The stranger stepped from between a stack of meal and a case of shoes and edged nearer the window. "Recollect, I'm Marsh Gregory," he said in a low voice. "What about my mail?"
"I know there's nothin' for you else I'd a remembered that strange name," Mrs. Crouch said, and added without looking up from the catalogues she sorted, "Now, don't go runnin' away. There's Costello's mail."
"My mail wouldn't a been a letter or a catalogue, either," he insisted.
"I'll have to sort out all this mess a catalogues," she said, and began calling in brisk tones, "Armstrong, Barnes, Burnett, Costellohere you are, oil man, a catalogue, an'don't go runnin' away. I think one a these magazines is Delph's, an' Fronie's Bible Quarterly ought to be in today. Most generally I look it over to see what sort a doctrine she's up to, but I won't bother today. Wait. I'll look."
She handed him soon a Bible Quarterly and a tightly rolled brown parcel that looked to be a woman's magazine. He hesitated by
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the window until she glanced at him and said, "That's all th' Costello mail."
"But mine?" he asked.
She rummaged through the papers scattered on the mail shelf and on the floor, squinted over this and that until she found a small stampless envelope that might have held a bulletin of less than twenty pages. "Here's somethin', but it's nothin' but gover'ment foolishnesssome bulletin from Washington tellin' a man how to farm like as if they knowed in Washington. Farmin' with their mouths, I call it," she went on, and Marsh felt rather than saw the smiles of the hill men.
He took the bulletin, shoved it hastily into his pocket, and turned toward the door in time to see the boys lounging by it make way for Logan Ragan, the man who had forced him out of the road. He was a tall, slender young man with black hair and blue-gray eyes, handsome as the hill men were sometimes handsome when they lived in town a time and learned to wear good clothes with the same careless grace they wore their overalls. He glanced at Marsh in cool-eyed appraisal, then turned to Mrs. Crouch and smiled and said, "Miss Costello sent me down for her mail. She's expectin' some, I think."
Marsh heard the sudden silence of the room, but Logan noticed nothing. He came and leaned by the mail window and waited. The postmistress turned a catalogue end over end and seemed unable to find the address. "I give it to this oil man here," she explained after what seemed an uncomfortably long time. "He was goin' up that way."
Logan turned quickly and held out his hand to Marsh. "I'll take it an' save you th' trip."
"I'm makin' it anyhow," Marsh answered, and studied him with narrowed eyes.
Logan laughed. "Don't be silly. Miss Costello sent me for it special. I'd get there quickerwith a car."
"I notice you go around damn quick in that car. But I'm takin' what I've got here," Marsh said, and walked toward the open door.
Logan turned and with two long strides was in the door. He stood with his back to the porch and looked at Marsh. Now, he was less the handsome young man polished a bit with some life away, than a cold-eyed hill man with spots of red on his thin cheek bones.
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Marsh took a step nearer, and Young Willie whispered, ''Better look out, Nitroglycerin Man.'' And some one else said, "If he ain't got a gun he'd better git out a th' door. That oil man's got a temper like th' load he carries."
Marsh dropped the mail to the floor and looked at the other's chin, and wondered through the unreasoning fury that choked him why he was making a fool of himselfbecause of a scratch on his lead horse's leg or over a girl he had scarcely seen.
Mrs. Crouch jerked open a drawer under the mail shelf, snatched up an antiquated forty-five, and pounded with the butt of it on the mail shelf while she boomed, "Logan Ragan, git out a that door. I give him leave to take that mail. You're standin' in his way. Obstructin' th' mail an' fightin' on gover'ment property is a federal offense. Git goin' 'fore I send you to Atlanta."
Logan turned abruptly away, strode across the porch, sprang to the ground with no bothering about the steps, and went to his car. Marsh felt a curious disappointment mixed with shame, and only remembered the mail and the excuse for his anger when the rabbity-eyed man nudged his elbow timidly and said, "Here's your mail, Sir."
Young Willie shifted his tobacco in his cheek, spat into the cold stove hearth and said, "Them Ragans was never any hands for fist fightin'but all th' same they can fight."
Mrs. Crouch came out of the mail corner with a slamming of the slat gate. "Young Willie, you'd better be a takin' up your saddle-bags an' mail an' gettin' 'em on over to Holly Bush, stead a try to skeer him. It's good for them Ragans to learn once in awhile that they don't own th' world," she said.
Marsh saw admiration in her eyes and some of the others. He hated it. Any half-witted roustabout could have done what he had just done, only the roustabout would maybe have been quicker and knocked the man down. He waited by the door until the black roadster of Logan's had gone chugging over the bridge, then went to his team. As he hitched the horses to the cart, he paused for no reason and fumbled a bit with Jude's throat latch, and slapped Tim on the shoulder. He liked to feel their sleek short hair and solid muscular flesh smooth under his hand. Many times he stroked his horses so, talked to them even, when he loaded his cart with nitroglycerin. He
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did not talk today. He was conscious of the men on the porch watching him, and his words to his horses as well as the government bulletins he collected and read were things belonging to himself alone.
