The Riddle Of The Rocks Part 5

The official looked with interest at it; he held up suddenly Purdee's grant and read aloud, "From Crystal Spring seven hundred poles _northwest_ to a stake in the middle of the river."

He examined, too, the original plat of survey which he had taken to guide him, and also the plat made when Squire Bates sold to Grinnell's father; "_northwest_" they all agreed. There was evidently a clerical error on the part of the scrivener who had written Grinnell's deed.

In a moment the hara.s.sed man saw that through the processioning of Purdee's land he had lost heavily in the extent of his supposed possessions. He it was who had claimed what was rightfully another's.

And because of the charge Purdee was the richer by a huge slice of mountain land--how large he could not say, as he ruefully followed the line of survey.

But for this discovery the interest of processioning Purdee's land would have subsided with the determination of the ownership of the limited environment of the stone tables of the Law. Now, as they followed the ever-diverging line to the northwest, the group was pervaded by a subdued and tremulous excitement, in which even the surveyor shared.

Two or three whispered apart now and then, and Grinnell, struggling to suppress his dismay, was keenly conscious of the glances that sought him again and again in the effort to judge how he was taking it. Only Purdee himself was withdrawn from the interest that swayed them all. He had loitered at first, dallying with a temptation to slip silently from the party and retrace his way to the tables and ascertain, perchance, if some vestige of that mystic scripture might not reveal itself to him anew, or if it had been only some morbid fancy, some futile influence of solitude, some fevered condition of the blood or the brain, that had traced on the stone those gracious words, the mere echo of which--his stuttered, vague recollections--had roused the camp-meeting to fervid enthusiasms undreamed of before. And then he put from him the project--some other time, perhaps, for doubts lurked in his heart, hesitation chilled his resolve--some other time, when his companions and their prosaic influence were all far away. He was roused abruptly, as he stalked along, to the perception of the deepening excitement among them.

They had emerged from the dense growths of the mountain to the lower slope, where pastures and fields--whence the grain had been harvested--and a garden and a dwelling, with barns and fences, lay before them all. And as Purdee stopped and stared, the realization of a certain significant fact struck him so suddenly that it seemed to take his breath away. That divergent line stretching to the northwest had left within his boundaries the land on which his enemy had built his home.

He looked; then he smote his thigh and laughed aloud.

The rocks on the river-bank caught the sound, and echoed it again and again, till the air seemed full of derisive voices. Under their stings of jeering clamor, and under the anguish of the calamity which his reeling senses could scarcely measure, Job Grinnell's composure suddenly gave way. He threw up his arms and called upon Heaven; he turned and glared furiously at his enemy. Then, as Purdee's laughter still jarred the air, he drew a "shooting-iron" from his pocket. The blacksmith closed with him, struggling to disarm him. The weapon was discharged in the turmoil, the ball glancing away in the first quiver of sunshine that had reached the earth to-day, and falling spent across the river.

Grinnell wrested himself from the restraining grasp, and rushed down the slope to his gate to hide himself from the gaze of the world--his world, that little group. Then remembering that it was no longer his gate, he turned from it in an agony of loathing. And knowing that earth held no shelter for him but the sufferance of another man's roof, he plunged into the leafless woods as if he heavily dragged himself by a power which warred within him with other strong motives, and disappeared among the myriads of holly bushes all aglow with their red berries.

The spectators still followed the surveyor and his Jacob's-staff, but Purdee lingered. He walked around the fence with a fierce, gloating eye, a panther-like, loping tread, as a beast might patrol a fold before he plunders it. All the venom of the old feud had risen to the opportunity.

Here was his enemy at his mercy. He knew that it was less than seven years since the enclosures had been made, acres and acres of tillable land cleared, the houses built--all achieved which converted the worthlessness of a wilderness into the sterling values of a farm. He--he, Roger Purdee--was a rich man for the "mountings," joining his little to this competence. All the cruelties, all the insults, all the traditions of the old vendetta came thronging into his mind, as distinctly presented as if they were a series of hideous pictures; for he was not used to think in detail, but in the full portrayal of scenes.

