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                  THE MYSTERY OF WITCH-FACE MOUNTAIN

                       CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK




                      THE MYSTERY OF WITCH-FACE
                               MOUNTAIN

                          AND OTHER STORIES

                                  BY

                       CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK


                         BOSTON AND NEW YORK
                    HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
                    The Riverside Press, Cambridge
                                 1895




                           Copyright, 1895,
                         BY MARY N. MURFREE.

                        _All rights reserved._

          _The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._

           Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.




                              CONTENTS.


                                                          PAGE
        THE MYSTERY OF WITCH-FACE MOUNTAIN                   1
        TAKING THE BLUE RIBBON AT THE COUNTY FAIR          165
        THE CASTING VOTE                                   200




                  THE MYSTERY OF WITCH-FACE MOUNTAIN.


I.

The beetling crags that hang here and there above the gorge hold in
their rugged rock sculpture no facial similitudes, no suggestions. The
jagged outlines of shelving bluffs delineate no gigantic profile
against the sky beyond. One might seek far and near, and scan the vast
<DW72> with alert and expectant gaze, and view naught of the semblance
that from time immemorial has given the mountain its name. Yet the
imagination needs but scant aid when suddenly the elusive simulacrum
is revealed to the eye. In a certain slant of the diurnal light, even
on bright nights at the full of the moon, sometimes in the uncanny
electric flicker smitten from a storm-cloud, a gigantic peaked
sinister face is limned on the bare, sandy <DW72>, so definite, with
such fixity of lineament, that one is amazed that the perception of it
came no earlier, and is startled when it disappears.

Disappearing as completely as a fancy, few there are who have ever
seen it who have not climbed from the herder's trail across the
narrow wayside stream and up the rugged mountain <DW72>s to the spot
where it became visible. There disappointment awaits the explorer. One
finds a bare and sterile space, from which the hardy chickweed can
scarcely gain the sustenance for timorous sproutings; a few
outcropping rocks; a series of transverse gullies here and there,
washed down to deep indentations; above the whole a stretch of burnt,
broken timber that goes by the name of "fire-scald," and is a relic of
the fury of the fire which was "set out" in the woods with the mission
to burn only the leaves and undergrowth, and which, in its
undisciplined strength, transcended its instructions, as it were, and
destroyed great trees. And this is all. But once more, at a coigne of
vantage on the opposite side of the gorge, and the experience can be
utilized in differentiating the elements that go to make up the weird
presentment of a human countenance. It is the fire-scald that suggests
the great peaked brown hood; the oblong sandy stretch forms the pallid
face; the ledges outline the nose and chin and brow; the eyes look out
from the deep indentations where the <DW72> is washed by the currents
of the winter rains; and here and there the gullies draw heavy lines
and wrinkles. And when the wind is fresh and the clouds scud before
it, in the motion of their shadows the face will seem to mow at the
observer, until the belief comes very readily that it is the exact
counterpart of a witch's face.

Always the likeness is pointed out and insisted on by the denizens of
Witch-Face Mountain, as if they had had long and intimate acquaintance
with that sort of unhallowed gentry, and were especially qualified to
pronounce upon the resemblance.

"Ain't it jes' like 'em, now? Ain't it the very moral of a witch?"
Constant Hite demanded, one gusty day, when the shadows were a-flicker
in the sun, and the face seemed animated by the malice of mockery or
mirth, as he pointed it out to his companion with a sort of triumph in
its splenetic contortions.

He was a big, bluff fellow, to whose pride all that befell him seemed
to minister. He was proud of his length of limb, and his hundred and
eighty pounds of weight, and yet his slim appearance. "Ye wouldn't
believe it now, would ye?" he was wont to say when he stepped off the
scales at the store of the hamlet down in the Cove. "It's solid meat
an' bone an' muscle, my boy. Keep on the friendly side of one hunderd
an' eighty," with a challenging wink. He was proud of his bright brown
eyes, and his dark hair and mustache, and smiling, handsome face, and
his popularity among the class that he was pleased to denominate "gal
critters." He piqued himself upon his several endowments as a hardy
woodsman, his endurance, his sylvan craft, his pluck, and his luck and
his accurate aim. The buck--all gray and antlered, for it was
August--that hung across the horse, behind the saddle, gave token of
this keen exactitude in the tiny wound at the base of the ear, where
the rifle-ball had entered to pierce the brain; it might seem to the
inexpert that death had come rather from the gaping knife-stroke
across the throat, which was, however, a mere matter of butcher-craft.
He was proud of the good strong bay horse that he rode, which so
easily carried double, and proud of his big boots and long spurs; and
he scorned flimsy town clothes, and thought that good home-woven blue
jeans was the gear in which a man who was a man should clothe himself
withal. He glanced more than once at the different toggery of his
companion, evidently a man of cities, whom he had chanced to meet by
the wayside, and with whom he had journeyed more than a mile.

He had paused again and again to point out the "witch-face" to the
stranger, who at first could not discern it at all, and then when it
suddenly broke upon him could not be wiled away from it. He
dismounted, hitching his horse to a sapling, and up and down he
patrolled the rocky mountain path to study the face at various angles;
Constant Hite looking on the while with an important placid
satisfaction, as if he had invented the illusion.

