THE PLACE OF THE ABANDONED GODS

The hut was built two sides and the roof of sodded poles; the roof had new clapboards of birch bark, but the rest had once belonged to a charcoal burner; the front side was partly poled and partly open, the back was the under-slope of a rock. For it stood by a cliff, one of the many that show their lonely faces all over the Cattle Ridge, except that this was more tumultuous than most, and full of caves made by the clumsy leaning bowlders; and all about were slim young birch trees in white and green, like the demoiselles at Camelot. Old pines stood above the cliff, making a soft, sad noise in the wind. In one of the caves above the leafage of the birches we kept the idols, especially Baal, whom we thought the most energetic; and in front of the cave was the altar-stone that served them all, a great flat rock and thick with moss, where ears of com were sacrificed, or peas or turnips, the first-fruits of the field; or of course, if you shot a chipmunk or a rabbit, you could have a burnt offering of that kind. Also the altar-stone was a council chamber and an outlook.

It was all a secret place on the north side of the Cattle Ridge, with cliffs above and cliffs below. Eastward half a mile lay the Cattle Ridge Road, and beyond that the Ridge ran on indefinitely; southward, three miles down, the road took you into Hagar; westward the Ridge, after all its leagues of length and rigor of form, broke down hurriedly to the Wyantenaug River, at a place called the Haunted Water, where stood the Leather Hermit's hut and beyond which were Bazilloa Armitage's bottom-lands and the Preston Plains railroad station. The road from the station across the bridge came through Sanderson Hollow, where the fields were all over cattle and lively horses, and met the Cattle Ridge Road to Hagar. And last, if you looked north from the altar-stone, you saw a long, downward sweep of woodland, and on and on miles and miles to the meadows and ploughed lands toward Wimberton, with a glimpse of the Wyantenaug far away to the left. Such were the surroundings of the place of abandoned gods. No one but ourselves came there, unless possibly the Hermit. If any

one had come it was thought that Baal would pitch him over the cliffs in some manner, mystically. We got down on our hands and knees, and said, “O Baal!” He was painted green, on a shingle; but his eyes were red. The place was reached from the Cattle Ridge Road by trail, for the old wood-road below was grown up to blackberry brambles, which made one scratched and bloody and out of patience, unless it were blackberry time.

And on the bank, where the trail drops into the climbing highway, there Aaron and Silvia were sitting in the June afternoon, hand in hand, with the filtered green light of the woods about them. We came up from Hagar, the three of us, and found them. They were strangers, so far as we knew. Strangers or townsmen, we never took the trail with any one in sight; it was an item in the Vows. But we ranged up before them and stared candidly. There was nothing against that. Her eyes were nice and blue, and at the time they contained tears. Her cheeks were dimpled and pink, her brown dress dusty, and her round straw hat cocked a bit over one tearful blue eye. He seemed like one who had been growing fast of late. His arms swung loosely as if fastened to his shoulders with strings. The hand that held her small hand was too large for its wrist, the wrist too large for the arm, the arm too long for the shoulder. He had the first growth of a downy mustache, a feeble chin, a humorous eye, and wore a broad-brimmed straw hat and a faded black coat, loose and flopping to his knees. A carpet bag

lay at his feet, only half full and fallen over with an air of depression. He seemed depressed in the same way.

“What's she crying for?” asked Moses Durfey, stolidly.

Aaron peered around at her shyly.

“She's scared to go home. I ain't, but I mote be 'fore I got there.”

“What's your name?”

“We-ell—”

He hesitated. Then, with loud defiance:

“It's Mr. and Mrs. Bees.”

A red squirrel clambered down a low-hanging branch overhead, and chattered sharply, scattering flakes of bark. Aaron, still holding Silvia's hand, leaned back on the bank and looked up. All lines of trouble faded quickly from his face. He smiled, so that his two front teeth stood out startlingly, and held up a long forefinger.

“Cherky little cuss, ain't he?”

The squirrel became more excited. Aaron's finger seemed to draw him like a loadstone. He slid down nearer and nearer, as far as the branch allowed, to a foot or two away, chattering his teeth fearfully. We knew that any one who could magnetize so flighty and malicious a person as a red squirrel, must be a magician, however simple he might be otherwise. Aaron snapped his finger and the squirrel fled. “We'd better be movin', Silvy.”

