A Chilhowee Lily

A Chilhowee Lily, by

Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree) This eBook is
for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
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Title: A Chilhowee Lily 1911
Author: Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
Release Date: November 19, 2007 [EBook #23554]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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CHILHOWEE LILY ***

Produced by David Widger

A CHILHOWEE LILY
By Charles Egbert Craddock
1911
Tall, delicate, and stately, with all the finished symmetry and

distinction that might appertain to a cultivated plant, yet sharing that
fragility of texture and peculiar suggestion of evanescence
characteristic of the unheeded weed as it flowers, the Chilhowee lily
caught his eye. Albeit long familiar, the bloom was now invested with a
special significance and the sight of it brought him to a sudden pause.
The cluster grew in a niche on the rocky verge of a precipice beetling
over the windings of the rugged primitive road on the slope of the ridge.
The great pure white bloom, trumpet-shaped and crowned with its
flaring and many-cleft paracorolla, distinct against the densely blue sky,
seemed the more ethereal because of the delicacy of its stalk, so erect,
so inflexibly upright. About it the rocks were at intervals green with
moss, and showed here and there heavy ocherous water stain. The
luxuriant ferns and pendant vines in the densely umbrageous tangle of
verdure served to heighten by contrast the keen whiteness of the flower
and the isolation of its situation.
Ozias Crann sighed with perplexity as he looked, and then his eye
wandered down the great hosky slope of the wooded mountain where in
marshy spots, here and there, a sudden white flare in the shadows
betokened the Chilhowee lily, flowering in myraids, holding out lures
bewildering in their multitude.
"They air bloomin' bodaciously all over the mounting," he remarked
rancorously, as he leaned heavily on a pickaxe; "but we uns hed better
try it ter-night ennyhows."
It was late in August; a moon of exceeding lustre was in the sky, while
still the sun was going down. All the western clouds were aflare with
gorgeous reflections; the long reaches of the Great Smoky range had
grown densely purple; and those dim Cumberland heights that, viewed
from this precipice of Chilhowee, were wont to show so softly blue in
the distance, had now a variant amethystine hue, hard and translucent
of effect as the jewel itself.
The face of one of his companions expressed an adverse doubt, as he,
too, gazed at the illuminated wilderness, all solitary, silent, remote.

"'Pears like ter me it mought be powerful public," Pete Swolford
objected. He had a tall, heavy, lumpish, frame, a lackluster eye, a broad,
dimpled, babyish face incongruously decorated with a tuft of dark
beard at the chin. The suit of brown jeans which he wore bore token
variously of the storms it had weathered, and his coarse cowhide boots
were drawn over the trousers to the knee. His attention was now and
again diverted from the conversation by the necessity of aiding a young
bear, which he led by a chain, to repel the unwelcome demonstrations
of two hounds belonging to one of his interlocutors. Snuffling and
nosing about in an affectation of curiosity the dogs could not forbear
growling outright, as their muzzles approached their shrinking
hereditary enemy, while the cub nestled close to his master and
whimpered like a child.
"Jes' so, jes' so, Honey. I'll make 'em cl'ar out!" Swofford replied to the
animal's appeal with ready sympathy. Then, "I wish ter Gawd, Eufe,
ye'd call yer dogs off," he added in a sort of aside to the youngest of the
three mountaineers, who stood among the already reddening sumac
fringing the road, beside his horse, athwart which lay a buck all gray
and antlered, his recently cut throat still dripping blood. The party had
been here long enough for it to collect in a tiny pool in a crevice in the
rocky road, and the hounds constrained to cease their harassments of
the bear now began to eagerly lap it up. The rifle with which Eufe
Kinnicutt had killed the deer was still in his hands and he leaned upon
it; he was a tall, finely formed, athletic young fellow with dark hair,
keen, darkly greenish eyes, full of quickly glancing lights, and as he,
too, scanned the sky, his attitude of mind also seemed dissuasive.
"'Pears like thar won't be no night, ez ye mought call night, till this
moon goes down," he suggested. "'Pears nigh ez bright ez day!"
Ozias