The Way Out
by Emerson Hough · English · Gutenberg #49096 · 398,314 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Way Out
Author: Emerson Hough
Release date: May 31, 2015 [eBook #49096]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WAY OUT ***
[Illustration: She sat alone now, gazing out across the hills.
[PAGE 312]]
THE
WAY OUT
BY
EMERSON HOUGH
[Illustration]
MCKINLAY, STONE & MACKENZIE
NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY
EMERSON HOUGH
Printed in the United States of America
TO
JAMES ALEXANDER BURNS
PROPHET OF HIS PEOPLE
CONTENTS
BOOK I
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE LAW AND THE GOSPEL 3
II. A NEW CREED 18
III. THE BLOOD COVENANT 30
IV. THE FROLIC AT SEMMES’ COVE 41
V. THE AWAKENING OF DAVID JOSLIN 50
VI. THE WANDERING WOMEN 58
VII. THE FABRIC OF A VISION 67
VIII. MARCIA HADDON, AND THE MERRY WIFE OF WINDSOR 72
IX. POLLY PENDLETON 92
X. MR. HADDON’S POINT OF VIEW 117
XI. POLLY PENDLETON’S VISITOR 123
XII. THE STRAIGHT AND NARROW WAY 133
BOOK II
XIII. THE CLANS 141
XIV. THE CROSSROADS 154
XV. THE ORIGINAL SIN 170
BOOK III
XVI. THE CITY ON THE HILL 181
XVII. THESE TWAIN 191
XVIII. MARCIA HADDON 209
XIX. THE NARROWS 215
XX. THE COMING OF JAMES HADDON 227
BOOK IV
XXI. THE FURRIN WOMAN 233
XXII. WHEN GHOSTS ARISE 244
XXIII. GRANNY WILLIAMS’ NARRATIONS 255
XXIV. THE DRUMS 275
XXV. STRANGERS WITHIN THE GATES 281
XXVI. THE UNCERTIFIED 291
XXVII. THE SEEKING 299
XXVIII. THE EDUCATION OF DAVID JOSLIN 306
BOOK I
THE WAY OUT
CHAPTER I
THE LAW AND THE GOSPEL
“HUSH! Stop it, Davy. He’s a-comin’!”
The old woman who spoke—a wrinkled dame she was, bowed down by years
and infirmity, her face creased by a thousand grimed-in, wrinkled
lines—moved with an odd sprightliness as she stepped across the floor.
She placed a hand upon the shoulder of the young man whom she accosted,
standing between him and the door of the little cabin of which they
were the only occupants.
The young man turned toward her, smiling half dreamily. He was a tall
man, as his outstretched legs, one crossed over the other, would
attest; a man well developed, muscular and powerful. His gray eyes
seemed now half a-dream, his wide mouth fixed itself in pleasant lines,
so that he seemed far away, somewhere in the lands to which music
offers access. For now he had been engaged in the production of what
perhaps might have been called music. It was an old ballad tune he had
been playing on his violin, and but now his grandam had joined in high
and cracking treble on the old air of “Barbara Allen,” known time out
of mind in these hills. It was the keener ear of the old woman which
first had caught warning of approaching danger.
“Take keer, I say!” she repeated, and shook him impatiently. “I tell ye
I heerd him come in at the lower gate. He’ll be here direckly. Git shet
of that fiddle, boy!”
She bent on him a pair of deep-set hazel eyes, sharp as those of some
wild creature. Her voice had in it a half-masculine dominance. Every
movement of her stooped and broken body bespoke a creature full of
resolution, fearless, fierce.