Silvia's tears flowed the faster, and the lines of trouble returned to Aaron's face.

“Why don't she want to go home?” persisted Moses, stolidly.

We drew close beside them now and sat on the bank, Moses and I by Aaron, Chub Leroy by Silvia. Chub was thoughtful. Silvia dried her eyes and said with a gulp:

“It's pa.”

“That's it.” Aaron nodded and rubbed his sharp nose. “Old man Kincard, it's him.”

They both looked at us trustfully. Moses saw no light in the matter.

“Who's he?”

“He's my father-in-law. He ain't goin' to like it. He's a sneezer. What he don't like generally gets out of the way. My snakes! He 'll put Silvy up the chimney and me in the stove, and he 'll light the fire.”

He chuckled and then relapsed into trouble. His emotions seemed to flit across his face like sunbeams and shadows on a wall, leaving no trace behind them, or each wiped out by the next.

“Snakes! We might just as well sit here.”

Silvia wept again. Moses's face admitted a certain surprise.

“What'll he do that for?”

While Aaron told their story, Silvia sometimes commented tearfully on his left, Moses stolidly on his right, and the red squirrel with excitement overhead; Chub and I were silent; the woods for the most part kept still and listened too, with only a little sympathetic murmur of leaves and tremble of sunbeam and shadow.

The Kincard place, it seemed, lay five miles away, down the north side till you cleared the woods, and then eastward among the foothills. Old Kincard's first name was James. And directly across the road stood the four-roomed house where the Bees family once lived. It was “rickety now and rented to rats.” The Bees family had always been absent-minded, given to dying off and leaving things lying around. In that way Aaron had begun early to be an orphan and to live with the Kincards. He was supposed to own the old house and the dooryard in front of it, but the rats never paid their rent, unless they paid it to the old man or the cat; and Mr. Kincard had a low opinion of Aaron, as being a Bees, and because he was built lengthwise instead of sidewise and knew more about foxes than cows. It seemed to Aaron that a fox was in himself a more interesting person; that this raising more potatoes than you could eat, more tobacco than you could smoke, this making butter and cheese and taking them to Wimberton weekly, and buying little except mortgages and bank accounts, somewhere involved a

mistake. A mortgage was an arrangement by which you established strained relations with a neighbor, a bank account something that made you suspicious of the bank. Now in the woods one dealt for direct usefulness, comfort, and freedom of mind. If a man liked to collect mortgages rather than fox-skins, it was the virtue of the woods to teach tolerance; but Mr. Kincard's opinion of Aaron was low and active. There was that difference between a Kincard and a Bees point of view.

Aaron and Silvia grew up a few years apart on the old spread-out farm, with the wooded mountainside heaving on the south and stretching east and west. It was a neighborhood of few neighbors, and no village within many miles, and the old man was not talkative commonly, though he'd open up sometimes. Aaron and Silvia had always classed themselves together in subdued opposition to their grim ruler of destiny. To each other they called him “the old man,” and expressed by it a reverential but opposed state of mind. To Aaron the undoubted parts of life were the mountain-side of his pleasures and the level fields of his toil. Wimberton was but a troubled glimpse now and then, an improbable memory of more people and houses than seemed natural. Silvia tended to see things first through Aaron's eyes, though she kept a basal judgment of her own in reserve.

“He always licked us together since we was little,” said Aaron, looking at Silvia with softly reminiscent eye. “It was two licks to me for Silvy's one. That was square enough, and the old man thought so. When he got set in a habit he'd never change. It was two to me for Silvy's one.”

Aaron told him, but a week now gone, that himself and Silvia would wish to be married, and he seemed surprised. In fact he came at Aaron with the hoe-handle, but could not catch him, any more than a lonesome rabbit. Then he opened up astonishingly, and told Aaron of his low opinion of him, which was more spread-out and full of details than you'd expect. He wasn't going to give Aaron any such “holt on him as that,” with a guaranty deed, whatever that was, on eternity to loaf in, and he set him the end of the week to clear out, to go elsewhere forever. To Aaron's mind that was an absurd proposal. He wasn't going to do any such foolishness. The rather he sold his collection of skins to a farmer named Shore, and one morning borrowed a carpet bag and came over the Cattle Ridge hand in hand with Silvia.

From Preston Plains they hired a team, drove over the line into York State, and were married. The farmer named Shore laid that out for them. He had a back score of trouble with the old man.

