After the Manner of Men

Coincident with a miniature thunderclap shattering the summer afternoon silence of the mountain forest a bullet whipped through the foliage, leaving a half-severed twig to flutter and dangle within easy arm’s reach. Tregarvon had never before been under fire, and he was a product of twentieth-century civilization and the cities. Yet his colonial ancestor, figuring as a seasoned Indian fighter in Braddock’s disaster, could scarcely have picked his sheltering tree with better judgment or dropped behind it with more mechanical celerity.

“Great Peter!” he exclaimed, under his breath, struggling to draw the pocket-entangled weapon which he had persuaded himself to add to his impedimenta before leaving Philadelphia, under the impression that it would be a necessary part of a land-looker’s equipment in the Tennessee mountains; “Great Pete----”

The pocket yielded with a sound of tearing cloth, and the first shock of panic subsided. Crouching behind his tree, the Philadelphian twirled the cylinder of the revolver to make sure that all the chambers were filled. While he was doing this there was another report, and this time the bullet scored the sheltering oak. Tregarvon edged himself into position, with due regard for the enemy’s line of fire, and cocked his weapon, not, however, with any reassuring confidence in it, or in his own steadiness of nerve.

Peering judiciously around the buttressing knees of the barricade oak, he could see nothing save a matted tangle of briers, blackberry bushes, and laurel. But being the possessor of a fairly active imagination, he fancied he could see more--the sunlight reflecting from the polished barrel of a rifle, for example, and, by another turn of the imaginative screw, the indistinct figure of his assailant far back among the trees.

While he was thus reconnoitring, a third shot ripped through the screening laurel and clicked spitefully into his oak. Since the click came first, with the report a fraction of a second later, he reserved his fire. It was evident that the hidden marksman was well beyond pistol range, and he decided to save his ammunition against a time when it might stand a chance of being more effective. The target-practice part of his education had been neglected, and he especially distrusted his marksmanship with the nickel-plated house weapon, the more since he had never as yet fired it.

Harboring this distrust, he was content for the moment to make himself small behind his tree, sitting between two of the flanking root buttresses with his back against the barrier trunk, and wincing in spite of himself while other bullets, following now in rapid and measured succession, whined to right or left, or buried themselves in the solid wood. Oddly enough, the misses, though he could feel the wind of them on either side, were less disquieting than the hits. At each impact of lead against wood there was a jarring little shock quite thrillingly transmissible to quick-set nerves in sympathetic contact with the other side of the target.

“By Jove! if Elizabeth could only see me now!” he chuckled broadly; “Elizabeth, or the mutterchen, or even my rough-riding little sister! This fusillading miscreant of mine must be one of the McNabb outlaws, trying in his elemental fashion to settle the old feud about our title to the coal lands. By and by, I suppose-- Whew!”

The spine-tingling thrill was so real this time that he was half minded to look and see if the impacting bullet had not come all the way through the tree to bulge the bark on his side of it. But he restrained the prompting and went on talking to himself.

“By and by, I suppose, he’ll get tired of blazing away at a safe distance and come charging down upon me. Then I shall be most unhappily obliged to kill him; which will be about the crassest misfortune that could happen, next to his killing me. Confound their barbarous feuds, anyway! Why can’t these out-of-date mountain people wake up and realize that they are living in the twentieth century of civilization and Christian enlightenment? That’s what I’d like to know!”

The only reply to this very reasonable query being the vicious “ping” of another rifle-bullet, he went on discontentedly.

“As if matters were not hopeless enough without adding a scrap with these silly mountaineers about the land titles! Everything torn up at home, the family anchor pulled out by the roots in the steel merger, two women to be taken care of--with Elizabeth presently to make a third--and nothing to make good on but this failure of a Cumberland Mountain coal mine! And now, before I’ve had time to turn around, the spirit moves this rifle-popping moonshine-maker to turn his grouch loose until I feel it in my bones that I shall have to kill him to make him quit!”

Then, the zip-zip of the bullets beginning again after a momentary pause, the soliloquy went on: “That’s right; keep it up, you pin-headed barbarian! I’ve got you for an excuse to commit manslaughter--that’s the surest thing there is. Which brings on more talk. I wonder how it feels to kill a man? I’d give all my old shoes if I didn’t have to find out experimentally. Then there is Elizabeth: it is two completed generations back to her Quaker forepeople, but she is quite capable of flatly refusing to marry what they would have stigmatized as ‘a man of blood.’ Say, you bloodthirsty assassin--that was an uncomfortably near one!”

After the glancing shot, which had flicked a handful of bark chips into Tregarvon’s lap, the firing ceased. Assuring himself that the battling moment at short range was approaching, the young man from the North sat tight, gripping the house pistol in nervous anticipation, and listening tensely for the sound of advancing footfalls.

