Buch lesen: «The Trail of the Lonesome Pine», Seite 5

X

Hale opened his eyes next morning on the little old woman in black, moving ghost-like through the dim interior to the kitchen. A wood-thrush was singing when he stepped out on the porch and its cool notes had the liquid freshness of the morning. Breakfast over, he concluded to leave the yellow mule with the Red Fox to be taken back to the county town, and to walk down the mountain, but before he got away the landlord's son turned up with his own horse, still lame, but well enough to limp along without doing himself harm. So, leading the black horse, Hale started down.

The sun was rising over still seas of white mist and wave after wave of blue Virginia hills. In the shadows below, it smote the mists into tatters; leaf and bush glittered as though after a heavy rain, and down Hale went under a trembling dew-drenched world and along a tumbling series of water-falls that flashed through tall ferns, blossoming laurel and shining leaves of rhododendron. Once he heard something move below him and then the crackling of brush sounded far to one side of the road. He knew it was a man who would be watching him from a covert and, straightway, to prove his innocence of any hostile or secret purpose, he began to whistle. Farther below, two men with Winchesters rose from the bushes and asked his name and his business. He told both readily. Everybody, it seemed, was prepared for hostilities and, though the news of the patched-up peace had spread, it was plain that the factions were still suspicious and on guard. Then the loneliness almost of Lonesome Cove itself set in. For miles he saw nothing alive but an occasional bird and heard no sound but of running water or rustling leaf. At the mouth of the creek his horse's lameness had grown so much better that he mounted him and rode slowly up the river. Within an hour he could see the still crest of the Lonesome Pine. At the mouth of a creek a mile farther on was an old gristmill with its water-wheel asleep, and whittling at the door outside was the old miller, Uncle Billy Beams, who, when he heard the coming of the black horse's feet, looked up and showed no surprise at all when he saw Hale.

"I heard you was comin'," he shouted, hailing him cheerily by name. "Ain't fishin' this time!"

"No," said Hale, "not this time."

"Well, git down and rest a spell. June'll be here in a minute an' you can ride back with her. I reckon you air goin' that a-way."

"June!"

"Shore! My, but she'll be glad to see ye! She's always talkin' about ye. You told her you was comin' back an' ever'body told her you wasn't: but that leetle gal al'ays said she KNOWED you was, because you SAID you was. She's growed some—an' if she ain't purty, well I'd tell a man! You jes' tie yo' hoss up thar behind the mill so she can't see it, an' git inside the mill when she comes round that bend thar. My, but hit'll be a surprise fer her."

The old man chuckled so cheerily that Hale, to humour him, hitched his horse to a sapling, came back and sat in the door of the mill. The old man knew all about the trouble in town the day before.

"I want to give ye a leetle advice. Keep yo' mouth plum' shut about this here war. I'm Jestice of the Peace, but that's the only way I've kept outen of it fer thirty years; an' hit's the only way you can keep outen it."

"Thank you, I mean to keep my mouth shut, but would you mind—"

"Git in!" interrupted the old man eagerly. "Hyeh she comes." His kind old face creased into a welcoming smile, and between the logs of the mill Hale, inside, could see an old sorrel horse slowly coming through the lights and shadows down the road. On its back was a sack of corn and perched on the sack was a little girl with her bare feet in the hollows behind the old nag's withers. She was looking sidewise, quite hidden by a scarlet poke-bonnet, and at the old man's shout she turned the smiling face of little June. With an answering cry, she struck the old nag with a switch and before the old man could rise to help her down, slipped lightly to the ground.

"Why, honey," he said, "I don't know whut I'm goin' to do 'bout yo' corn. Shaft's broke an' I can't do no grindin' till to-morrow."

"Well, Uncle Billy, we ain't got a pint o' meal in the house," she said. "You jes' got to LEND me some."

"All right, honey," said the old man, and he cleared his throat as a signal for Hale.

The little girl was pushing her bonnet back when Hale stepped into sight and, unstartled, unsmiling, unspeaking, she looked steadily at him—one hand motionless for a moment on her bronze heap of hair and then slipping down past her cheek to clench the other tightly. Uncle Billy was bewildered.

"Why, June, hit's Mr. Hale—why—-"

"Howdye, June!" said Hale, who was no less puzzled—and still she gave no sign that she had ever seen him before except reluctantly to give him her hand. Then she turned sullenly away and sat down in the door of the mill with her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands.