He did not know whether to be pleased or sorry when, as he was driving away, a teen-age boy with his arms filled with flowers came running and calling to him, "Mrs. Crouch said could she please go along with you. She's borried a horse special, but she thought it'ud be easier to ride with you she's got so many flowers."
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The cart bounced at a smart pace up the rough hill roads while Mrs. Crouch clutched at the seat with one hand and fanned herself with a hymn book in the other. Now and then she glanced at her flowers, and often at Marsh, but each time found him straight mouthed and hard eyed. He commented on nothing, though his deep gray eyes, swinging slowly from this to that, missed nothing by the road; a clump of purple ironweed in some grassy space, the white and pale lavender of the wild asters scattered here and there among the trees, clusters of beech nuts that hung sometimes above his head, and the skya high blue August sky where a few powdery white clouds drifted.
"I always rest my horses at th' top of a hill," he explained in a half apologetic, half defensive tone as he stopped his team in a shady spot at the top of the high land that divided Costello's Valley from the Little South Fork Country.
"I noticed you was an uncommon careful driver," the postmistress answered, and smiled to see that her flowers had lost few petals on the way.
"You get carefulhaulin' nitroglycerin," he said, and was silent then while he sat and looked down into the Little South Fork Country. He saw a broad sweep of level farming land, cut by a creek, and encircled by high but gently sloping hills, some wooded, some in corn, with here and there a rolling pasture field dotted with sheep and cows. The floor of the valley was given almost entirely to cane and tobacco and corn. The corn stood high and a rich dark green with its spreading tassels shining golden brown. The few log or
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frame houses, surrounded by orchards and log barns, were mostly on the lower slopes of the hills, set in wide yards where sometimes a horse or calves grazed; and over the whole of the valley there was a peace and a quiet and a dreaming like that of an old man sleeping in the sun.
"It's a pretty farmin' country," he said, without taking his eyes away.
Mrs. Crouch nodded. "Aye, but you ought to see it in th' fall. There's somethin' so quiet an' safe like about th' fallspecially after a good crop year like we're havin' now."
"Yes. That would be a pretty time." He looked across the valley, up through a grove of trees, and above the trees he could see bits of a great gray-white hou
se, flanked by weather stained rock chimneys surrounded by barns and smoke houses, and towering above it all was the wide sweep of a high hill pasture field. He nodded toward the farm. "Whose place is that?"
"Costello's," Mrs. Crouch answered with a short, hard emphasis on the name.
"Is that where Logan Ragan's girl lives?"
She nodded so violently that the purple pansies on the black straw sailor jiggled. "Yes. It is.Now don't misunderstand me. I was never one for meddlin'.But if you're got any sense you'll give that mail to Juber when you get there an' stay away from th' girl. She's somethin' like a load a dynamite anyhow."
He turned to her and smiled, a quick flashing smile that bared his teeth and showed them white and fine with a pointed tooth on each side. "I'm a good hand at haulin' nitroglycerin."
"If'n Logan an' all his brothers turned loose on you, an' then her Uncle John found out his Delph was so much as castin' sheep's eyes at a stranger your nitroglycerin would seem like clabbered milk alongside of it all.You'd better stay by me, an' not go mixin' 'round her."
He laughed and started his team. "I only meant to see Doriean' wellI'd like to hear this girl sing. I've heard about her singin'."
"Listenin's all you'd better do. John went to law an' took her from her motherth' Costellos can win any law suit in this countywhen she wanted to take her to Oregon where she went when she married again. An' he's not aimin' for nobody to take her away from him."
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"She goes with this Logan," he insisted.
Mrs. Crouch shook her head. "That's different. Th' Costellos an' th' Ragans have always been friends. I reckin they fought together in th' Revolution, an' again in th' Civil War, an' mebbe in th' Spanish American. They've fought in all th' wars that ever was, an' that was how they got their start a land."
"This girl's uncle own a lot a land?"
"Not anymore. I'll bet John Costello don't have more'n six hundred acres countin' his timber, but in th' old days th' Costellos owned all th' land that you could see on both sides a that high spot where we stopped. It went like all th' other big holdin's in these hills. Th' generation got bigger, an' they divided an' kept sellin' out an' a goin' away till John's all that's left."
Marsh asked no more of the girl. As they drove through the valley his attention seemed mostly for the crops behind the rail fences that bordered either side of the road. They came at last to Big Cane Brake Church near the head of the creek, a fair-sized building for the hills, painted white, and set in a shadowy, tree-filled yard. Sounds of singing came through the open doors and windows while the crowd of men and boys close-packed about the doors were still with listening, and the bare-footed children who played a game of needle's eye in the shade of a twisted white oak tree sang, "Many a beau have I let go because I wanted you," in soft hushed whispers.
