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Title: The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories

Author: Charles Egbert Craddock

Release Date: January 30, 2010 [EBook #31122]

Language: English

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THE MYSTERY OF WITCH-FACE MOUNTAIN

CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK

THE MYSTERY OF WITCH-FACE MOUNTAIN

AND OTHER STORIES

BY

CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK

                         BOSTON AND NEW YORK
                    HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
                    The Riverside Press, Cambridge
                                 1895

                           Copyright, 1895,
                         BY MARY N. MURFREE.

All rights reserved.

The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.

Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.

CONTENTS.

PAGE THE MYSTERY OF WITCH-FACE MOUNTAIN 1 TAKING THE BLUE RIBBON AT THE COUNTY FAIR 165 THE CASTING VOTE 200

THE MYSTERY OF WITCH-FACE MOUNTAIN.

I.

The beetling crags that hang here and there above the gorge hold in their rugged rock sculpture no facial similitudes, no suggestions. The jagged outlines of shelving bluffs delineate no gigantic profile against the sky beyond. One might seek far and near, and scan the vast slope with alert and expectant gaze, and view naught of the semblance that from time immemorial has given the mountain its name. Yet the imagination needs but scant aid when suddenly the elusive simulacrum is revealed to the eye. In a certain slant of the diurnal light, even on bright nights at the full of the moon, sometimes in the uncanny electric flicker smitten from a storm-cloud, a gigantic peaked sinister face is limned on the bare, sandy slope, so definite, with such fixity of lineament, that one is amazed that the perception of it came no earlier, and is startled when it disappears.

Disappearing as completely as a fancy, few there are who have ever seen it who have not climbed from the herder's trail across the narrow wayside stream and up the rugged mountain slopes to the spot where it became visible. There disappointment awaits the explorer. One finds a bare and sterile space, from which the hardy chickweed can scarcely gain the sustenance for timorous sproutings; a few outcropping rocks; a series of transverse gullies here and there, washed down to deep indentations; above the whole a stretch of burnt, broken timber that goes by the name of "fire-scald," and is a relic of the fury of the fire which was "set out" in the woods with the mission to burn only the leaves and undergrowth, and which, in its undisciplined strength, transcended its instructions, as it were, and destroyed great trees. And this is all. But once more, at a coigne of vantage on the opposite side of the gorge, and the experience can be utilized in differentiating the elements that go to make up the weird presentment of a human countenance. It is the fire-scald that suggests the great peaked brown hood; the oblong sandy stretch forms the pallid face; the ledges outline the nose and chin and brow; the eyes look out from the deep indentations where the slope is washed by the currents of the winter rains; and here and there the gullies draw heavy lines and wrinkles. And when the wind is fresh and the clouds scud before it, in the motion of their shadows the face will seem to mow at the observer, until the belief comes very readily that it is the exact counterpart of a witch's face.

Always the likeness is pointed out and insisted on by the denizens of Witch-Face Mountain, as if they had had long and intimate acquaintance with that sort of unhallowed gentry, and were especially qualified to pronounce upon the resemblance.

"Ain't it jes' like 'em, now? Ain't it the very moral of a witch?" Constant Hite demanded, one gusty day, when the shadows were a-flicker in the sun, and the face seemed animated by the malice of mockery or mirth, as he pointed it out to his companion with a sort of triumph in its splenetic contortions.

He was a big, bluff fellow, to whose pride all that befell him seemed to minister. He was proud of his length of limb, and his hundred and eighty pounds of weight, and yet his slim appearance. "Ye wouldn't believe it now, would ye?" he was wont to say when he stepped off the scales at the store of the hamlet down in the Cove. "It's solid meat an' bone an' muscle, my boy. Keep on the friendly side of one hunderd an' eighty," with a challenging wink. He was proud of his bright brown eyes, and his dark hair and mustache, and smiling, handsome face, and his popularity among the class that he was pleased to denominate "gal critters." He piqued himself upon his several endowments as a hardy woodsman, his endurance, his sylvan craft, his pluck, and his luck and his accurate aim. The buck—all gray and antlered, for it was August—that hung across the horse, behind the saddle, gave token of this keen exactitude in the tiny wound at the base of the ear, where the rifle-ball had entered to pierce the brain; it might seem to the inexpert that death had come rather from the gaping knife-stroke across the throat, which was, however, a mere matter of butcher-craft. He was proud of the good strong bay horse that he rode, which so easily carried double, and proud of his big boots and long spurs; and he scorned flimsy town clothes, and thought that good home-woven blue jeans was the gear in which a man who was a man should clothe himself withal. He glanced more than once at the different toggery of his companion, evidently a man of cities, whom he had chanced to meet by the wayside, and with whom he had journeyed more than a mile.

He had paused again and again to point out the "witch-face" to the stranger, who at first could not discern it at all, and then when it suddenly broke upon him could not be wiled away from it. He dismounted, hitching his horse to a sapling, and up and down he patrolled the rocky mountain path to study the face at various angles; Constant Hite looking on the while with an important placid satisfaction, as if he had invented the illusion.

"Some folks, though, can't abide sech ez witches," he said, with a tolerant smile, as if he