Dumfounded, the old miller pulled the sack of corn from the horse and leaned it against the mill. Then he took out his pipe, filled and lighted it slowly and turned his perplexed eyes to the sun.

"Well, honey," he said, as though he were doing the best he could with a difficult situation, "I'll have to git you that meal at the house. 'Bout dinner time now. You an' Mr. Hale thar come on and git somethin' to eat afore ye go back."

"I got to get on back home," said June, rising.

"No you ain't—I bet you got dinner fer yo' step-mammy afore you left, an' I jes' know you was aimin' to take a snack with me an' ole Hon." The little girl hesitated—she had no denial—and the old fellow smiled kindly.

"Come on, now."

Little June walked on the other side of the miller from Hale back to the old man's cabin, two hundred yards up the road, answering his questions but not Hale's and never meeting the latter's eyes with her own. "Ole Hon," the portly old woman whom Hale remembered, with brass-rimmed spectacles and a clay pipe in her mouth, came out on the porch and welcomed them heartily under the honeysuckle vines. Her mouth and face were alive with humour when she saw Hale, and her eyes took in both him and the little girl keenly. The miller and Hale leaned chairs against the wall while the girl sat at the entrance of the porch. Suddenly Hale went out to his horse and took out a package from his saddle-pockets.

"I've got some candy in here for you," he said smiling.

"I don't want no candy," she said, still not looking at him and with a little movement of her knees away from him.

"Why, honey," said Uncle Billy again, "whut IS the matter with ye? I thought ye was great friends." The little girl rose hastily.

"No, we ain't, nuther," she said, and she whisked herself indoors. Hale put the package back with some embarrassment and the old miller laughed.

"Well, well—she's a quar little critter; mebbe she's mad because you stayed away so long."

At the table June wanted to help ole Hon and wait to eat with her, but Uncle Billy made her sit down with him and Hale, and so shy was she that she hardly ate anything. Once only did she look up from her plate and that was when Uncle Billy, with a shake of his head, said:

"He's a bad un." He was speaking of Rufe Tolliver, and at the mention of his name there was a frightened look in the little girl's eyes, when she quickly raised them, that made Hale wonder.

An hour later they were riding side by side—Hale and June—on through the lights and shadows toward Lonesome Cove. Uncle Billy turned back from the gate to the porch.

"He ain't come back hyeh jes' fer coal," said ole Hon.

"Shucks!" said Uncle Billy; "you women-folks can't think 'bout nothin' 'cept one thing. He's too old fer her."

"She'll git ole enough fer HIM—an' you menfolks don't think less—you jes' talk less." And she went back into the kitchen, and on the porch the old miller puffed on a new idea in his pipe.

For a few minutes the two rode in silence and not yet had June lifted her eyes to him.

"You've forgotten me, June."

"No, I hain't, nuther."

"You said you'd be waiting for me." June's lashes went lower still.

"I was."

"Well, what's the matter? I'm mighty sorry I couldn't get back sooner."

"Huh!" said June scornfully, and he knew Uncle Billy in his guess as to the trouble was far afield, and so he tried another tack.

"I've been over to the county seat and I saw lots of your kinfolks over there." She showed no curiosity, no surprise, and still she did not look up at him.

"I met your cousin, Loretta, over there and I carried her home behind me on an old mule"—Hale paused, smiling at the remembrance—and still she betrayed no interest.

"She's a mighty pretty girl, and whenever I'd hit that old—-"

"She hain't!"—the words were so shrieked out that Hale was bewildered, and then he guessed that the falling out between the fathers was more serious than he had supposed.

"But she isn't as nice as you are," he added quickly, and the girl's quivering mouth steadied, the tears stopped in her vexed dark eyes and she lifted them to him at last.

"She ain't?"

"No, indeed, she ain't."

For a while they rode along again in silence. June no longer avoided his eyes now, and the unspoken question in her own presently came out:

"You won't let Uncle Rufe bother me no more, will ye?"

"No, indeed, I won't," said Hale heartily. "What does he do to you?"

"Nothin'—'cept he's always a-teasin' me, an'—an' I'm afeered o' him."

"Well, I'll take care of Uncle Rufe."