The Purdee wrongs were all avenged. This result was so complete, so baffling, so ruinous temporally, so humiliating spiritually! It was the fullest replication of revenge for all that had challenged it.

"How Uncle Ezra would hev rej'iced ter hev lived ter see this day!" he thought, with a pious regret that the dead might not know.

The next moment his attention was suddenly attracted by a movement in the door-yard. A woman had been hanging out clothes to dry, and she turned to go in, without seeing the striding figure patrolling the enclosure. A baby--a small bundle of a red dress--was seated on the pile of sorghum-cane where the mill had worked in the autumn; the stalks were broken, and flimsy with frost and decay, and washed by the rains to a pallid hue, yet more marked in contrast with the brown ground. The baby's dress made a bright bit of color amidst the dreary tones. As Purdee caught sight of it he remembered that this was "Grinnell's old baby," who had been the cause of the renewal of the ancient quarrel, which had resulted so benignantly for him. "I owe you a good turn, sis,"

he murmured, satirically, glaring at the child as the unconscious mother lifted her to go in the house. The baby, looking over the maternal shoulder, encountered the stern eyes staring at her. She stared gravely too. Then with a bounce and a gurgle she beamed upon him from out the retirement of her flapping sun-bonnet; she smiled radiantly, and finally laughed outright, and waved her hands and again bounced beguilingly, and thus toothlessly coquetting, disappeared within the door.

Before Purdee reached home, flakes of snow, the first of the season, were whirling through the gray dusk noiselessly, ceaselessly, always falling, yet never seeming to fall, rather to restlessly pervade the air with a vacillating alienation from all the laws of gravitation. Elusive fascinations of thought were liberated with the shining crystalline aerial pulsation; some mysterious attraction dwelt down long vistas amongst the bare trees; their fine fibrous grace of branch and twig was accented by the snow, which lay upon them with exquisite lightness, despite the aggregated bulk, not the densely packed effect which the boughs would show to-morrow. The crags were crowned; their grim faces looked frowningly out like a warrior's from beneath a wreath. Nowhere could the brown ground be seen; already the pine boughs bent, the needles failing to pierce the drifts. On the banks of the stream, on the slopes of the mountain, in wildest jungles, in the niches and crevices of bare cliffs, the holly-berries glowed red in the midst of the ever-green snow-laden leaves and ice-barbed twigs. When his house at last came into view, the roof was deeply covered; the dizzying whirl had followed every line of the rail-fence; scurrying away along the furthest zigzags there was a vanishing glimpse of a squirrel; the boles of the trees were embedded in drifts; the chickens had gone to roost; the sheep were huddling in the broad door of the rude stable; he saw their heads lifted against the dark background within, where the ox was vaguely glimpsed. He caught their mild glance despite the snow that in-starred with its ever-shifting crystals the dark s.p.a.ce of the aperture, and intervened as a veil. They suddenly reminded him of the season--that it was Christmas Eve; of the sheep which so many years ago beheld the angel of the Lord and the glory of the great light that shone about the shepherds abiding in the fields. Did they follow, he wondered, the shepherds who went to seek for Christ? Ah, as he paused meditatively beside the rail-fence--what matter how long ago it was, how far away!--he saw those sheep lying about the fields under the vast midnight sky. They lift their sleepy heads. Dawn? not yet, surely; and they lay them down again. And one must bleat aloud, turning to see the quickening sky; and one, woolly, white, white as snow, with eyes illumined by the heralding heavens, struggles to its feet, and another, and the flock is astir; and the shepherds, drowsing doubtless, are awakened to good tidings of great joy.

What a night that was!--this night--Christmas Eve. He wondered he had not thought of it before. And the light still shines, and the angel waits, and the eternal hosts proclaim peace on earth, good-will toward men, and summon us all to go and follow the shepherds and see--what? A little child cradled in a manger. The mountaineer, leaning on his gun by the rail-fence, looked through the driving snow with the lights of divination kindling in his eyes, seeing it all, feeling its meaning as never before. Christ came thus, he knew, for a purpose. He could have come in the chariots of the sun or on the wings of the wind. But He was cradled as a little child, that men might revere humanity for the sake of Him who had graced it; that they, thinking on Him, might be good to one another and to all little children.

