The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains

The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains
By Charles Egbert Craddock
Boston and New York
Houghton Mifflin Company
The Riverside Press Cambridge
I.
ALWAYS enwrapped in the illusory mists, always touching the
evasive clouds, the peaks of the Great Smoky Mountains are like some
barren ideal, that has bartered for the vague isolations of a higher
atmosphere the material values of the warm world below. Upon those
mighty and majestic domes no tree strikes root, no hearth is alight;
humanity is an alien thing, and utility set at naught. Below, dense
forests cover the massive, precipitous slopes of the range, and in the
midst of the wilderness a clearing shows, here and there, and the roof of
a humble log cabin; in the valley, far, far lower still, a red spark at dusk
may suggest a home, nestling in the cove. Grain grows apace in these
scanty clearings, for the soil in certain favored spots is mellow; and the
weeds grow, too, and in a wet season the ploughs are fain to be active.
They are of the bull-tongue variety, and are sometimes drawn by oxen.
As often as otherwise they are followed by women.
In the gracious June mornings, when winds are astir and wings are
awhirl in the wide spaces of the sunlit air, the work seemed no hardship
to Dorinda Cayce, - least of all one day when another plough ran
parallel to the furrows of her own, and a loud, drawling, intermittent
conversation became practicable. She paused often, and looked idly
about her: sometimes at the distant mountains, blue and misty, against
the indefinite horizon; sometimes down at the cool, dense shadows of
the wooded valley, so far below the precipice, to which the steep

clearing shelved; sometimes at the little log cabin on the slope above,
sheltered by a beetling crag and shadowed by the pines; sometimes still
higher at the great "bald" of the mountain, and its mingled
phantasmagoria of shifting clouds and flickering sheen and glimmering
peak.
"He 'lowed ter me," she said, suddenly, "ez he hev been gin ter view
strange sights a many a time in them fogs, an' sech."
The eyes lifted to the shivering vapors might never have reflected aught
but a tropical sunshine, so warm, so bright, so languorously calm were
they. She turned them presently upon a young man, who was ploughing
with a horse close by, and who also came to a meditative halt in the
turn-row. He too was of intermittent conversational tendencies, and
between them it might be marveled that so many furrows were already
run. He wore a wide-brimmed brown wool hat, set far back upon his
head; a mass of straight yellow hair hung down to the collar of his
brown jeans coat. His brown eyes were slow and contemplative. The
corn was knee-high, and hid the great boots drawn over his trousers. As
he moved there sounded the unexpected jingle of spurs. He looked,
with the stolid, lack-lustre expression of the mountaineer, at the girl,
who continued, as she leaned lightly on the plough- handles: -
"I 'lowed ter him ez mebbe he hed drempt them visions. I knows I hev
thunk some toler'ble cur'ous thoughts myself, ef I war tired an' sleepin'
hard. But he said he reckoned I hed drempt no sech dreams ez his'n. I
can't holp sorrowin' fur him some. He 'lowed ez Satan hev hunted him
like a pa'tridge on the mounting."
The young man's eyes dropped with sudden significance upon his
plough-handles. A pair of pistols in their leather cases swung
incongruously there. They gave a caustic suggestion of human
adversaries as fierce as the moral pursuit of the Principle of Evil, and
the girl's face fell. In absence of mind she recommended her work.
"Waal," she gently drawled, as the old ox languidly started down the
row, "'pears like ter me ez it ain't goin' ter be no differ, nohow; it won't
hender ye none."

Her face was grave, but there was a smile in her eyes, which had the
lustre and depth of a sapphire, and a lambent glow like the heart of a
blue flame. They were fringed by long, black lashes, and her hair was
black, also. Her pink calico sun-bonnet, flaring toward the front,
showed it lying in moist tendrils on her brow, and cast an unwonted
roseate tint upon the clear, healthful pallor of her complexion. She wore
a dark blue homespun dress, and, despite her coarse garb and uncouth
occupation and the gaunt old ox, there was something impressive in her
simple beauty, her youth, and her elastic vigor. As she drove the
ploughshare into the mould she might have seemed the type of a young
civilization, - so fine a thing in itself, so roughly accoutred.
When she came