"I knowed YOU'D say that," she said. "Pap and Dave always laughs at me," and she shook her head as though she were already threatening her bad uncle with what Hale would do to him, and she was so serious and trustful that Hale was curiously touched. By and by he lifted one flap of his saddle-pockets again.

"I've got some candy here for a nice little girl," he said, as though the subject had not been mentioned before. "It's for you. Won't you have some?"

"I reckon I will," she said with a happy smile.

Hale watched her while she munched a striped stick of peppermint. Her crimson bonnet had fallen from her sunlit hair and straight down from it to her bare little foot with its stubbed toe just darkening with dried blood, a sculptor would have loved the rounded slenderness in the curving long lines that shaped her brown throat, her arms and her hands, which were prettily shaped but so very dirty as to the nails, and her dangling bare leg. Her teeth were even and white, and most of them flashed when her red lips smiled. Her lashes were long and gave a touching softness to her eyes even when she was looking quietly at him, but there were times, as he had noticed already, when a brooding look stole over them, and then they were the lair for the mysterious loneliness that was the very spirit of Lonesome Cove. Some day that little nose would be long enough, and some day, he thought, she would be very beautiful.

"Your cousin, Loretta, said she was coming over to see you."

June's teeth snapped viciously through the stick of candy and then she turned on him and behind the long lashes and deep down in the depth of those wonderful eyes he saw an ageless something that bewildered him more than her words.

"I hate her," she said fiercely.

"Why, little girl?" he said gently.

"I don't know—" she said—and then the tears came in earnest and she turned her head, sobbing. Hale helplessly reached over and patted her on the shoulder, but she shrank away from him.

"Go away!" she said, digging her fist into her eyes until her face was calm again.

They had reached the spot on the river where he had seen her first, and beyond, the smoke of the cabin was rising above the undergrowth.

"Lordy!" she said, "but I do git lonesome over hyeh."

"Wouldn't you like to go over to the Gap with me sometimes?"

Straightway her face was a ray of sunlight.

"Would—I like—to—go—over—"

She stopped suddenly and pulled in her horse, but Hale had heard nothing.

"Hello!" shouted a voice from the bushes, and Devil Judd Tolliver issued from them with an axe on his shoulder. "I heerd you'd come back an' I'm glad to see ye." He came down to the road and shook Hale's hand heartily.

"Whut you been cryin' about?" he added, turning his hawk-like eyes on the little girl.

"Nothin'," she said sullenly.

"Did she git mad with ye 'bout somethin'?" said the old man to Hale. "She never cries 'cept when she's mad." Hale laughed.

"You jes' hush up—both of ye," said the girl with a sharp kick of her right foot.

"I reckon you can't stamp the ground that fer away from it," said the old man dryly. "If you don't git the better of that all-fired temper o' yourn hit's goin' to git the better of you, an' then I'll have to spank you agin."

"I reckon you ain't goin' to whoop me no more, pap. I'm a-gittin' too big."

The old man opened eyes and mouth with an indulgent roar of laughter.

"Come on up to the house," he said to Hale, turning to lead the way, the little girl following him. The old step-mother was again a-bed; small Bub, the brother, still unafraid, sat down beside Hale and the old man brought out a bottle of moonshine.

"I reckon I can still trust ye," he said.

"I reckon you can," laughed Hale.

The liquor was as fiery as ever, but it was grateful, and again the old man took nearly a tumbler full plying Hale, meanwhile, about the happenings in town the day before—but Hale could tell him nothing that he seemed not already to know.

"It was quar," the old mountaineer said. "I've seed two men with the drap on each other and both afeerd to shoot, but I never heerd of sech a ring-around-the-rosy as eight fellers with bead on one another and not a shoot shot. I'm glad I wasn't thar."

He frowned when Hale spoke of the Red Fox.

"You can't never tell whether that ole devil is fer ye or agin ye, but I've been plum' sick o' these doin's a long time now and sometimes I think I'll just pull up stakes and go West and git out of hit—altogether."

"How did you learn so much about yesterday—so soon?"

"Oh, we hears things purty quick in these mountains. Little Dave Tolliver come over here last night."

"Yes," broke in Bub, "and he tol' us how you carried Loretty from town on a mule behind ye, and she jest a-sassin' you, an' as how she said she was a-goin' to git you fer HER sweetheart."