“Gawd knows why he’s back so soon,” she went on, “but he’s here. Give
him time to turn old Molly loose and git a few years of corn, an’ he’ll
be right in. Onct he hears that fiddle he’ll raise trouble, that’s what
he’ll do. I reckon I know a preacher, an’ most of all yore daddy. For
him thar hain’t nothin’ sinfuller’n a fiddle; he’s pizen on ’em—all
preachers is—him wust of all. What does he know about music? Now, if
he was French an’ Irish, like me, it mought be different. But then——”
“I kain’t hep it, Granny,” said the young man, still slowly, still
unchanged, his fingers still trailing across the strings. “‘Barbara
Allen’—do ye call that wicked, even on a Sunday? Besides, this is the
fust time I’ve ever strung this fiddle up full. I couldn’t git the
strings till jest now. Melissa says——”
“Never mind what Meliss’ says neither—she’s a triflin’ sort, even if
she is yore own wife. For all that, ye’d orter be home this minute,
like enough.”
“As if ye understood!” said the young man, sighing now and dropping the
instrument to his knee. For the first time a shade of sadness crossed
his face, giving to his features a certain sternness and masculine
vigor.
“Why shouldn’t I understand, Davy? Listen—ye hain’t for these hills.
Ye’re a throw-back somehow, ye don’t belong here. I say that, though
yore daddy is my own son. Don’t I know him—he’d skin us alive if he
found us two here fiddlin’ on Sunday atternoon. He certainly would
shake us out over hell fire, boy! When he gits started to exhortin’ and
damnin’ around here, he certainly is servigerous. Ye know that. Hist,
now!”
The young man himself now heard the sound of heavy footsteps slopping
on the sodden earth, the slam of the slat gate’s wooden latch as
someone entered. There followed the stamp of heavy feet on the broken
gallery, where evidently someone was stopping for an instant to kick
off the mud.
Before the newcomer could enter the young man arose, and with one
stride gained the opening that led up to the loose-floored loft of
the single-storied log house. He reached up a long arm and laid the
offending fiddle back out of sight upon the floor.
Just as he turned there entered the person against whose advent he had
been warned—a tall man, large of frame, bushy and gray-white of hair
and as to a beard whose strong, close-set growth gave him a look of
singular fierceness. As he stood he might have seemed fifty years old.
In reality he was past seventy. The young man who faced him now—his
son—was twenty-eight. A stalwart breed this, housed here in this cabin
in a cove of the ancient Cumberlands. The old dame who stood now, her
eyes turning from one to the other, would never see her ninetieth
birthday again.
Andrew Joslin, commonly known through these half-dozen mountain
communities where he rode circuit as “Preacher Joslin,” stood now in
the door of his own home and looked about him with his accustomed
sternness—a sternness always more intense upon the Lord’s Day. A
somber, dour nature, that of this mountain minister, whose main mission
in life was to proclaim the wrath of God. A man of yea, yea, and nay,
nay, one must have said who saw him standing now, his gray eyes looking
out fiercely, searchingly, beneath his bushy brows.
“What ye been doin’?” he asked suspiciously now, indifferently of the
old woman, his mother, and the stalwart young man, his own son. “What
ye doin’ here, David? Why hain’t ye home? Why hain’t ye at church
to-day, like ye’d orter be?”
“Thar’s no sarvices nowhars near here, an’ ye know it, Andrew,” said
the old woman somewhat querulously.
“Thar kin be sarvices anywhar whar a few is gethered together in the
name of the Lord. Ye two right here could hold sarvices for the glory
of God, if so as ye wanted to.”
Neither made answer to him, and he went on:
“David, have ye read all of that thar book I give ye? Ye’d orter git
some good outen Calvin’s Institutes. Ye’ll maybe be a preacher some
time like yore daddy.”
“Well, daddy, I done tried to read her. I set up all one night with
Preacher Cuthbertson from over in Owsley, an’ we both read sever’l
chapters in them Institutes. Hit was nigh about midnight when we both
went to sleep, an’ atter I’d went to sleep he done shuk me by the
shoulder an’ woke me up, an’ he says to me, ‘David, David, I’ve been
thinkin’ over them Institutes so hard.... I believe they’ve injured my
mind’!”
The young man broke into a wide-mouthed smile as he made this
recountal. But it was a thundercloud of wrath upon the face of his
father which greeted such levity.
