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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't'sturb me
'bout yer witch-face. Ef thar ain't the buck,--yes, toler'ble
fat,--an' with all his horns! An' look at my boot,--actially the spur
on it! An' my hat turned up;" he raised his flattered hand to the brim
as if to verify its position.

"You didn't know you were so good looking, hey?" suggested the amused
town man.

"My Lord, naw!" declared Hite, laughing at himself, yet laughing
delightedly. "I dunno _how_ the gals make out to do without me at
all!"

The pleased artist laughed, too. "Well, hand it over," he said, as he
reached out for the book. "We must be getting out of this sun. I'm not
used to it, you see."

He put his foot in the stirrup as he spoke, and as he swung himself
into the saddle the mountaineer reluctantly closed and relinquished
the book. "I'd like ter see it agin, some time or other," he observed.

He remembered this wish afterward, and how little he then imagined
where and in what manner he was destined to see it again.

They rode on together into the dense woods, leaving the wind and the
sunshine and the flying clouds fluctuating over the broad expanse of
the mountains, and the witch-face silently mowing and grimacing at the
world below, albeit seen by no human being except perchance some
dweller at the little house on the spur, struck aghast by this
unwelcome apparition evoked by the necromancy of the breeze and the
sheen and the shadow, marking this as an unlucky day.

"That's right smart o' a cur'osity, ain't it?" said Constant Hite
complacently, as they jogged along. "When the last gover'mint survey
fellers went through hyar, they war plumb smitten by the ole 'oman,
an' spent cornsider'ble time a-stare-gazin' at her. They 'lowed they
hed never seen the beat."

"What was the survey for?" asked the town man, with keen mundane
interest.

Constant Hite was rarely at a loss. When other men were fain to come
to a pause for the lack of information, the resources of his agile
substitutions and speculations were made manifest. "They war jes'
runnin' a few lines hyar an' thar," he said negligently. "They lef'
some tall striped poles planted in the ground, red an' sich colors,
ter mark the way; an' them mounting folks over yander in the
furderest coves,--they air powerful ahint the times,--they hed never
hearn o' sech ez a survey, noway, an' the poles jes' 'peared ter them
sprung up thar like Jonah's gourd in a single night, ez ef they kem
from seed; an' the folks, they 'lowed 't war the sign o' a new war."
He laughed lazily at the uninstructed terrors of the unsophisticated
denizens of the "furderest coves." "They'd gather around an'
stare-gaze at the poles, an' wonder if they'd hev ter fight the Rebs
agin; them folks is mos'ly Union." Then his interest in the subject
quickening, "Them survey fellers, they ondertook, too, ter medjure the
tallness o' some o' the mountings fur the gover'mint. Now what good is
that goin' ter do the Nunited States?" he resumed grudgingly. "The
mountings kin be medjured by the eye,--look a-yander." He pointed with
the end of his whip at a section of the horizon, visible between the
fringed and low-swaying boughs of hemlock and fir as the trail swept
closer to the verge of the range, on which was softly painted, as on
ivory and with an enameled lustre, two or three great azure domes,
with here and there the high white clouds of a clear day nestling
flakelike on the summits. "They air jes' all-fired high, an' that's
all. Do it make 'em seem enny taller ter say they air six thousand or
seben thousand feet? Man ain't used ter medjurin' by the thousand
feet. When he gits ter the ground he goes by the pole. I dunno how
high nor how long a thousand feet air. The gover'mint jes' want ter
spend a leetle money, I reckon. It 'pears toler'ble weak-kneed in its
mind, wunst in a while. But ef it wants ter fool money away, it's
mighty well able ter afford sech. It hev got a power o' ways a-comin'
at money,--we all know that, we all know that."

He said this with a gloomy inflection and a downward look that might
have implied a liability for taxes beyond his willingness to pay. But,
barring the assessment on a small holding of mountain land, Constant
Hite seemed in case to contribute naught to his country's exchequer.

"It needs all it can get, now," replied the stranger casually, but
doubtless from a sophisticated knowledge, as behooved a reader of the
journals of the day, of the condition of the treasury.

He could not account for the quick glance of alarm and enmity which
the mountaineer cast upon him. It roused in him a certain constraint
which he had not experienced earlier in their chance association. It
caused him to remember that this was a lonely way and a wild country.
He was an alien to the temper and sentiment of the people. He felt
suddenly that sense of distance in mind and spirit which is the true
isolation of the foreigner, and which even an identity of tongue and
kindred cannot annul. Looking keenly into the mountaineer's
half-averted, angry, excited face, he could not for his life discern
how its expression might comport with the tenor of the casual
conversation which had elicited it. He did not even dimly surmise that
his allusion to the finances of the government could be construed as a
justification of the whiskey tax, generally esteemed in the mountains
a measure of tyrannous oppression; that from his supposititious
advocacy of it he had laid himself liable to the suspicion of being
himself of the revenue force,--his mission here to spy out
moonshiners; that his companion's mind was even now dwelling anew, and
with a rueful difference, on that masterly drawing of himself in the
stranger's sketch-book.