Hale glanced by chance at the little girl. Her face was scarlet, and a light dawned.

"An' sis, thar, said he was a-tellin' lies—an' when she growed up she said she was a-goin' to marry—-"

Something snapped like a toy-pistol and Bub howled. A little brown hand had whacked him across the mouth, and the girl flashed indoors without a word. Bub got to his feet howling with pain and rage and started after her, but the old man caught him:

"Set down, boy! Sarved you right fer blabbin' things that hain't yo' business." He shook with laughter.

Jealousy! Great heavens—Hale thought—in that child, and for him!

"I knowed she was cryin' 'bout something like that. She sets a great store by you, an' she's studied them books you sent her plum' to pieces while you was away. She ain't nothin' but a baby, but in sartain ways she's as old as her mother was when she died." The amazing secret was out, and the little girl appeared no more until supper time, when she waited on the table, but at no time would she look at Hale or speak to him again. For a while the two men sat on the porch talking of the feud and the Gap and the coal on the old man's place, and Hale had no trouble getting an option for a year on the old man's land. Just as dusk was setting he got his horse.

"You'd better stay all night."

"No, I'll have to get along."

The little girl did not appear to tell him goodby, and when he went to his horse at the gate, he called:

"Tell June to come down here. I've got something for her."

"Go on, baby," the old man said, and the little girl came shyly down to the gate. Hale took a brown-paper parcel from his saddle-bags, unwrapped it and betrayed the usual blue-eyed, flaxen-haired, rosy-cheeked doll. Only June did not know the like of it was in all the world. And as she caught it to her breast there were tears once more in her uplifted eyes.

"How about going over to the Gap with me, little girl—some day?"

He never guessed it, but there were a child and a woman before him now and both answered:

"I'll go with ye anywhar."

Hale stopped a while to rest his horse at the base of the big pine. He was practically alone in the world. The little girl back there was born for something else than slow death in that God-forsaken cove, and whatever it was—why not help her to it if he could? With this thought in his brain, he rode down from the luminous upper world of the moon and stars toward the nether world of drifting mists and black ravines. She belonged to just such a night—that little girl—she was a part of its mists, its lights and shadows, its fresh wild beauty and its mystery. Only once did his mind shift from her to his great purpose, and that was when the roar of the water through the rocky chasm of the Gap made him think of the roar of iron wheels, that, rushing through, some day, would drown it into silence. At the mouth of the Gap he saw the white valley lying at peace in the moonlight and straightway from it sprang again, as always, his castle in the air; but before he fell asleep in his cottage on the edge of the millpond that night he heard quite plainly again:

"I'll go with ye—anywhar."

XI

Spring was coming: and, meanwhile, that late autumn and short winter, things went merrily on at the gap in some ways, and in some ways—not.

Within eight miles of the place, for instance, the man fell ill—the man who was to take up Hale's options—and he had to be taken home. Still Hale was undaunted: here he was and here he would stay—and he would try again. Two other young men, Bluegrass Kentuckians, Logan and Macfarlan, had settled at the gap—both lawyers and both of pioneer, Indian-fighting blood. The report of the State geologist had been spread broadcast. A famous magazine writer had come through on horseback and had gone home and given a fervid account of the riches and the beauty of the region. Helmeted Englishmen began to prowl prospectively around the gap sixty miles to the southwest. New surveying parties were directing lines for the rocky gateway between the iron ore and the coal. Engineers and coal experts passed in and out. There were rumours of a furnace and a steel plant when the railroad should reach the place. Capital had flowed in from the East, and already a Pennsylvanian was starting a main entry into a ten-foot vein of coal up through the gap and was coking it. His report was that his own was better than the Connellsville coke, which was the standard: it was higher in carbon and lower in ash. The Ludlow brothers, from Eastern Virginia, had started a general store. Two of the Berkley brothers had come over from Bluegrass Kentucky and their family was coming in the spring. The bearded Senator up the valley, who was also a preacher, had got his Methodist brethren interested—and the community was further enriched by the coming of the Hon. Samuel Budd, lawyer and budding statesman. As a recreation, the Hon. Sam was an anthropologist: he knew the mountaineers from Virginia to Alabama and they were his pet illustrations of his pet theories of the effect of a mountain environment on human life and character. Hale took a great fancy to him from the first moment he saw his smooth, ageless, kindly face, surmounted by a huge pair of spectacles that were hooked behind two large ears, above which his pale yellow hair, parted in the middle, was drawn back with plaster-like precision. A mayor and a constable had been appointed, and the Hon. Sam had just finished his first case—Squire Morton and the Widow Crane, who ran a boarding-house, each having laid claim to three pigs that obstructed traffic in the town. The Hon. Sam was sitting by the stove, deep in thought, when Hale came into the hotel and he lifted his great glaring lenses and waited for no introduction:

"Brother," he said, "do you know twelve reliable witnesses come on the stand and SWORE them pigs belonged to the squire's sow, and twelve equally reliable witnesses SWORE them pigs belonged to the Widow Crane's sow? I shorely was a heap perplexed."

"That was curious." The Hon. Sam laughed:

"Well, sir, them intelligent pigs used both them sows as mothers, and may be they had another mother somewhere else. They would breakfast with the Widow Crane's sow and take supper with the squire's sow. And so them witnesses, too, was naturally perplexed."

Hale waited while the Hon. Sam puffed his pipe into a glow:

"Believin', as I do, that the most important principle in law is mutually forgivin' and a square division o' spoils, I suggested a compromise. The widow said the squire was an old rascal an' thief and he'd never sink a tooth into one of them shoats, but that her lawyer was a gentleman—meanin' me—and the squire said the widow had been blackguardin' him all over town and he'd see her in heaven before she got one, but that HIS lawyer was a prince of the realm: so the other lawyer took one and I got the other."

"What became of the third?"

The Hon. Sam was an ardent disciple of Sir Walter Scott:

"Well, just now the mayor is a-playin' Gurth to that little runt for costs."

Outside, the wheels of the stage rattled, and as half a dozen strangers trooped in, the Hon. Sam waved his hand: "Things is comin'."

Things were coming. The following week "the booming editor" brought in a printing-press and started a paper. An enterprising Hoosier soon established a brick-plant. A geologist—Hale's predecessor in Lonesome Cove—made the Gap his headquarters, and one by one the vanguard of engineers, surveyors, speculators and coalmen drifted in. The wings of progress began to sprout, but the new town-constable soon tendered his resignation with informality and violence. He had arrested a Falin, whose companions straightway took him from custody and set him free. Straightway the constable threw his pistol and badge of office to the ground.

"I've fit an' I've hollered fer help," he shouted, almost crying with rage, "an' I've fit agin. Now this town can go to hell": and he picked up his pistol but left his symbol of law and order in the dust. Next morning there was a new constable, and only that afternoon when Hale stepped into the Ludlow Brothers' store he found the constable already busy. A line of men with revolver or knife in sight was drawn up inside with their backs to Hale, and beyond them he could see the new constable with a man under arrest. Hale had not forgotten his promise to himself and he began now:

"Come on," he called quietly, and when the men turned at the sound of his voice, the constable, who was of sterner stuff than his predecessor, pushed through them, dragging his man after him.

"Look here, boys," said Hale calmly. "Let's not have any row. Let him go to the mayor's office. If he isn't guilty, the mayor will let him go. If he is, the mayor will give him bond. I'll go on it myself. But let's not have a row."

Now, to the mountain eye, Hale appeared no more than the ordinary man, and even a close observer would have seen no more than that his face was clean-cut and thoughtful, that his eye was blue and singularly clear and fearless, and that he was calm with a calmness that might come from anything else than stolidity of temperament—and that, by the way, is the self-control which counts most against the unruly passions of other men—but anybody near Hale, at a time when excitement was high and a crisis was imminent, would have felt the resultant of forces emanating from him that were beyond analysis. And so it was now—the curious power he instinctively had over rough men had its way.

"Go on," he continued quietly, and the constable went on with his prisoner, his friends following, still swearing and with their weapons in their hands. When constable and prisoner passed into the mayor's office, Hale stepped quickly after them and turned on the threshold with his arm across the door.

"Hold on, boys," he said, still good-naturedly. "The mayor can attend to this. If you boys want to fight anybody, fight me. I'm unarmed and you can whip me easily enough," he added with a laugh, "but you mustn't come in here," he concluded, as though the matter was settled beyond further discussion. For one instant—the crucial one, of course—the men hesitated, for the reason that so often makes superior numbers of no avail among the lawless—the lack of a leader of nerve—and without another word Hale held the door. But the frightened mayor inside let the prisoner out at once on bond and Hale, combining law and diplomacy, went on the bond.