“Ye wasn’t reverent!” he blazed. “Ye was impyous, both of ye. Injure
his mind—why, that feller Cuthbertson never had no mind fer to injure.
That’s what ails him. The book of John Calvin is one of the greatest
books in the world. What’ll folks like ye and Preacher Cuthbertson
be up an’ sayin’ next? An’ I’d set ye apart for the ministry, too,
allowin’ I could git ye some schoolin’ atter a while, somewhars.”
He turned from them both, and stood a little apart, his brows drawn
down into a scowling frown.
“How come ye come home so soon, Andrew?” asked his mother now. “We
wasn’t expectin’ ye back—ye told me ye was a-goin’ over to Leslie to
preach a couple days on the head of Hell-fer-Sartin. But ye only left
yisterday.”
“Hit’s none yore business how I got back so soon,” replied the old man
savagely. “I don’t have to account to no one what I do.”
He turned about now moodily. In his great hand he still clutched the
heavy umbrella which he carried, its whalebone ribs and cotton cover
dripping rivulets. A step or two brought him to the opening in the loft
floor, where he reached up to place the wet umbrella out of the way. As
he did so his hand struck some other object hidden there. He grasped it
and drew it down—and stood, his face fairly contorted with surprise
and anger.
It was his son’s violin which now he clutched in his gnarled and bony
hand. As he regarded it the emotion on his face was as much that of
horror as aught else. A violin, an instrument of hell, here in his
house—his house—a chosen minister of God!
“What’s this?” he demanded at length. “Tell me—how come this thing
here—in my house!”
With one stride now—tearing away all the strings of the instrument
with one grasp of his hand as he did so—he flung the offending
violin full upon the flames in the fireplace, sweeping from him with
an outward thrust of his great arm the tall figure of his son, who
impulsively stepped forward to save his cherished instrument. As for
the wrinkled old woman, she stood arrested in an attitude as near
approaching fear as any she ever had evinced. She knew the fierce
temper of both these men.
But the young man, the equal in height of his parent, his superior in
strength, stayed his own impulse and lowered the clenched hand he had
raised. Filial obedience, after all, was strong in his heart
“That’s whar it belongs!” exclaimed the older man, his eyes flashing.
“In hell fire is whar all them things belongs, an’ the critters that
fosters ‘em. My own flesh an’ blood! O Lord God, lay not up this
against thy sarvent!”
“Ye have sinned against the Lord,” he began, excited now in something
of the religious fervor which had had no expenditure of late. He
thrust a long, bony finger towards his son. “Ye an’ yore granny both
have sinned. To Adam was give the grace of perseverin’ in good if he
choosed. Adam had the power if he had the will, but not the will that
he mought have the power. It was give to all of us subserquents to have
both the will an’ the power fer to obstain from sin. But have ye two
obstained? Look at that thing a-quoilin’ up in hell. That’s what comes
to them that fosters evil when they have both the will an’ the power,
an’ don’t use neither.”
They stood looking at him silently, and he went on, still more excited.
“Ye have-ah—tempted of the Lord,” he intoned. “Ye have forgot the holy
commandments of the Lord-ah! Ye have sinned in the sight of God on the
holy Sabbath day-ah! Ye have kivered up yore sin from me, the sarvent
of the Lord-ah! Ye have plotted agin me. Ye have no grace, fer grace
is not offered by the Lord to be either received or rejected—it is
grace that perjuces both the will an’ the choice in the heart of man.
But whar air the subserquent good works of grace? Ye don’t show them.
Ye nuvver had no grace, neither one of ye! The both of ye will quoil in
hell like that thing thar.”
“Tell me”—he turned now to the old dame—“was he a-fiddlin’ here in my
house on the Lord’s day?”
“Yes, he war, an’ it hain’t the first time!” exclaimed the old woman.