As he burst into the door of his house the elations of his high religious mood were rudely dispelled by shrill cries of congratulation from his wife and her mother. For the news had preceded him. Ephraim Blinks with his fiddle had stopped there on his way to play at some neighboring merry-making, and had acquainted them with the result of processioning Purdee's land.

"We'll go down thar an' live!" cried his wife, with a gush of joyful tears. "Arter all our scratch-in' along like ten-toed chickens all this time, we'll hev comfort an' plenty! We'll live in Grinnell's good house!

But ter think o' our trials, an' how pore we hev been!"

"This air the Purdees' day!" cried the grandmother, her face flushed with the semblance of youth. "Arter all ez hev kem an' gone, the jedg-mint o' the Lord hev descended on Grinnell, an' he air cast out.

An' his fields, an' house, an' bin, an' barn, air Purdee's!"

The fire flared and faded; shadows of the night gloomed thick in the room--this night of nights that bestowed so much, that imposed so much on man and on his fellow-man!

"Ain't the Grinnell baby got _no_ home?" whimpered the hereditary enemy.

The mountaineer remembered the Lord of heaven and earth cradled, a little Child, in the manger. He remembered, too, the humble child smiling its guileless good-will at the fence. He broke out suddenly.

"How kem the fields Purdee's," he cried, leaning his back against the door and striking the puncheon floor with the b.u.t.t of the gun till it rang again and again, "or the house, or the bin, or the barn? Did he plant 'em? Did he build 'em? Who made 'em his'n?"

"The law!" exclaimed both women in a breath.

"Thar ain't no law in heaven or yearth ez kin gin an' honest man what ain't his'n by rights," he declared.

An insistent feminine clamor arose, protesting the sovereign power of the law. He quaked for a moment; dominant though he was in his own house, he could not face them, but he could flee. He suddenly stepped out of the door, and when they opened it and looked after him in the snowy dusk and the whitened woods, he was gone.

And popular opinion coincided with them when it became known that he had formally relinquished his right to that portion of the land improved by Grinnell. He said to the old squire who drew up the quit-claim deed, which he executed that Christmas Eve, that he was not willing to profit by his enemy's mistake, and thus the consideration expressed in the conveyance was the value of the land, considered not as a farm, but as so many acres of wilderness before an axe was laid to the trunk of a tree or the soil upturned by a plough. It was the minimum of value, and Grinnell came cheaply off.

The blacksmith, the mountain fiddler, and the advanced thinker, who had been active in the survey, balked of the expected excitement attendant upon the ousting of Grinnell, and some sensational culmination of the ancient feud, were not in sympathy with the pacific result, and spoke as if they had given themselves to unrequited labors.

"Thar ain't no way o' settlin' what that thar critter Purdee owns 'ceptin' ez consarns Moses' tables o' the Law. He clings ter them," they said, in conclave about the forge fire when the big doors were closed and the snow, banking up the crevices, kept out the wind. "There ain't no use in percessionin' Purdee's land."

And indeed Purdee's possessions were wider far than even that divergent line which the county surveyor ran out might seem to warrant; for on the mountain-tops largest realms of solemn thought were open to him. He levied tribute upon the liberties of an enthused imagination. He exulted in the freedom of the expanding s.p.a.ces of a spiritual perception of the spiritual things. When the snow slipped away from the tables of the Law, the man who had read strange scripture engraven thereon took his way one day, doubtful, but faltering with hope, up and up to the vast dome of the mountain, and knelt beside the rocks to see if perchance he might trace anew those mystic runes which he once had some fine instinct to decipher. And as he pondered long he found, or thought he found, here a familiar character, and there a slowly developing word, and anon--did he see it aright?--a phrase; and suddenly it was discovered to him that, whether their origin were a sacred mystery or the fantastic scroll-work of time as the rock weathered, high thoughts, evoking thrilling emotions, bear scant import to one who apprehends only in mental acceptance. And he realised that the multiform texts which he had read in the fine and curious script were but paraphrases of the simple mandate to be good to one another for the sake of that holy Child cradled in manger, and to all little children.