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TIOBA

AND OTHER TALES

By Arthur Colton

With a Frontispiece by A. B. Frost

New York

Henry Holt And Company

1903


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DEDICATED TO

A. G. BRINSMADE




TIOBA

FROM among the birches and pines, where we pitched our moving tent, you
looked over the flat meadow-lands; and through these went a river,
slow and almost noiseless, wandering in the valley as if there were
no necessity of arriving anywhere at appointed times. “What is the
necessity?” it said softly to any that would listen. And there was none;
so that for many days the white tent stood among the trees, overlooking
the haycocks in the meadows. It was enough business in hand to study the
philosophy and the subtle rhetoric of Still River.

Opposite rose a strangely ruined mountain-side. There was a nobly-poised
head and plenteous chest, the head three thousand feet nearer the
stars--which was little enough from their point of view, no doubt, but
to us it seemed a symbol of something higher than the stars, something
beyond them forever waiting and watching.

From its feet upward half a mile the mountain was one raw wound. The
shivered roots and tree-trunks stuck out helplessly from reddish soil,
boulders were crushed and piled in angry heaps, veins of granite ripped
open--the skin and flesh of the mountain tom off with a curse, and the
bones made a mockery. The wall of the precipice rose far above this
desolation, and, beyond, the hazy forests went up a mile or more clear
to the sky-line. The peak stood over all, not with triumph or with
shame, but with the clouds and stars.

It was a cloudy day, with rifts of sunlight. An acre of light crept
down the mountain: so you have seen, on the river-boats at night, the
search-light feeling, fingering along the shore.

In the evening an Arcadian, an elderly man and garrulous, came up to see
what it might be that glimmered among his pulp-trees. He was a surprise,
and not as Arcadian as at first one might presume, for he sold milk and
eggs and blueberries at a price to make one suddenly rich. His name was
Fargus, and he it was whose hay-cutter clicked like a locust all day
in the meadow-lands. He came and made himself amiable beside us, and
confided anything we might care to know which experience had left with
him.

“That's Tioba,” he said. “That's the name of that mountain.” And he
told us the story of one whom he called “Jim Hawks,” and of the fall of
Tioba.

She's a skinned mountain [he said]. She got wet inside and slid. Still
River used to run ten rods further in, and there was a cemetery,
too, and Jim Hawks's place; and the cemetery's there yet, six rods
underground, but the creek shied off and went through my plough-land
scandalous.

Now, Jim Hawks was a get-there kind, with a clawed face--by a wildcat,
yes, sir. Tioba got there; and Jim he was a wicked one. I've been
forty years in this valley, with the Petersons and the Storrses and the
Merimys at Canada Center, all good, quiet folk. And nothing happened to
us, for we did nothing to blame, till Jim came, and Tioba ups and drops
on him.

Now look at it, this valley! There've been landslides over beyond in
Helder's valley, but there's only one in mine. Looks as if the devil
gone spit on it. It's Jim Hawks's trail.

He come one day with a buckboard and a yellow horse, and he says:

“Sell me that land from here up the mountain.”

“Who be you?” says I.

“Jim Hawks,” says he, and that's all he appeared to know about it. And
he bought the land, and put up a house close to the mountain, so you
could throw a cat down his chimney if you wanted to, or two cats if you
had 'em.

He was a long, swing-shouldered man, with a light- mustache and a
kind of flat gray eye that you couldn't see into. You look into a man's
eye naturally to see what his intentions are. Well, Jim Hawks's eye
appeared to have nothing to say on the subject. And as to that, I told
my wife it was none of our business if he didn't bring into the valley
anything but his name and a bit of money sufficient.

He got his face clawed by a wildcat by being reckless with it; and he
ran a deer into Helder's back yard once and shot it, and licked Helder
for claiming the deer. He was the recklessest chap! He swings his fist
into Helder's face, and he says:

“Shoot, if you got a gun. If you hain't, get out!”

I told Jim that was no place to put a house, on account of Tioba
dropping rocks off herself whenever it rained hard and the soil got
mushy. I told him Tioba'd as soon drop a rock on his head as into his
gridiron.

You can't see Canada Center from here. There's a post-office there, and
three houses, the Petersons', the Storrses' and the Merimys'. Merimy's
house got a peaked roof on it. I see Jeaney Merimy climb it after her
kitten a-yowling on the ridge. She wasn't but six years old then, and
she was gritty the day she was born. Her mother--she's old Peterson's