleton of a cart, consisted of two pairs of clumsy, broad-tired wheels, united by a long tongue of ash, whose tip was tied with rope to the middle of the forward axle. The road looked innocent of even the least of the country-road-master's well-meaning attempts at repair,--a circ.u.mstance, indeed, which should perhaps be set to its credit. It was made up of four deep, parallel ruts, the two outermost eroded by years of journeying cart-wheels, the inner ones worn by the companioning hoofs of many a yoke of oxen. Down the centre ran a high and gra.s.sy ridge, intolerable to the country parson and the country doctor, compelled to traverse this highway in their one-horse wagons.

From ruts and ridges alike protruded the imperishable granite boulder, which wheels and feet might polish but never efface. On either side of the roadway was traced an erratic furrow, professing to do duty for a drain, and at intervals emptying a playful current across the track to wander down the ruts.

Along beside the slouching team slouched a tall, lank, stoop-shouldered youth, the white down just beginning to stiffen into bristles on his long upper lip. His pale eyes and pale hair looked yet paler by contrast with his thin, red, wind-roughened face. In his hand he carried a long-handled ox-whip, with a short goad in the b.u.t.t of it.

"Gee, Buck!" he drawled, prodding the near ox lightly in the ribs. And the team lurched to the right to avoid a markedly obtrusive boulder.

"Haw, Bright!" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed a minute later, flicking with his whip the off shoulder of the farther ox. And with sprawling legs and swaying of hind-quarters the team swerved obediently to the left, shunning a mire-hole that would have taken in the wheel to the hub. Presently, coming to a swampy spot that stretched all the way across the road, the youth seated himself sidewise on the narrow tongue connecting the fore and hind axles, and drove his team dry-shod.

It was a slow and creaking progress; but there seemed to be no hurry, and the youth dreamed gloomily on his jolting perch. His eyes took no note of the dark-mossed, scrubby hillocks, the rough clearings blackened with fire, the confused and ragged woods, as they crept past in sombre procession. But suddenly, as the cart rounded a turn in the road, there came into view the figure of a girl travelling in the same direction.

The young man slipped from his perch and prodded up the oxen to a brisk walk.

As the noise of the team approached her, the girl looked around. She was good to see, with her straight, vigorous young figure in its blue-gray homespun gown. Her hair, in color not far from that of the red ox, was rich and abundant, and lay in a coil so gracious that not even the tawdry millinery of her cheap "store" hat could make her head look quite commonplace. Her face was freckled, but wholesome and comely. A shade of displeasure pa.s.sed over it as she saw who was behind her, and she hastened her steps perceptibly. But presently she remembered that she had a good five miles to go ere she would reach her destination; and she realized that she could not hope to escape by flight. With a pout of vexation she resigned herself to the inevitable, and dropped back into her former pace. Immediately the ox-team overtook her.

As the oxen slowed up she stepped to the right to let them pa.s.s, and then walked on, thus placing the cart between herself and her undesired companion. The youth looked disconcerted by these tactics, and for a few moments could find nothing to say. Then, dropping his long white lashes sheepishly, he murmured, "Good-day, Liz."

"Well, Jim-Ed!" replied the girl, coolly.

"Won't ye set on an' let me give ye a lift home?" he asked, with entreaty in his voice.

"No," she said, with finality: "I'd ruther walk."

Not knowing how to answer this rebuff, he tried to cover his embarra.s.sment by exclaiming authoritatively, "Haw, Bright!" whereupon the team slewed to the left and crowded him into the ditch.

Soon he began again.

"Ye _might_ set on, Liz," he pleaded.

"Yes, I _might_," said she, with what she considered rather withering smartness; "but I ain't a-goin' to."

"Ye'll be tired afore ye git home," he persisted, encouraged by finding that she would talk back at him.

"James-Ed A'ki'son," she declared, with emphasis, "if ye think I'm a-goin' to be beholden to _you_ fer a lift home, ye're mistaken, that's all."

After this there was silence for some time, broken only by the rattling and b.u.mping of the cart, and once by the whir of a woodc.o.c.k that volleyed across the road. Young Atkinson chewed the cud of gloomy bewilderment. At length he roused himself to another effort.

"Liz," said he, plaintively, "y' ain't been like ye used to, sence ye come back from the States."

"Ain't I?" she remarked, indifferently.

"No, Liz, ye ain't," he repeated, with a sort of pathetic emphasis, as if eager to persuade himself that she had condescended to rebut his accusation. "Y' ain't been like ye used to at all. Appears like as if ye thought us folks in the Settlement wasn't good enough fer ye now."