“And Silvy's got a cat,” added Aaron, “and she catches rats to please herself. Silvy thinks she ought to catch rats to be obligin'. Folks that live up these trees don't act that way. No more did Shore.”

Here Aaron looked shrewd and wise.

“I wish Sammy was here,” murmured Silvia, lovingly.

“First-rate cat,” Aaron admitted. “Now, we didn't marry to oblige each other. Each of us obliged himself. Hey?”

Silvia opened her eyes wide. The idea seemed a little complicated. They clasped hands the tighter.

“Now,” said Aaron, “Silvy's scared. I ain't, but I mote be when I got there.”

A blue-jay flew shrieking down the road. Aaron looked after it with a quick change of interest.

“See him! Yes, sir. You can tell his meanness the way he hollers. Musses folks' eggs.”

Aaron no longer surprised us now, nor did Silvia. We accepted them. We had standards of character and conduct, of wisdom and of things possible, but they were not set for us by the pulpit, the statute book, or the market-place. We had often gone forth on expeditions into the mystical beyond, always with a certain purpose to achieve there, and at some point it had been necessary to come home and face the punishment, if there were any, to have supper, and go to bed. Home could not be left permanently and another existence arranged, any more than the feet could be taken from the earth permanently. It had been found impractical. Aaron and Silvia were like ourselves. They might conceive of living away from the farmhouse under the mountain-side a few days. They shrank from facing old Kincard with his hoe-handle or horse-whip, but one must go back eventually. We recognized that their adventure was bold and peculiar; we judged the price likely to be appalling; we gave them frank admiration for both. None of us had ever run away to be definitely married, or suffered from a hoe-handle

or a horse-whip, and yet all these were things to be conceived of and sympathized with.

“I knew a blue-jay,” went on Aaron, thoughtfully, “that lived near the end of Shore's land, and he never appeared to like anything agreeable. He used to hang around other folks' nests and holler till they were distracted.”

Silvia's snuffling caught his ear, and once more the rapid change passed over his face.

“We-ell,” he said, “the old man'll be lively, that's sure. I'd stay in the woods, if it was me, but women”—with a large air of observation—“have to have houses.”.

“We've got a house,” broke in Chub, suddenly. We exchanged looks furtively.

“They'll have to take the Vows,” I objected. “We've took 'em,” said Aaron. “Parson—”

“You'll have to solemn swear,” said Moses. “Will you solemn swear?”

“I guess so.”

“And if you tell, you hope you drop dead.”

The blue-jay flew up the road again, shrieking scornfully. The red squirrel trembled and chattered his teeth on the branch overhead. All else in the woods was silent while Aaron and Silvia took the Vows.

And so we brought them, in excitement and content, to the place of the abandoned gods. Baal lurked far back in his cave, the cliff looked down with lonely forehead, the distant prospect was smooth and smoky. Neither the gods nor the face of the world offered any promise or threat. But Aaron and Silvia seemed to believe in the kindness of not human things. Silvia fell to chattering, laughing, in unforeboding relief from sudden and near-by evil.

Aaron had a surprising number of silver dollars, due to Shore and the fox-skins, by means of which we should bring them supplies from Hagar; and so we left them to the whispering gossip of leaves, the lonely cliff, the lurking Baal, and the smooth, smoky prospect.

No doubt there were times to Aaron and Silvia of trembling awe, dumb delight, conversations not to the point, so that it seemed more successful merely to sit hand in hand and let the moon speak for them, pouring light down silvery gulfs out of the abundant glory within her. There could be seen, too, the dawn, as pink as Silvia's cheeks, but, after all, not so interesting. A hermit-thrush sang of things holy at dawn, far down the woodland, while the birch leaves trembled delicately and the breeze was the sigh of a world in love; and of things quietly infinite at sunset in the growth of rosy gloom.

“It's nice,” Silvia might whisper, leaning to Aaron.

“That's a hermit-thrush down there, Silvy. He opens his mouth, and oh! Kingdom's comin'.”

“Yes.”

“Little brown chap with a scared eye. You don't ever see him hardly.”

“You don't want to, do you, Aaron?” after a long silence.

“Don't know as you do.”

There would be a tendency, at least, to look at things that way, and talk duskily as the dusk came on, and we would leave them on the altar-stone to take the trail below.

