



Produced by David Widger






A CHILHOWEE LILY

By Charles Egbert Craddock

1911


Tall, delicate, and stately, with all the finished symmetry and
distinction that might appertain to a cultivated plant, yet sharing
that fragility of texture and peculiar suggestion of evanescence
characteristic of the unheeded weed as it flowers, the Chilhowee lily
caught his eye. Albeit long familiar, the bloom was now invested with a
special significance and the sight of it brought him to a sudden pause.

The cluster grew in a niche on the rocky verge of a precipice beetling
over the windings of the rugged primitive road on the <DW72> of the
ridge. The great pure white bloom, trumpet-shaped and crowned with its
flaring and many-cleft paracorolla, distinct against the densely blue
sky, seemed the more ethereal because of the delicacy of its stalk, so
erect, so inflexibly upright. About it the rocks were at intervals green
with moss, and showed here and there heavy ocherous water stain. The
luxuriant ferns and pendant vines in the densely umbrageous tangle of
verdure served to heighten by contrast the keen whiteness of the flower
and the isolation of its situation.

Ozias Crann sighed with perplexity as he looked, and then his eye
wandered down the great hosky <DW72> of the wooded mountain where in
marshy spots, here and there, a sudden white flare in the shadows
betokened the Chilhowee lily, flowering in myraids, holding out lures
bewildering in their multitude.

"They air bloomin' bodaciously all over the mounting," he remarked
rancorously, as he leaned heavily on a pickaxe; "but we uns hed better
try it ter-night ennyhows."

It was late in August; a moon of exceeding lustre was in the sky, while
still the sun was going down. All the western clouds were aflare with
gorgeous reflections; the long reaches of the Great Smoky range had
grown densely purple; and those dim Cumberland heights that, viewed from
this precipice of Chilhowee, were wont to show so softly blue in the
distance, had now a variant amethystine hue, hard and translucent of
effect as the jewel itself.

The face of one of his companions expressed an adverse doubt, as he,
too, gazed at the illuminated wilderness, all solitary, silent, remote.

"'Pears like ter me it mought be powerful public," Pete Swolford
objected. He had a tall, heavy, lumpish, frame, a lackluster eye, a
broad, dimpled, babyish face incongruously decorated with a tuft of
dark beard at the chin. The suit of brown jeans which he wore bore token
variously of the storms it had weathered, and his coarse cowhide boots
were drawn over the trousers to the knee. His attention was now and
again diverted from the conversation by the necessity of aiding a young
bear, which he led by a chain, to repel the unwelcome demonstrations of
two hounds belonging to one of his interlocutors. Snuffling and nosing
about in an affectation of curiosity the dogs could not forbear growling
outright, as their muzzles approached their shrinking hereditary enemy,
while the cub nestled close to his master and whimpered like a child.

"Jes' so, jes' so, Honey. I'll make 'em cl'ar out!" Swofford replied to
the animal's appeal with ready sympathy. Then, "I wish ter Gawd, Eufe,
ye'd call yer dogs off," he added in a sort of aside to the youngest
of the three mountaineers, who stood among the already reddening sumac
fringing the road, beside his horse, athwart which lay a buck all gray
and antlered, his recently cut throat still dripping blood. The party
had been here long enough for it to collect in a tiny pool in a crevice
in the rocky road, and the hounds constrained to cease their harassments
of the bear now began to eagerly lap it up. The rifle with which Eufe
Kinnicutt had killed the deer was still in his hands and he leaned upon
it; he was a tall, finely formed, athletic young fellow with dark hair,
keen, darkly greenish eyes, full of quickly glancing lights, and as he,
too, scanned the sky, his attitude of mind also seemed dissuasive.

"'Pears like thar won't be no night, ez ye mought call night, till this
moon goes down," he suggested. "'Pears nigh ez bright ez day!"

Ozias Crann's lank, angular frame; his narrow, bony face; his nose, long
yet not large, sharp, pinched; his light grey eyes, set very closely
together; his straggling reddish beard, all were fitting concomitants to
accent the degree of caustic contempt he expressed. "Oh, to be sure!"
he drawled. "It'll be powerful public up hyar in the mounting in the
midnight,--that's a fac'!--an' moonlight is mighty inconvenient to them
ez wants ter git spied on through totin' a lantern in cur'ous places."

This sarcasm left the two remonstrants out of countenance. Pete Swofford
found a certain resource in the agitations of his bear, once more
shrinking and protesting because of the dogs. "Call off yer hound-dogs,
Rufe," he cried irritably, "or I'll gin 'em a bullet ter swallow."

"Ye air a pl