In the "Stranger People's" Country

I.

Who they were, and whence they came, none can say. The mountains where they found their home—their long home—keep silence. The stars, that they knew, look down upon their graves and make no sign. Their memory, unless in some fine and subtle way lingering in the mystery, the pervasive melancholy, the vaguely troublous forecast and retrospect which possess the mind in contemplating this sequestered spot, unhallowed save by the sense of a common humanity, has faded from the earth. None might know that they had ever lived but for a dim tradition associating them with the ancient forgotten peoples of this old hemisphere of ours that we are wont to deem so new. For this is one of the strange burial-grounds of the "pygmy dwellers" of Tennessee; prehistoric, it is held, an extinct diminutive race; only Aztec children, others surmise, of a uniform age and size, buried apart from their kindred, for some unimagined, never-to-be-explained reason; and a more prosaic opinion contends that the curious stone sepulchres contain merely infant relics of the Cherokee Indian. All I know is, here they rest, awaiting that supreme moment when this mortality shall put on immortality, and meanwhile in the solemn environment of the Great Smoky Mountains the "Leetle People" sleep well.

Quiet neighbors all these years have they been. So quiet! almost forgotten. In fact, the nearest mountaineers start, with a dazed look, at a question concerning them, then become mysterious, with that superstitious, speculative gleam in the eye as of one who knows much of uncanny lore, but is shy to recount.

"I do declar' I never war so set back in my life ez I felt whenst that thar valley man jes' upped an' axed me 'bout'n them thar Leetle Stranger People buried yander on the rise," declared Stephen Yates, one July evening, as he stood leaning on his rifle before the door of his cabin in the cove. His horse, reeking and blown, still saddled, bore a deer, newly slain, unprotected by the game-laws, and the old hounds, panting and muddy from the chase, lay around the doorstep.

A young woman of twenty, perhaps, with a pale oval face and dark hair, and serene dark gray eyes, was on the rickety porch, leaning upon a rude shelf that served also as a balustrade; she had a cedar piggin in her hand, and the cow was lowing at the bars. On the doorstep there sat a rotund and stalwart, but preternaturally solemn young person, who now and again, with a corrugated countenance, gnashed his gums. His time and energies were expended in that trying occupation known as "cuttin' yer teeth," an acquisition which he would some day value more highly than now. He sought, as far as an abnormally developed craft might compass, to force, by many an infant wile, his elders to share his woes, and it was with a distinctly fallen countenance that his father hearkened to his mother's parenthetical request to "'bide hyar an' company leetle Moses whilst I be a-milkin' the cow."

"LEETLE MOSE."

Yates did not refuse, although a braver man might have quailed. It was his hard fate to regard "leetle Moses" as a supreme fetich, and to worship him with as unrequited an idolatry as ever was lavished on the great god Dagon. He only sought to gain time, and continued his account of the conversation:

"He 'lowed ef he hed knowed afore ez they war buried hyar, he'd hev kem a hunderd mile jes' ter view the spot," he said, his eye kindling with a recollection of the "valley man's" enthusiasm.

His wife hardly entered into it at second-hand. She regarded him with a slow wonderment stealing over her face.

"War—war he 'quainted with enny of 'em in thar lifetime?" she demanded, hesitating, but seeking to solve the valley man's reason—"them Leetle Stranger People?"

"'WAR—WAR HE 'QUAINTED WITH ENNY OF 'EM?'"

"Great Gosh! Adelaide!" Yates exclaimed, irritably, contemptuous all at once of the limitations of her standpoint. "Ye stay cooped up hyar sociatin' with nobody but leetle Mose till ye hev furgot every durned thing ye ever knowed. The Leetle People hev been dead so long ago nobody 'members 'em—not even old man Peake, an' he air a hunderd an' ten year old—ef he ain't lyin'," he added, cautiously.

Her face flushed. There was fire in her serene eyes, like a flare of sunset in the placid depths of a lake. "I'm willin' ter 'bide along o' leetle Mose," she retorted. "I never expect ter see no better company 'n leetle Mose ter the las' day I live, an' I never did see none!"

Yates shifted his weight uncertainly upon his other foot, and surveyed with a casual glance the wide landscape. The sense of supersedure was sharp at the moment. He had been in his day a great man in her estimation, and now "leetle Mose," with his surly dejection, with only a tooth or two—and with these he would have gladly dispensed—with his uncertain gait and his pigeon-toes and his nearly bald head, was a greater man still. He and his mother were a close corporation, but, for the sake of his own fealty to the domestic Dagon, Steve Yates forgave them both. He went on presently:

"The valley man hed jes' hearn tell ez them Leetle People war buried hyarabout. I never seen a man so streck of a heap ez he war, an' he axed me fool questions till I felt plumb cur'ous a-talkin' 'bout them Leetle Stranger People buried thar on the rise." Once more he turned toward the slope that embarrassed, half-laughing glance—in which, however, there was no mirth—betokening a spirit ill at ease, and secretly shrinking from some uncanny, irksome fear.