"But what do that prove, though?" Hite thought, a certain hope
springing up with the joy of the very recollection of the simulacrum
of the brilliant rural coxcomb adorning the page. "Jes' that me is
_Me_. All he kin say 'bout me air that hyar I be goin' home from
huntin' ter kerry my game. _That_ ain't agin the law, surely."

The "revenuers," he argued, too, never rode alone, as did this man,
and spies and informers were generally of the vicinage. The stranger
was specially well mounted, and as his puzzled cogitation over the
significant silence that had supervened between them became so marked
as to strike Hite's attention, the mountaineer sought to nullify it by
an allusion to the horse. "That feller puts down his feet like a
kitten," he said admiringly. "I never seen nuthin' ez wears shoes so
supple. Shows speed, I s'pose? Built fur it."

"Makes pretty fair time," responded the stranger without enthusiasm.
The doubt, perplexity, and even suspicion which his companion's manner
had evoked were not yet dissipated, and the allusion to the horse, and
the glow of covetous admiration in Hite's face as his eyes dwelt upon
the finely fashioned creature so deftly moving along, brought suddenly
to his mind sundry exploits of a gang of horse-thieves about these
coves and mountains, detailed in recent newspapers. These rumors had
been esteemed by urban communities in general as merely sensational,
and had attracted scant attention. Now, with their recurrence to his
recollection, their verisimilitude was urged upon him. The horse he
rode was a valuable animal, and moreover, here, ten or twenty miles
from a habitation, would prove a shrewd loss indeed. Nevertheless, it
was impossible to shake off or evade his companion; the wilderness,
with its jungle of dense rhododendron undergrowth on either side of
the path, was impenetrable. There was no alternative practicable. He
could only go on and hope for the best.

A second glance at the mountaineer's honest face served in some sort
as reassurance as to the probity of his character. Gradually a vivid
interest in the environment, which had earlier amazed and amused
Constant Hite, began to be renewed. The stranger looked about to
identify the growths of the forest with a keen, fresh enthusiasm, as
if he were meeting old friends. Once, with a sudden flush and an
intent eye, he flung the reins to the man whom he had half suspected
of being a horse-thief ten minutes before, to hastily dismount and
uproot a tiny wayside weed, which he breathlessly and triumphantly
explained to the wondering mountaineer was a rare plant which he had
never seen; he carefully bestowed it between the leaves of his
sketch-book before he resumed the saddle, and Hite was moved to ask,
"How d' ye know its durned comical name, ef ye never seen it afore? By
Gosh! it's got a name longer 'n its tap-root!"

The town man only laughed a trifle at this commentary upon the
botanical Latin nomenclature, and once more he was leaning from his
saddle, peering down the aisles of the forest with a smiling,
expectant interest, as if they held for him some enchantment of which
duller mortals have no ken. A brown geode, picked up in the channel of
a summer-dried stream, showed an interior of sparkling quartz crystal,
when a blow had shattered it, which Hite had never suspected, often as
he had seen the rugged spherical stones lying along the banks. All the
rocks had a thought for the stranger, close to his heart and quick on
his tongue, and as Hite, half skeptical, half beguiled, listened, his
suspicion of the man as a "revenuer" began to fade.

"The revenuers ain't up ter no sech l'arnin' ez this," he said to
himself, with a vicarious pride. "The man, though he never war in the
mountings afore, knows ez much about 'em ez ef he hed bodaciously
built 'em. Fairly smelt that thar cave over t' other side the ridge
jes' now, I reckon; else how'd he know 't war thar?"

A certain hollow reverberation beneath the horse's hoofs had caught
his companion's quick ear. "Have you ever been in this cave
hereabout?" he had asked, to Hite's delighted amazement at this
brilliant feat of mental jugglery, as it seemed to him.

Even the ground, when the repetitious woods held no new revelation of
tree or flower, or hazy, flickering insect dandering through the
yellow sunshine and the olive-tinted shadow and the vivid green
foliage, the very ground had a word for him.

"This formation here," he said, leaning from his saddle to watch the
path slipping along beneath his horse's hoofs, like the unwinding of
coils of brown ribbon, "is like that witch-face <DW72> that we saw
awhile ago. It seems to occur at long intervals in patches. You see
down that declivity how little grows, how barren."

