UNWELCOME GUESTS
While she was yet puzzling over the strange mood of absorbed brooding into which Jim had fallen, his face suddenly lighted, and he changed with such rapidity that her uneasiness was doubled.
They had reached the stretches of deep forest at the foot of the Black Mountain ranges.The Swannanoa had become a silver thread of laughing, foaming spray and deep, still pools beneath the rocks.The fields were few and small.The little clearings made scarcely an impression in the towering virgin forests.
"Great guns, Kiddo!" he exclaimed, "this is some country! By George, I had no idea there was such a place so close to New York!"She looked at him with uneasy surprise.What could be in his mind? The solemn gorge through which they were passing gave no entrancing views of clouds or sky or towering peaks.Its wooded cliffs hung ominously overhead in threatening shadows.The scene had depressed her after the vast sunlit spaces of sky, of shining valleys and cloud-capped, sapphire peaks on which they had turned their backs.
"You like this, Jim?" she asked."It's great--great!""I thought that waterfall we just passed was very beautiful.""I didn't see it.But this is something like it.You're clean out of the world here--and there ain't a railroad in twenty miles!"The deeper the shadows of tree and threatening crag, the higher Jim's strange spirit seemed to rise.
She watched him with increasing fear.How little she knew the real man! Could it be possible that this lonely, unlettered boy of the streets of lower New York, starved and stunted in childhood, had within him the soul of a great poet? How else could she explain the sudden rapture over the threatening silences and shadows of these mountain gorges which had depressed her?And yet his utter indifference to the glories of beautifulwaters, his blindness at noon before the most wonderful panorama of mountains and skies on which she had ever gazed, contradicted the theory of the poetic soul.A poet must see beauty where she had seen it--and a thousand wonders her eyes had not found.
His elation was uncanny.What could it mean?
He was driving now with a skill that was remarkable, a curious smile playing about his drooping, Oriental eyelids.A wave of fierce resentment swept her heart.She was a mere plaything in this man's life.The real man she had never seen.What was he thinking about? What grim secret lay behind the mysterious smile that flickered about the corners of those eyes? He was not thinking of her.The mood was new and cold and cynical, for all the laughter he might put in it.
She asked herself the question of his past, his people, his real life- history.The only answer was his baffling, mysterious smile.
A frown suddenly clouded his face.
"Hello!Ye're running right into a man's yard!" Mary lifted her head with quick surprise.
"Why yes, it's the stopping place for the parties that climb Mount Mitchell.I remember it.We stayed all night here, left our rig, and started next morning at sunrise on horseback to climb the trail.""Pretty near the jumping-off place, then," he remarked."We'll ask the way to Cat-tail Peak."He stopped the car in front of the low-pitched, weather-stained frame house and blew the horn.
A mountain woman with three open-eyed, silent children came slowly to meet them.
She smiled pleasantly, and without embarrassment spoke in a pleasant drawl:
"Won't you 'light and look at your saddle?"The expression caught Jim's fancy, and he broke into a roar of laughter.The woman blushed and laughed with him.She couldn't understand what was the matter with the man.Why should he explode over the simple greeting in which she had expressed her pleasure at their arrival?
Anyhow, she was an innkeeper's wife, and her business was to make folks feel at home--so she laughed again with Jim.
"You know that's the funniest invitation I ever got in a car," he cried at last."We fly in these things sometimes.And when you said, `Won't you 'light,'"--he paused and turned to his wife--"I could just feel myself up in the air on that big old racer's back.""Won't you-all stay all night with us?" the soft voice drawled again."Thank you, not tonight," Mary answered.
She waited for Jim to ask the way.
"No--not tonight," he repeated."You happen to know an old woman by the name of Owens who lives up here?""Nance Owens?" "That's her name."
"Lord, everybody knows old Nance!" was the smiling answer."She ain't got good sense!" the tow-headed boy spoke up."Sh!" the mother warned, boxing his ears.
"She's a little queer, that's all.Everybody knows her in Buncombe and Yancey counties.Her house is built across the county line.She eats in Yancey and sleeps in Buncombe----""Yes," broke in the boy joyously, "an' when the Sheriff o' Yancey comes, she moves back into Buncombe.She's some punkin's on a green gourd vine, she is--if she ain't got good sense."His mother struck at him again, but he dodged the blow and finished his speech without losing a word.
"Could you tell us the way to her house?" "Keep right on this road, and you can't miss it." "How far is it?""Oh, not far."
"No; right at the bottom o' the Cat's-tail," the boy joyfully explained."He means the foot o' Cat-tail Peak!" the mother apologized.
"How many miles?"
"Just a little ways--ye can't miss it; the third house you come to on this road.""You'll be there in three shakes of a sheep's tail--in that thing!" the boy declared.
Jim waved his thanks, threw in his gear, and the car shot forward on the level stretch of road beyond the house.He slowed down when out of sight.
"Gee! I'd love to have that kid in a wood-shed with a nice shingle all by ourselves for just ten minutes.""The people spoil him," Mary laughed."The people who stop there for the Mount Mitchell climb.He was a baby when I was there six years ago"--she paused and a rapt look crept into her eyes--"a beautiful little baby, her first-born, and she was the happiest thing I ever saw in my life."Her voice sank to a whisper.