"Some folks, though, can't abide sech ez witches," he said, with a
tolerant smile, as if he were able to defy their malevolence and make
light of it. "Ye see that cabin on the spur over yander around the
bend?" It looked very small and solitary from this height, and the
rail fences about its scanty inclosures hardly reached the dignity of
suggesting jackstraws. "Waal, the Hanways over thar hev a full view of
the old witch enny time she will show up at all. Folks in the
mountings 'low the day be onlucky when she appears on the <DW72> thar.
The old folks at Hanway's will talk 'bout it cornsider'ble ef ye set
'em goin'; they hev seen thar time, an' it rests 'em some ter tell
'bout'n the spites they hev hed that they lay ter the witch-face."

The ugly fascination of the witch-face had laid hold, too, on the
stranger. Twice he had sought to photograph it, and Constant Hite had
watched him with an air of lenient indulgence to folly as he pottered
about, now adjusting his camera, now changing his place anew.

"And I believe I have got the whole amount of nothing at all," he said
at last, looking up breathlessly at the mountaineer. Albeit the wind
was fresh and the altitude great, the sun was hot on the unshaded red
clay path, and the nimble gyrations of the would-be artist brought
plentiful drops to his brow. He took off his straw hat, and mopped his
forehead with his handkerchief, while he stared wistfully at the siren
of his fancy, grimacing maliciously at him from the <DW72> above. "If
the confounded old woman would hold still, and not disappear so
suddenly at the wrong minute, I'd have had her charming physiognomy
all correct. I believe I've spoiled my plates,--that's all." And once
more he mopped his bedewed forehead.

He was a man of thirty-five, perhaps, of the type that will never look
old or grow perceptibly gray. His hair was red and straight, and cut
close to his head. He had a long mustache of the same sanguine tint.
The sun had brought the blood near the surface of his thin skin, and
he looked hot and red, and thoroughly exasperated. His brown eyes were
disproportionately angry, considering the slight importance of his
enterprise. He was evidently a man of keen, quick temper, easily
aroused and nervous. His handsome, well-groomed horse was fractious,
and difficult for so impatient a rider to control. His equestrian
outfit once more attracted the covert glance of Con Hite, whose
experience and observation could duplicate no such attire. He was
tall, somewhat heavily built, and altogether a sufficiently stalwart
specimen of the genus "town man."

"I'll tell you what I'll do!" he exclaimed suddenly. "I'll sketch the
whole scene!"

"Now you're shoutin'," said Con Hite capably, as if he had always
advocated this method of solving the difficulty. His interlocutor
could not for a moment have dreamed that he had never before seen a
camera, had never heard of a photograph, had not the least idea of
what the process of sketching might be which he so boldly approved;
nay, the very phrase embodying his encouragement of the project was
foreign to his vocabulary,--a bit of sophisticated slang which he had
adopted from his companion's conversation, and readily assimilated.

"You stay just where you are!" cried the stranger, his enthusiasm
rising to the occasion; "just that pose,--that pose precisely."

He ran swiftly across the path to remove the inefficient camera from
the foreground, and in a moment was seated on a log by the wayside,
his quick eye scanning the scene: the close file of the ranges about
the horizon, one showing above another, and one more faintly blue
than another, for thus the distance was defined; then the amphitheatre
of the Cove, the heavy bronze-green <DW72>s of the mountains, all with
ripple marks of clear chrome-green ruffling in the wake of the wind;
in the middle distance the still depths of the valley below, with
shadows all a-slumber and silent, and on the projecting spur the
quiet, lonely little house, so slight a suggestion of the presence of
man amidst the majestic dominance of nature; here, to the right,
across the savage gorge, with its cliffs and with its currents in the
deep trough, the nearest <DW72> of the mountain, with the great gaunt
bare space showing that face of ill omen, sibylline, sinister,
definite indeed,--he wondered how his eyes were holden that he should
not have discerned it at once; and in the immediate foreground the
equestrian figure of the mountaineer, booted and spurred, the very
"moral," as Hite would have called it, of an athlete, with his fine
erect pose distinct against the hazy perspective, his expression of
confident force, the details of his handsome features revealed by the
brim of his wide black hat turned up in front.

"It's a big subject, I know; I can't get it all in. I shall only
suggest it. Just keep that pose, will you? Hold the horse still.
'Stand the storm, it won't be long!'" the artist said, smiling with
renewed satisfaction as his pencil, not all inapt, went briskly to
work on the horizontal lines of the background.

But it was longer than he had thought, so still sat the contemplative
mountaineer, so alluring were the details of the landscape. The
enthusiasm of the amateur is always a more urgent motive power than
the restrained and utilitarian industry of the professional.

Few sworn knights of the crayon would have sat sketching so long in
that temperature as he did, with the sun blazing through his straw hat
and his blood mustering under his thin skin; but he stopped at a point
short of sunstroke, and it was with a tumultuous sense of success that
he at last arose, and, with the sketch-book still open, walked across
the road and laid it on the pommel of the mountaineer's saddle.

Constant Hite took it up suspiciously and looked at it askance. It is
to be doubted if ever before he had seen a picture, unless perchance
in the primary reading-book of his callow days at the public school,
spasmodically opened at intervals at the "church house" in the Cove.
He continued to gravely gaze at the sketch, held sideways and almost
reversed, for some moments.

"Bless Gawd! hyar's Whitefoot's muzzle jes' ez nat'ral--an'
_Me_--waal, sir! don't _I_ look proud!" he cried suddenly, with a note
of such succulent vanity, so finely flavored a pride, that the
stranger could but laugh at the zest of his triumph.

"Do you see the witch-face?" he demanded.

"Hesh! hesh!" cried the mountaineer hilariously. "Don