



Produced by Stan Goodman and PG Distributed Proofreaders






SOUTHERN LIGHTS AND SHADOWS

Harper's Novelettes

By Various

Edited By William Dean Howells And Henry Mills Alden

1907



Table of Contents


   Grace MacGowan Cooke
   THE CAPTURE OF ANDY PROUDFOOT

   Abby Meguire Roach
   THE LEVEL OF FORTUNE

   Alice MacGowan
   PAP OVERHOLT

   Mrs. B.F. Mayhew
   IN THE PINY WOODS

   William L. Sheppard
   MY FIFTH IN MAMMY

   Sarah Barnwell Elliott
   AN INCIDENT

   M.E.M. Davis
   A SNIPE HUNT

   J.J. Eakins
   THE COURTSHIP OF COLONEL BILL

   Maurice Thompson
   THE BALANCE OF POWER




INTRODUCTION

The most noticeable characteristic of the extraordinary literary
development of the South since the Civil War is that it is almost entirely
in the direction of realism. A people who, up to that time, had been so
romantic that they wished to naturalize among themselves the ideals and
usages of the Walter Scott ages of chivalry, suddenly dropped all that, and
in their search for literary material could apparently find nothing so good
as the facts of their native life. The more "commonplace" these facts the
better they seemed to like them. Evidently they believed that there was a
poetry under the rude outside of their mountaineers, their slattern country
wives, their shy rustic men and maids, their grotesque humorists, their
wild religionists, even their black freedmen, which was worth more than the
poetastery of the romantic fiction of their fathers. In this strong faith,
which need not have been a conscious creed, the writers of the New South
have given the world sketches and studies and portraits of the persons and
conditions of their peculiar civilization which the Russians themselves
have not excelled in honesty, and hardly in simplicity. To be sure, this
development was on the lines of those early humorists who antedated the
romantic fictionists, and who were often in their humor so rank, so wild,
so savage, so cruel, but the modern realism has refined both upon their
matter and their manner. Some of the most artistic work in the American
short-story, that is to say the best short-story in the world, has been
done in the South, so that one may be reasonably sure of an artistic
pleasure in taking up a Southern story. One finds in the Southern stories
careful and conscientious character, rich local color, and effective
grouping, and at the same time one finds genuine pathos, true humor, noble
feeling, generous sympathy. The range of this work is so great as to
include even pictures of the more conventional life, but mainly the writers
keep to the life which is not conventional, the life of the fields, the
woods, the cabin, the village, the little country town. It would be easier
to undervalue than to overvalue them, as we believe the reader of the
admirable pieces here collected will agree.

W.D.H.




The Capture of Andy Proudfoot


By GRACE MACGOWAN COOKE

A dry branch snapped under Kerry's foot with the report of a toy pistol. He
swore perfunctorily, and gazed greedily at the cave-opening just ahead. He
was a bungling woodsman at best; and now, stalking that greatest of all big
game, man, the blood drummed in his ears and his heart seemed to slip a cog
or two with every beat. He stood tense, yet trembling, for the space in
which a man might count ten; surely if there were any one inside the
cave--if the one whose presence he suspected were there--such a noise would
have brought him forth. But a great banner of trumpet-creeper, which hid
the opening till one was almost upon it, waved its torches unstirred except
by the wind; the sand in the doorway was unpressed by any foot.

Kerry began to go forward by inches. He was weary as only a town-bred man,
used to the leisurely patrolling of pavements, could be after struggling
obliquely up and across the pathless flank of Big Turkey Track Mountain,
and then climbing to this eyrie upon Old Yellow Bald--Old Yellow, the peak
that reared its "Bald" of golden grass far above the ranges of The Big and
Little Turkey Tracks.

"Lord, how hungry I am!" he breathed. "I bet the feller's got grub in
there." He had been out two days. He was light-headed from lack of food; at
the thought of it nervous caution gave way to mere brute instinct, and he
plunged recklessly into the cave. Inside, the sudden darkness blinded him
for a moment. Then there began to be visible in one corner a bed of bracken
and sweet-fern; in another an orderly arrangement of tin cans upon a shelf,
and the ashes of a fire, where sat a Dutch oven. The sight of this last
whetted Kerry's hunger; he almost ran to the shelf, and groaned as he found
the first can filled with gunpowder, the next with shot, and the third
containing some odds and ends of string and nails.

He had knelt to inspect a rude box, when a little sound caused him to turn.
In the doorway was a figure which raised the hair upon his head, with a
chilly sensation at its roots--a tall man, with a great mane of black locks
blowing unchecked about his shoulders. He stood turned away from Kerry,
having halted in the doorway as though to take a last advantage of the
outer daylight upon some object of interest to him before entering. He was
examining one of his own hands, and a little shivering moan escaped him. A
rifle rested in the hollow of his arm; Kerry could see the outline of a big
navy-pistol in his belt; and as the man shifted, another came to view;
while the Irishman's practised eye did not miss the handle of a long knife
in its sheath. It went swiftly through his mind that those who sent him on
this errand should have warned him of the size of the quarry. Suddenly,
almost without his own volition, he found himself saying: "I ask your
pardon. I was dead beat an' fair famished, an' I crawled in here to--"

The tall figure in the doorway turned like a thing on a pivot; he did not
start, nor spin round, as a slighter or more nervous person might have
done; and a strange chill fell upon Kerry's heat when the man, whom he
recognized as that one he had come to seek, faced him. The big, dark eyes
looked the intruder up and down; what their owner thought of him, what he
decided concerning him, could no more be guessed than the events of next
year. In a full, grave voice, but one exceedingly gentle, the owner of the
cave repaired the lack of greeting.