“I don’t keer who knows it. He war a-playin’ ‘Barbara Allen’ here,
an’ I war a-singin’ to it. Now ye know it, an’ what air ye goin’ to do
about it?”
For a moment the three stood in tableau, strong, yet sad enough. Then
the fierce soul of the old man flamed yet more.
“Disgrace me—in my own house! Out of my house, ye, an’ never darken
its doors agin! Yore wife and children need ye plenty ‘thout ye comin’
up here, fiddlin’ in a preacher’s house on Sunday.”
“Do ye mean that, daddy?” asked the young man quietly. “Do ye reelly
mean that? Maybe ye’d better think it over.”
“I don’t have to think it over,” retorted the other. “Begone! Don’t
nuvver come here again.”
“I reckon I’ll go too,” said the grandam, reaching out a skinny arm for
the sunbonnet on its peg at the door.
“Ye’ll do nothin’ of the sort,” replied her son savagely. “Ye belong
here. Let him go. I sont his mother outen the same door onct.”
“I know ye did, Andrew,” she replied, her fierce eyes untamed as she
faced him. “An’ as good a womern as ever was in the world when she
started, ontel ye cowed her an’ abused her, an’ sont her down the
river—ye know whar, an’ ye know into what. Ye kin preach till ye’re
daid, and shake me over hell fire all ye like, but ye kain’t change me,
and ye kain’t scare me, an’ ye know it almighty well. I’ll stay here,
an’ I’ll go when I git ready, an’ ye know that.”
“Go on, Davy.” She turned to the young man who stood, gray and silent,
his hand upon the half-opened door. “Take him at his word, an’ don’t ye
nuvver come back here agin. If ye hain’t happy in yore own home, git
outen these mountings—git somewhars else. No matter what ye do, ye
kain’t do worsen what ye’re doin’ here. Ye know that yore maw nuvver
flickered afore him—nor yore granny neither—an’ don’t ye.”
The gray old man stood silent, at bay, in the center of the squalid
little room—a room cluttered up with heavy, homemade chairs, a pair
of corded bedsteads, a low board table; an interior lighted now in the
approaching gloom of evening by nothing better than the log fire on
the deep-worn hearth. It was an old, old room in an old, old house.
The threshold of the door, renewed no man might say how often, was
worn yet again to the bottom. Its hinges of wood were again worn half
in two. The floor, made of puncheons once five inches thick, hewn by
a hand-adze two generations ago from some giant poplar tree, now worn
almost as smooth as glass by the polishing of bare feet—puncheons more
than a yard wide each as they lay here on the ancient floor beams. A
pair of windows, once owning glass, partially lighted the room, and
there were two doors, one standing ajar at the farther end of the room
making upon a covered passageway which led to a second cabin. In this
usually went forward, it might be supposed, the cooking operations of
the place, such as they were.
At length the old woman stepped to the side of the fireplace and kicked
together the ends of the logs. A faint flame arose, now lighting up
the interior of this half-savage abode. It showed all the better the
tall form of the young man at the door. He spoke no more. With one last
glance straight at the face of his father, he turned and passed out
into the dusk.
The old man, suddenly trembling, now cast himself into a chair before
the fire and sat staring into the flickering flames.
“Whar’s my supper?” he demanded hoarsely after a time.
“Thar hain’t none ready, an’ ye know it,” said his mother. “If I’d
a-knowed ye war a-comin’ back I mought have got something ready. What
made ye?”
“Hit war the Lord’s will,” he rejoined. “I’ve met causes sufficient.
The Lord brung me back to find out what was a-goin’ on here, I reckon.
The Sabbath, too!”
“Hit’s no worse one day than another,” said his mother. “Ye’ve druv
yore own son outen yore own house. He’s got no house of his own to
go to, to speak of—God knows thar’s little enough to keep him thar,
that’s shore. Thar’s little enough to keep any of us here, come to
that.”
Her attitude certainly was not that of shrinking or fear. Granny Joslin
was known far and wide through these mountains as the fightingest of
the fighting Joslins; and that was saying much.