Farther from the door, men sitting with their backs against the trees whittled and talked in subdued tones, with now and then a glance toward some straw-filled wagon where a baby slept, often times in company with baskets and buckets of food. A group of young boys played a quiet game of marbles in the shade; and they, with the singing children and whittling men, gave the place more an air of quiet holiday than of sorrowful service for the dead.
Marsh hitched under a black locust tree near the road, and offered to watch the food and flowers while Mrs. Crouch went to attend the services, but the postmistress insisted that the flowers would be safer than he. Though he had no wish to enter the church, unshaved and dressed in such poor clothing, he argued the matter but little, and stood untroubled by the craning heads of the hill men under the trees. Mostly, he listened to the singing. He thought he heard the girl's voice rising above the others, high and clear it was,
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but sad somehow, sadder even than the words of the song, touched with some great hunger, as if under the words and the music her thoughts were much like his own. He listened a moment longer, then said, "Sure, I'll go inside."
Mrs. Crouch pointed to the mail he carried and whispered, "You'd better give that to me. I'll see she gets it."
He shook his head, then walked with her through the yard, careful to keep his eyes straight ahead as he went down the narrow lane the crowd by the door opened for them. He went inside and felt himself the mark of many eyes, and flushed when a small girl with tight pig-tails tied with gingham strings giggled and said in a shrill whisper, "Look at a stranger man comin' through th' woman's door."
Mrs. Crouch, as if to conceal him as much as possible, sat him on the inside corner of a back bench with a window on the one side of him and herself on the other. The small girl tapped his shoulder with the palm leaf fan then handed it to him, while a round brown arm in front reached backward and dropped a hymn book into his lap.
The church was one large, high-ceilinged room, boarded and ceiled with lumber whip-sawed and planed and tongued and grooved by hand. It was easy to believe Mrs. Crouch when she turned to him and whispered with pride, "This church was built better'n a hundred years ago." The nine poplar pillars that supported the ceiling were golden brown with age, and the wide-seated, high-backed benches, fashioned of wide, four-inch-thick planks, were worn smooth and round in front, but much initialed on their backs by the generations of knife carrying men and boys who had worshipped there.
Marsh, conscious of being watched, studied the church as long as he was able, but soon his glance wandered to the pulpit where several preachers sat near the water buckets and behind a Bible stand banked with flowers. He tried to look steadfastly at the preachers, but from the corner of his eyes he could see Delph in the front row of the choir. He heard her and the other sopranos sing, "In that sweet by and by," dwelling on the high throbbing sadness of the long drawn "sw-e-e-e-et," while the bass growled in with quick deep "by and by''s. It seemed to him that for Delph the words had a meaning all of their own that had nothing to do with the departed dead or God or that rich heaven of purple and gold across the jasper seas of which the hill women loved to sing. There was in her voice no
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supplication nor worship, more a straining and a yearning as if she would on the instant go in search of the promised land; take it in life with no waiting for death.
Then suddenly her voice was not enough and he must look at her, stare with his shoulders thrust forward, while the forgotten hymn book and fan slipped between his knees. When he looked at her he thought of curious things, foolish nothings he had never had, a mountain top dark violet in a blue twilight, the smell of clean oak wood, the starsmemories of many things he had rooted away in his mind to keep. Other girls, pretty now with round cheeks and soft curving flesh, would in time grow old and fat and ugly, but not the girl in the choir. Her beauty lived in her strong straight body, her eyes, and the bones of her face, the proud free tilt of her head, and some air of expectancy or of waiting that gave her a look of eager aliveness even while she sang.
He liked her dark brown hair, the heavy braids of it wound about her head, with loose half-curling tendrils of the fine dark stuff slipping about her ears and forehead. And when she moved her head, lights and shadows glinted on the braids, and other lights and shadows flickered through her eyes. They were a hill woman's eyes, a deeper blue than most, snow water clear and forever changing, like deep lakes or rivers, darkening and brightening as clouds raced across the sun.
Mrs. Crouch nudged him violently with her elbow and whispered heatedly, "You're a lookin' in th' wrong direction. There's Dorie Dodson Fairchild over by that post." Marsh roused, and remembered dimly that Dorie was his excuse for coming to the church. He found her by a pillar near the front as the post mistress had said. She was a hill woman in her middle fifties, but her face in repose seemed older than that, brown it was, and wrinkled with sun and wind and squinting at the sky for rain, not a pretty face, unadorned with even a wisp of her iron gray hair, gathered in a knob at the back of her head and skewered with what had always seemed to him a dangerously small number of pins. She sat now and looked
about the room, her large, blue-gray eyes traveling slowly from this to that, measuring all things and questioning most. "She's as hardboiled lookin' as ever," he whispered to prove that he had seen her, and then turned back to Delph.