The suspense was short. Some one, several persons, as it presently appeared, were pushing through the tangle of low-hanging undergrowth toward the oak-tree. Tregarvon wondered that there should be no attempt cautionary on the part of the enemy; wondered again, this time with nettle pricklings of foolishness, when a voice, cheerfully exultant and unmistakably feminine, cried out close at hand.

“Oh, you people--come here and see! I did hit it--_lots_ of times; not that trifling little sheet of paper, of course”--scornfully--“but the tree, I mean. Just come and-- _Ee-e-ow!_”

The shrill little scream of surprise and alarm was for Mr. Vance Tregarvon, issuing cautiously from behind the bulwark oak, still mystified, and still absently gripping the pistol.

The Philadelphian found himself confronting a young woman gowned in stone-blue linen, and wearing an embroidery hat to match, the hat shading a face too unaffectedly winsome to be called beautiful, perhaps, but yet the most piquant and expressive face he had ever looked upon. This young woman was carrying a target-rifle; and pinned upon the bullet-punctured side of the oak was the square of white paper at which she had evidently been shooting.

There were others coming up to join the pretty markswoman: a lean-faced, mild-eyed, spectacled gentleman of middle age, whose coat suggested the church or the schoolroom; a vivacious lady in black, with strongly marked eyebrows and eloquent hands and shoulders; a young woman who wore an artist’s smock over her walking-gown; and another who was girlish enough to wear a red tarn, and to be the prettier for it. But by preference Tregarvon made his stammering apologies to the blue embroidery hat.

“Ah--er--please don’t mind me,” he begged, acutely conscious that his abrupt and pistol-bearing entrance was handicapping him prodigiously. “I thought--that is--er--you see, I really couldn’t know that it was merely a peaceful target practice, and I----”

“Of all things!” gasped the young woman, her slate-blue eyes emphasizing her shocked amazement. “Did you really think that some one was shooting at you? But, of course, you must have! How perfectly dreadful!”

Tregarvon was trying ineffectually to hide the ornamental revolver in his coat pocket when the others closed in.

“You are sure you are not hurt?” the mild-eyed escort made haste to inquire, and Tregarvon grinned sheepishly.

“Only in my self-esteem,” he confessed. “I was silly enough to think that somebody was trying to mark me down, though I might have known better after the first shot or two.”

“But how could you know when you were behind the tree and couldn’t see us?” protested the one who had been doing the shooting. “I’m sure it speaks libraries for your self-control that you didn’t retaliate in kind! Don’t you think so, Madame Fortier?” and she appealed to the lady with the Gallic eyebrows and the eloquent shoulders.

“_Ciel!_ but the _sangfroid_--what you call the cold blood--of these American zhentlemen is of a grandeur the moz’ magnificent!” exclaimed madame. “Mees Richardia she is shoot a hondred time at zis zhentleman, and he is say he is injure’ onlee in hees amour-propre!”

It was at this point that the humor of the situation overtook the chief offender, and she laughed, the sweetest and most delectable laugh that ever gladdened the ears of a young man keenly sensitive to the charms of heavenly slate-blue eyes, a piquant face, and a voice remindful of wood-thrushes and song-sparrows and golden-throated warblers.

“After this, there is nothing left for us but to declare ourselves,” she submitted ruefully, turning to the spectacled escort. “It is the least we can do to save the gentleman the trouble of describing us if he wishes to have us taken before Squire Prigmore.”

But now Tregarvon was regaining some measure of equanimity.

“Let me be the one to begin the identifying process,” he amended. “My name is Vance Tregarvon, and I have the misfortune to be the present owner of the valueless piece of property known as the Ocoee Mine. You are more than welcome to make a rifle-range of my landscape any time you wish. I am quite certain it is the only useful purpose it has ever subserved.”

The gentleman whose coat was either clerical or schoolmasterish, bowed gravely and took his turn, prefacing it with a question.

“Have you ever heard of Highmount College for Young Women, Mr. Tregarvon?”

Tregarvon, in deference to piquancies and slate-blue eyes and the like, was tempted to quibble and say that, of course, every one knew of Highmount College. But the heavenly eyes were holding him, and they promised intolerance of anything but the pellucid truth. So he shook his head regretfully.

“Such is fame--the fame of an old, a great, and a noble institution of learning!” said the spectacled one, in mock deprecation. “With a foundation laid over half a century in the past, with the most healthful and charming location on the entire Cumberland Mountain for its site; with a corps of instructors second only to those of the richly endowed colleges of the North--correct me, Miss Richardia, if I am not quoting the prospectus accurately--with all these splendid advantages, and with a student body drawn from the oldest and most distinguished families of the South.... Mr. Tregarvon, can it be possible----”