“Womern, womern!” The old preacher raised a hand in protest. There was
a sort of weakening in his face and his attitude, a sort of quavering
in his voice.
She turned and looked at him—looked at the floor where his chair sat
before the fireplace. Beside the drip of the old umbrella there was
another stain spreading on the floor now—darker than that which first
had marked it; a stain which seemed to have darkened his garments and
to have caked on his heavy, homemade shoes.
“What’s that, Andy?” she asked imperiously, but knowing well enough
what it was. “Who done that?”
He made no answer for a time, but at length remarked with small
concern, “Why, old Absalom done that, that’s who. He knifed me in the
back when I was lookin’ the other way atter his two boys.”
“Ye taken the old hill trail, then?”
“Yes, it wasn’t so slippy as the creek road up to Hell-fer-Sartin. Oh,
I know I was warned outen thar, but I couldn’t show the white feather,
could I?”
“No, ye couldn’t, not even if ye war a preacher.” By this time she was
busying herself caring for his wound.
“Well, that’s how it come,” went on Andrew Joslin. “I taken the hill
trail turnin’ off yander from the creek, like ye know. I met them up
in the hills. The Lord led me to ‘em, maybe. The Lord fotched me back
here, too, to find what I have found. How have I sinned!”
“If ye didn’t kill old Absalom Gannt ye shore have sinned,” remarked
his fierce dam casually. “Was it some fight they made?”
“Well, yes. Thar wasn’t but me along, exceptin’ Chan Bullock from over
on the head of the Buffalo—we met up jest as I got up into the hills.
When we turned down the head of Rattlesnake we run acrosst them people
settin’ under a tree, dry, an’ playin’ a game of keerds, right on the
Lord’s day. I rid up with my pistol in my hand, an’ I says to them I
didn’t think they war a-doin’ right to play keerds thar. I seen old
Absalom thar, an’ two of his boys and two of his cousins. Before I
could say much to them, one of the boys he up and fired fust. He hit
old Molly in the neck. She pitched some then, an’ afore I could git her
whar I could do anything, the feller that fired at me, he slipped over
down the big bank back of him, an’ got away in the bush. They had their
horses thar, an’ a couple of ‘em jumped on horseback an’ begun firin’
at me, an’ all the time old Molly was a-jumpin’ so nobody could hit
nobody offen her. Then come Chan Bullock ridin’ up closeter to me. He
had along his old fifty-caliber Winchester—never could bear them big
guns; they shoot too high. Well, he fired couple of times, an’ missed,
an’ by that time all of Absalom an’ his folks was on the run, either
horseback er afoot.
“I seen the boy that done shot at me a-runnin’ down the creek bed
more’n a hundred and fifty yard away. I grabbed the gun away from Chan,
an’ I says, ‘If I couldn’t shoot no better’n ye kin I’d be ashamed
o’ myself.’ So I taken a keerful aim—ye see, I helt a leetle ahead
of him—an’ when I pulls the trigger he rolls over about four times
atter he hit the ground. I swear that big rifle must be a hard-hittin’
gun—hit war a good two-hundred yard when I shot!
“Chan didn’t have no pistol along, an’ mine had fell on the ground.
While all this war a-happenin’, Absalom he had snuck back behint the
tree whar they was a-settin’ an’ a-playin’ keerds. Now, when my back
was turned, he run out an’ he cut me two er three times right here in
the back, afore I could hep myself. Then he run off, too.”
“An’ ye didn’t git ‘im?”
“How could I? He run down the creek bed road towarge whar that other
feller was. I covered him fair with Chan’s gun—but she snapped on me.
He hadn’t had but a couple of hulls, an’ I’d shot the last shot at Pete
when I got him. So Absalom, he got away.”