But early in the afternoon it would be lively enough, except that Silvia had a prejudice against Baal, which might have been dangerous if Baal had minded it; but he did her no harm. She referred to Elijah and those prophets of Baal, and we admitted he had been downed that time, for it took him when he was not ready, and generally he was low in his luck ever since. But we had chosen him first for an exiled dignity, who must needs have a deadly dislike for the other dignity who had once conquered him vaingloriously, and so must be in opposition to much that we opposed, such as Sunday-school lessons, sermons, and limitations of liberty. It might be that our reasonings were not so concrete and determined, but the sense of opposition was strong. We put it to Silvia that she ought to respect people's feelings, and she was reasonable enough.

Old Kincard, it seemed, was an interesting and opinionated heathen, and Silvia had not experienced sermons and Sunday-schools. That explained much. But she had read the Bible, which her mother had owned, before she died; and we could follow her there, knowing it to be a book of naturally strong points, as respects David for instance, Joseph, and parts of Revelation.

Aaron did not care for books, and had no prejudice toward any being or supposition that might find place in the woods. The altar-stone was common to many gods and councils, and we offered it to Silvia, to use as she liked. I judge she used it mostly to sit there with Aaron, and hear the hermit-thrush, or watch the thick moonlight pour down the scoop of the mountain.

That stretch of the Wyantenaug which is called the Haunted Water is quiet and of slow current, by reason of its depth, and dark in color, by reason of the steep fall of the Cattle Ridge and the pines which crowd from it to the water's edge. The Leather Hermit's hut stood up from the water in the dusk of the pines.

He came to the valley in times within the memories of many who would speak if they were asked, but long enough ago to have become a settled fact; and if any did not like him, neither did they like the Wyantenaug to flood the bottom-lands in spring. The pines and the cliffs belonged to the Sandersons, who cared little enough for either phenomenon.

We often met him on the Cattle Ridge, saw him pass glowering through the thicket with shaggy gray beard and streaming hair. Sometimes he wore a horse-blanket over his leathern vestment. He was apt to be there Sundays, wandering about, and maybe trying to make out in what respect he differed from Elijah the Tishbite; and although we knew this, and knew it was in him to cut up roughly if he found out about Baal, being a prophet himself both in his looks and his way of acting, still he went to and fro for the most part on the other side of the crest, where he had a trail of his own; and you could not see the altar-stone from the top of the cliff, but had to climb down till you came to a jam of bowlders directly over it.

We did not know how long he may have stood there, glowering down on us. The smoke of the sacrifice was beginning to curl up. Baal was backed against a stone, looking off into anywhere and taking things indifferently. Silvia sat aside, twirled her hat scornfully, and said we were “silly.” Aaron chewed a birch twig, and was very calm.

We got down on our hands and knees, and said, “O Baal!”

And the Hermit's voice broke over us in thunder and a sound as of falling mountains. It was Sunday, June 26, 1875.

He denounced us under the heads of “idolaters, gone after the abornination of the Assyrians; babes and sucklings, old in sin, setting up strange gods in secret places; idle mockers of holy things, like the little children of Bethel, whereby they were cursed of the prophet and swallowed of she-bears”; three headings with subdivisions.

Then he came down thumping on the left. Silvia shrieked and clung to Aaron, and we fled to the right and hid in the rocks. He fell upon Baal, cast him on the altar-fire, stamping both to extinction, and shouted:

“I know you, Aaron Bees and Silvia Kincard!”

“N-no, you don't,” stammered Aaron. “It's Mrs. Bees.”

The Hermit stood still and glared on them.

“Why are you here, Aaron and Silvia Bees?”

Aaron recovered himself, and fell to chewing his birch twig.

“We-ell, you see, it's the old man.”

“What of him?”

“He'd lick us with a hoe-handle, wouldn't he? And maybe he'd throw us out, after all. What'd be the use? Might as well stay away,” Aaron finished, grumbling. “Save the hoe.”

The Hermit's glare relaxed. Some recollection of former times may have passed through his rifted mind, or the scent of a new denunciation drawn it away from the abornination of Assyria, who lay split and smoking in the ashes. He leaped from the altar-stone, and vanished under the leafage of the birches. We listened to him crashing and plunging, chanting something incoherent and tuneless, down the mountain, till the sound died away.