At this the girl tossed her head crossly.

"It appears like as if ye wanted to be back in the States ag'in," he continued, in a voice of anxious interrogation.

"My lands," exclaimed the girl, "but ye're green!"

To the young man this seemed such an irrelevant remark that he was silent for some time, striving to fathom its significance. As his head sank lower and lower, and he seemed to lose himself completely in joyless revery, the girl shot occasional glances at him out of the corners of her eyes. She had spent the preceding winter in a factory in a crude but stirring little New England town, and had come back to Nova Scotia ill content with the monotony of life in the backwoods seclusion of Wyer's Settlement. Before she went away she had been, to use the vernacular of the Settlement, "keepin' company with Jim-Ed A'ki'son;"

and now, to her, the young man seemed to unite and concentrate in his person all that she had been wont to persuade herself she had outgrown.

To be sure, she not seldom caught herself dropping back comfortably into the old conditions. But these symptoms stirred in her heart an uneasy resentment, akin to that which she felt whenever--as would happen at times--she could not help recognizing that Jim-Ed and his affairs were not without a pa.s.sing interest in her eyes.

Now she began to grow particularly angry at him because, as she thought, "he hadn't nothing to say fer himself." Sadly to his disadvantage, she compared his simplicity and honest diffidence with the bold self-a.s.sertion and easy familiarity of the young fellows with whom she had come in contact during the winter. Their impertinences had offended her grievously at the time, but, woman-like, she permitted herself to forget that now, in order to accentuate the deficiencies of the man whom she was unwilling to think well of.

"My lands!" she reiterated to herself, with acc.u.mulated scorn, "but _ain't_ he green? He--why, he wouldn't know a 'lectric car from a waterin'-cart. An' _soft_, too, takin' all my sa.s.s 'thout givin' me no lip back, no more 'n if I was his mother!"

But the young man presently broke in upon these unflattering reflections. With a sigh he said slowly, as if half to himself,--

"Lands, but I used to set a powerful store by ye, Liz!"

He paused; and at that "used to" the girl opened her eyes with angry apprehension. But he went on,--

"An' I set still more store by ye now, Liz, someways. Seems like I jest couldn't live without ye. I always did feel as how ye was too good, a sight too good, fer me, an' you so smart; an' now I feel it more 'n ever, bein' 's ye've seen so much of the world like. But, Liz, I _don't_ allow as it's right an' proper fer even you to look down the way ye do on the place ye was born in an' the folks ye was brung up with."

"My!" thought the girl to herself, "he's got some s.p.u.n.k, after all, to git off such a speech as that, an' to rake me over the coals, too!"

But aloud she retorted, "Who's a-lookin' down on anybody, Jim-Ed A'ki'son? An', anyways, _you_ ain't the whole of Wyer's Settlement, be ye?"

The justice of this retort seemed to strike the young man with great force.

"That's so," he acknowledged, gloomily. "'Course I ain't. An' I s'pose I hadn't oughter said what I did."

Then he relapsed into silence. For half a mile he slouched on without a syllable, save an occasional word of command addressed to the team.

Coming to another boggy bit of road, he seated himself dejectedly on the cart, and apparently would not presume to again press unwelcome a.s.sistance upon his fellow-way-farer. Quite uncertain whether to interpret this action as excess of humility or as a severe rebuke, the girl picked her way as best she could, flushed with a sense of injury.

When the mud was pa.s.sed, the young man absent-mindedly, kept his seat.

Beginning to boil with indignation, the girl speedily lost her confident superiority, and felt humiliated. She did not know exactly what to do.

She could not continue to walk humbly beside the cart. The situation was profoundly altered by the mere fact that the young man was riding. She tried to drop behind; but the team had an infinite capacity for loitering. At last, with head high in the air, she darted ahead of the team, and walked as fast as she could. Although she heard no orders given by their driver, she knew at once that the oxen had quickened their pace, and that she was not leaving them behind.

Presently she found herself overtaken; whereupon, with swelling heart and face averted, she dropped again to the rear. She was drawing perilously near the verge of that feminine cataclysm, tears, when Fate stepped in to save her from such a mortification.

Fate goes about in many merry disguises. At this juncture she presented herself under the aspect of two half-tipsy commercial travellers driving a single horse in a light open trap. They were driving in from the Settlement, in haste to reach the hotel at Bolton Corners before nightfall. The youth hawed his team vigorously till the nigh wheels were on the other side of the ditch, leaving a liberal share of the road for them to pa.s.s in.