“Well, you see how come me to come home,” he added presently, having
faithfully told his kin the full story of the latest combat. “I didn’t
know as I could git acrosst the mountings into Hell-fer-Sartin an’
preach fer a couple days. Somehow it seemed to me I had orter come back
home. I did—an’, well you see what I’ve done found here. I didn’t git
Absalom. I’ve lost my son, David. Hit ’pears to me like I’m forsaken of
the Lord this day!”
His mother made no comment, but stepped up to the mantel-piece and
reached down a bottle of white liquid, from which she poured half a
pint into a gourd which she found alongside the bottle.
“Drink this,” said she. “We’ll git Absalom some other time.”
CHAPTER II
A NEW CREED
THE young man who had been dismissed from his father’s house walked
unmindful of the rain still falling in the evening gloom, nor looked
back to the door now closed behind him. His face, strong and deeply
lined, now had settled into a sternness which belied the half-humorous
expression it but now had borne. He was wide of chest, broad of
shoulder, straight of limb as he walked now, hands in pockets,
straightforward, not slouching down, his back flat. There was little of
apathy or weakness about him, one would have said. Well-clad, such a
man as he would attract many a backward gaze from men—or women—on any
city street.
He stepped straight down the little bank beyond the fence marking the
delimitations of the scant yard and the little cornfield of Preacher
Joslin’s cabin, and at once was in the road, or all the road that
ever had been known there. It was no better than the rocky bed of
the shallow creek which flowed directly in front of the cabin. Here,
in the logging days, iron-shod wheels had worn deep grooves into the
sand rock. The longer erosion of the years also had cut sharp the
faces of some of the clay banks. It might have been seen in a stronger
light than this of twilight, that these banks had great seams of black
running parallel through them—croppings of the heavy coal seams known
throughout the region.
From time to time the young man sprang from rock to rock as he made
his way down the bed of the little branch now running full from the
heavy rain, but he walked on carelessly, for the road was well known to
him by day or night. It had been the path of himself, his family, his
ancestors, for well nigh a hundred years.
As he advanced, David Joslin cast an eye now and again upon the
mountain sides. They were beautiful, even in the dull of evening, clad
in gorgeous autumnal glories of chlorophyll afire under the combined
alchemies of the rain, the frost, and the sun. There were reds more
brilliant than may be seen even among the maples of the far north when
the frost comes, yellows for which a new color name must be invented,
browns of unspeakable velvety softness, a thousand ocherous and saffron
hues such as no palette carries. They lay now softened and dulled, but
very beautiful.
Young Joslin knew every hill, every ravine, every mountain cove which
lay about him here,—all the country for fifty miles. Presently he
reached the end of this little side trail down from the mountains, and
emerged into a wider valley where passed the considerable volume of a
fork of the Kentucky River, itself now running yellow from the rains.
Had he cared he might have noted, now passing on the flood, scattered
logs and parts of rafts, flotsam and jetsam of the old wasteful
occupants of the land, who cut and dragged priceless timber to the
grudging stream, and lost the more the more they labored.
He turned to the right, followed down the muddy river bank, and within
a quarter of a mile turned yet again to the right at a decrepit gate
serving in part to stop the way as adjutant of a broken rail fence
which marked a scanty field.
Before him now lay a cleared space of some twenty acres or more,
occupied at one corner by spare, gnarled apple trees, no man might say
how old, appurtenances of acres which David Joslin had “heired” from
the husband of the same grandam, whom but now he had left. Behind the
apple trees rose a low roof, the broken cover of a scant gallery, a
chimney, ragged-topped, at each end of the cabin. Here and there stood
a China tree, yonder grew a vine, softening somewhat and beautifying
even in the beauty of decay those rude surroundings. Back of the house
were other small log buildings, cribs scantily filled with corn. In
the barnyard stood two tall poles, behind which, running up into the
darkness of the mountain side, stretched the long rusted wires which
in the harvesting of the autumn sometimes carried down from the side
of the mountains, too steep for the use of horse or mule, the sacks of
corn perilously gathered above and sent down in the easiest way to the
farmyard.