Only a day or two later the mountaineers, who worked at the brick-plant with pistols buckled around them, went on a strike and, that night, shot out the lights and punctured the chromos in their boarding-house. Then, armed with sticks, knives, clubs and pistols, they took a triumphant march through town. That night two knives and two pistols were whipped out by two of them in the same store. One of the Ludlows promptly blew out the light and astutely got under the counter. When the combatants scrambled outside, he locked the door and crawled out the back window. Next morning the brick-yard malcontents marched triumphantly again and Hale called for volunteers to arrest them. To his disgust only Logan, Macfarlan, the Hon. Sam Budd, and two or three others seemed willing to go, but when the few who would go started, Hale, leading them, looked back and the whole town seemed to be strung out after him. Below the hill, he saw the mountaineers drawn up in two bodies for battle and, as he led his followers towards them, the Hoosier owner of the plant rode out at a gallop, waving his hands and apparently beside himself with anxiety and terror.

"Don't," he shouted; "somebody'll get killed. Wait—they'll give up." So Hale halted and the Hoosier rode back. After a short parley he came back to Hale to say that the strikers would give up, but when Logan started again, they broke and ran, and only three or four were captured. The Hoosier was delirious over his troubles and straightway closed his plant.

"See," said Hale in disgust. "We've got to do something now."

"We have," said the lawyers, and that night on Hale's porch, the three, with the Hon. Sam Budd, pondered the problem. They could not build a town without law and order—they could not have law and order without taking part themselves, and even then they plainly would have their hands full. And so, that night, on the tiny porch of the little cottage that was Hale's sleeping-room and office, with the creaking of the one wheel of their one industry—the old grist-mill—making patient music through the rhododendron-darkness that hid the steep bank of the stream, the three pioneers forged their plan. There had been gentlemen-regulators a plenty, vigilance committees of gentlemen, and the Ku-Klux clan had been originally composed of gentlemen, as they all knew, but they meant to hew to the strict line of town-ordinance and common law and do the rough everyday work of the common policeman. So volunteer policemen they would be and, in order to extend their authority as much as possible, as county policemen they would be enrolled. Each man would purchase his own Winchester, pistol, billy, badge and a whistle—to call for help—and they would begin drilling and target-shooting at once. The Hon. Sam shook his head dubiously:

"The natives won't understand."

"We can't help that," said Hale.

"I know—I'm with you."

Hale was made captain, Logan first lieutenant, Macfarlan second, and the Hon. Sam third. Two rules, Logan, who, too, knew the mountaineer well, suggested as inflexible. One was never to draw a pistol at all unless necessary, never to pretend to draw as a threat or to intimidate, and never to draw unless one meant to shoot, if need be.

"And the other," added Logan, "always go in force to make an arrest—never alone unless necessary." The Hon. Sam moved his head up and down in hearty approval.

"Why is that?" asked Hale.

"To save bloodshed," he said. "These fellows we will have to deal with have a pride that is morbid. A mountaineer doesn't like to go home and have to say that one man put him in the calaboose—but he doesn't mind telling that it took several to arrest him. Moreover, he will give in to two or three men, when he would look on the coming of one man as a personal issue and to be met as such."

Hale nodded.

"Oh, there'll be plenty of chances," Logan added with a smile, "for everyone to go it alone." Again the Hon. Sam nodded grimly. It was plain to him that they would have all they could do, but no one of them dreamed of the far-reaching effect that night's work would bring.

They were the vanguard of civilization—"crusaders of the nineteenth century against the benighted of the Middle Ages," said the Hon. Sam, and when Logan and Macfarlan left, he lingered and lit his pipe.

"The trouble will be," he said slowly, "that they won't understand our purpose or our methods. They will look on us as a lot of meddlesome 'furriners' who have come in to run their country as we please, when they have been running it as they please for more than a hundred years. You see, you mustn't judge them by the standards of to-day—you must go back to the standards of the Revolution. Practically, they are the pioneers of that day and hardly a bit have they advanced. They are our contemporary ancestors." And then the Hon. Sam, having dropped his vernacular, lounged ponderously into what he was pleased to call his anthropological drool.