The break in the density of the woods served to show the mountains,
blue and purple and bronze, against the horizon; an argosy of white
clouds under full sail; the Cove, shadowy, slumberous, so deep down
below; and the oak leaves above their heads, all dark and sharply
dentated against the blue.

Hite had suddenly drawn in his horse. An eager light was in his eye, a
new idea in his mind. He felt himself on the verge of imminent
discovery.

"Now," said he, lowering his voice mysteriously, and laying his hand
on the bridle of the other's horse,--and so far had the allurements of
science outstripped merely mundane considerations that the stranger's
recent doubts and anxieties touching his animal were altogether
forgotten, and he was conscious only of a responsive expectant
interest,--"air thar ennything in that thar 'formation,' ez ye calls
it ez could gin out fire?"

"No, certainly not," said the man of science, surprised, and marking
the eager, insistent look in Hite's eyes. Both horses were at a
standstill now. A jay-bird clanged out its wild woodsy cry from the
dense shadows of a fern-brake far in the woods on the right, and they
heard the muffled trickling of water, falling on mossy stones hard by,
from a spring so slight as to be only a silver thread. The trees far
below waved in the wind, and a faint dryadic sibilant singing sounded
a measure or so, and grew fainter in the lulling of the breeze, and
sunk to silence.

"Ennyhow," persisted Hite, "won't sech yearth gin out light
somehows,--in some conditions sech ez ye talk 'bout?" he added
vaguely.

"Spontaneously? Certainly not," the stranger replied, preserving his
erect pose of inquiring and expectant attention.

"Why, then the mounting's 'witched sure enough,--that's all," said
Hite desperately. He cast off his hold on the stranger's horse, caught
up his reins anew, and made ready to fare onward forthwith.

"Does fire ever show there?" demanded his companion wonderingly.

"It's a plumb meracle, it's a plumb mystery," declared Constant Hite,
as they went abreast into the dense shadow of the closing woods. "I
asked ye this 'kase ez ye 'peared ter sense so much in rocks, an'
weeds, an' birds, an' sile, what ain't revealed ter the mortal eye in
gineral, ye mought be able ter gin some nateral reason fur that thar
sile up thar round the old witch-face ter show fire or sech. But it's
beyond yer knowin' or the knowin' o' enny mortal, I reckon."

"How does the fire show?" persisted the man of science, with keen and
attentive interest. "And who has seen it?"

"Stranger," said Hite, lowering his voice, "I hev viewed it, myself.
But fust it war viewed by the Hanways,--them ez lives in that house on
the spur what prongs out o' the range nigh opposite the <DW72> o' the
Witch-Face. One dark night,--thar war no moon, but thar warn't no
storm, jes' a dull clouded black sky, ez late August weather will show
whenst it be heavy an' sultry,--all of a suddenty, ez the Hanway
fambly war settin' on the porch toler'ble late in the night, the air
bein' close in the house, the darter, Narcissa by name, she calls out,
'Look! look! I see the witch-face!' An' they all start up an' stare
over acrost the deep black gorge. An' thar, ez true ez life, war the
witch-face glimmerin' in the midst o' the black night, and agrinnin'
at 'em an' a-mockin' at 'em, an' lighted up ez ef by fire."

"And did no one discover the origin of the fire?" asked the stranger.

"Thar war no fire!" Constant Hite paused impressively. Then he went on
impulsively, full of his subject: "Ben Hanway kem over ter the
still-house arter me, an' tergether we went ter examinate. But the
bresh is powerful thick, an' the way is long, an' though we seen a
flicker wunst or twict ez we-uns pushed through the deep woods, 't war
daybreak 'fore we got thar, an' nare sign nor smell o' fire in all the
woods could we find; nare scorch nor singe on the ground, not even a
burnt stick or chunk ter tell the tale; everythin' ez airish an' cool
an' jewy an' sweet ter the scent ez a summer mornin' is apt ter be."

"How often has this phenomenon occurred?" said the stranger coolly,
but with a downcast, thoughtful eye and a pursed-up lip, as if he were
less surprised than cogitating.

"Twict only, fur we hev kep' an eye on the old witch, Ben an' me. Ben
wants a road opened out up hyar, stiddier jes' this herder's trail
through the woods. Ben dunno how it mought strike folks ef they war
ter know ez the witch-face hed been gin over ter sech cur'ous ways
all of a suddenty. They mought take it fur a sign agin the road, sech
ez b'lieves in the witch-face givin' bad luck." After a pause, "Then
_I_ viewed it wunst,--wunst in the dead o' the night. I war goin' home
from the still, an' I happened ter look up, an' I seen the
witch-face,--the light jes'