Apparently the harvest that fall had been but scant. The place had
an air of poverty, or meagerness—rather perhaps should one use the
latter than the former word. It was not the home of a drunkard, or
a ne’er-do-well, or a poverty-smitten man, which David Joslin now
approached—his own home, one like to many others all about him in
these hills. It was an old, old, out-worn land, a decrepit land, which
lay all about him. He was like his neighbors, his home like theirs.
David Joslin walked past the China tree and up to his own door. He
stood for a moment scraping the mud from his feet at the end of the
broken board on the little gallery before he pushed open the door. A
woman rose to meet him.
She was a woman yet young, but seemed no longer young. Perhaps she was
twenty-two, perhaps twenty-five years of age. She was tall and strong,
after the fashion of the mountain woman, angular, spare. The thin dark
hair, swept smoothly back from her bony forehead, seemed to come from
a scalp tight-grown upon the skull. She appeared to carry about her
the look of a certain raw, rugged strength, though there was little of
the soft and feminine about her figure, about her attitude, about her
voice as she now spoke to him.
“Why didn’t ye come home long ago?” she demanded with no preliminary.
Joslin made no answer, but sat down sullenly in a chair which he pushed
up to the fireplace. The flames were dying down into a mass of coals
which likewise seemed sullen. He reached out to the scant pile of
firewood at the corner of the hearth, and cast on a stick or so.
“Ye’re always away,” she went on grumbling. “Folks’ll think ye don’t
care nothin’ fer yore own fam’ly. Every whip-stitch ye’re off up into
the hills, visitin’ somewhars or other, I don’t know whar. What’s it
comin’ to?”
Still he made no answer, and she went on upbraiding.
“We been married four years, an’ ye act as free as if we’d nuvver been
married at all. Don’t yore fam’ly need nothin’ now an’ agin? Is this
all a womern’s got to live fer, I want to know? Look what kind of place
we got.”
“Hit’s all ye come from,” he said at length. “Hit’s all yore people
ever knowed, er mine. Why should ary of us expect more?”
An even, dull, accepted despair was in his tone. As for her, she cared
not so much for philosophy as for the heckling she had held in reserve
for him.
“Hit’s a lot to offer ary womern, hain’t it?” said she.
“Had ye much to offer in exchange?” said he, quietly and bitterly. “We
traded fair, the best we knowed, the same sort of trade that’s common.
We got married—thar was our children. What more is thar fer ye er em
er ary of us in these hills, I’d like to know! Such as I’ve had, ye’ve
had.”
There was something so stern, so bitter, in his sudden unkind remark
that she took another tack.
“Hain’t ye tired?” she began, wheedling. She stooped over and pulled
back the coverlet, a gaudy, patchwork quilt upon the single bed of the
apartment. “Don’t ye want to lay down an’ rest a while?”
“No. I’m a-thinkin’.”
“What was ye thinkin’ about—me?”
“No, I was thinkin’ about the new doctor, an’ what he said to me last
week.”
She was silent now. The name of the new doctor seemed to be something
she had heard before.
“Ye talk too much with that new doctor. He puts too many fool ideas
in yore haid. We’re married, an’ we got to live like that. How do ye
figger any different, I’d like to know? Ye brung me here yore own
self—ye knowed what ye wanted when ye come up thar courtin’ me at my
daddy’s at the haid of Bull Skin. I come right down here to yore house
when I was married. I stood right on this floor here, an’ yore daddy,
he married us. Ye know that.”
“Yes, I do.” The young man’s face was extremely grave and gray as he
spoke.
“—An’ yore daddy was a regular ordained preacher.”
“What’s the matter with ye, anyways?” she went on querulously. “Ye been
a-quarlin’ with yore own people well as me?”
“My own daddy jest now ordered me outen his house. I’m nuvver goin’
thar no more.”
“Huh! I reckon yore own free-thinkin’ ways druv it on ye.”
“He burned my fiddle!” said David Joslin, with sudden resentment.
