The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains

Twilight was slipping down on the Big Smoky. Definiteness was annihilated, and distance a suggestion. Mountain forms lay darkening along the horizon, still flushed with the sunset. Eskaqua Cove had abysmal suggestions, and the ravines were vague glooms. Fire-flies were a-flicker in the woods. There might be a star, outpost of the night.

Dorinda, hunting for the vagrant 'crumply cow,' paused sometimes when the wandering path led to the mountain's brink, and looked down those gigantic slopes and unmeasured depths. She carried her milk-piggin, and her head was uncovered. Now and then she called with long, vague vowels, 'Soo -- cow! Soo! ' There was no response save the echoes, and the vibrant iteration of the katydid. Once she heard an alien sound, and she paused to listen. From the projecting spur where she stood, looking across the Cove, she could see, above the forests on the slopes, the bare, uprising dome, towering in stupendous proportions against the sky. The sound came again and yet again, and she recognised the voice of the man who was wont to go and pray in the desert places on the 'bald' of the mountain, and whom she had likened to the prophets of old. There was something indescribably wild and weird in those appealing, tempestuous tones, now rising as in frenzy, and now falling as with exhaustion -- beseeching, adjuring, reproaching.