“Ye mought have expected it—goin’ up thar to play a fiddle in a
preacher’s house!”
“I jest had her strung up for the fust time,” rejoined her husband. “I
was a-playin’ ‘Barbara Allen.’ My daddy accused me of bein’ sinful.
We’ve got it hard enough livin’ in these hills without being damned
when we die.”
“Hush, Dave! Be keerful of what ye say.”
“I’m a-bein’ keerful. I’m castin’ up accounts this very day. I been
castin’ up accounts fer some time. I’m thinkin’ of what that new doctor
said to me. _That_ was preachin’ sich as I nuvver heern tell of afore
in these hills. I wish’t he’d come here an’ stay right along.”
She made no answer now, but pulled out the rude board table at the side
of the fire, and placed upon it a yellowed plate or so, holding a piece
of cold cornpone, a handful of parched corn.
“Eat,” said she. “Hit’s all we got. I borrowed some meal from the
Taggarts. They’ve got no more to lend.”
“Don’t ask nothin’ of no one, womern. I’ll not be beholden to ary man.
I tell ye, I’m castin’ up accounts.”
“What do ye mean—what ye talkin’ about, Dave?” She was half-frightened
now.
“I hardly know. I kain’t see very much light jest yit.”
“Hain’t ye goin’ to eat?” she said. “Hain’t ye goin’ to sleep? Hain’t
ye goin’ to lay down on the bed?”
“No!” said he. “No! Our children laid thar onct—them two. They died.
It was best they died. They’re our last ones.”
“What do ye mean, Dave?” she again demanded, wide-eyed. “What do ye
mean—ye hain’t a-goin’ to sleep here with me agin—nuvver?”
“No, I told ye. I said I was a-castin’ up accounts. Meliss’, I’ve got
to go away.”
“Ye hain’t a-goin’ to quit me?”
“I don’t like that word. I nuvver quit nobody nor nothin’ that I owed
a duty to. But I’ve got to go away. Hit hain’t right fer ye an’ me to
live together no more. Children—why, my God!”
“Dave! Air ye crazy? Hain’t I been a good and faithful womern to ye?
Tell me!”
He did not answer her.
“Tell me, Dave—have ye——”
“No! I’ve been as faithful as ye. We made our mistake when we was
married—we mustn’t make it no more an’ no wuss.”
“The new doctor!” She blazed out now with scorn, contempt, indignation,
all in her voice.
“Yes!” he replied suddenly. “The new doctor—ary doctor—ary man with
sense could have told us what he told me. I know now a heap of things I
nuvver knowed—what my pap an’ mammy nuvver knowed.”
“Ye’re a-goin’ to quit me like a coward!”
“I quit nobody like a coward. I hain’t a coward, Meliss’, an’ you know
it. I’m a-goin’ to quit ye because I’m a brave man. I’ve got to be as
brave as ary man ever was in the Cumberlands to do what I’ve got to do.
Do ye think it’s easy fer me? Don’t ye think I hear my own children
cryin’ still—mine as much as yours? An’ this was all I have to give
them. Thank God they died! They’d nuvver orter of been borned.”
His wife sank into a chair, her hands dropped limp in her lap. His own
hands were trembling as, after a long time, he turned toward her; his
voice trembled also.
“Look around us in these hills,” said he, his lips quivering.
“Think of what’s in them coves back fer fifty mile yan way, and
yan, and yan, up the Bull Skin, up the Redbird, up Hell-fer-Sartin
an’ Newfound an’ the Rattlesnake an’ the Buffalo—houses like
ours—whisky—killin’—cousins.”
“Cousins?” Her voice was hoarse. “Why not?”
“Whisky—killin’—cousins!” he repeated. “I don’t know which is the
wust, but I reckon the cousin part is. _We was cousins!_ Thar’s
_cousins_ back in our family, both sides, as far as we know. Those
children—thank God! Thar’ll be no more.”
Now indeed a long, long silence fell between them. The woman was pale
as death as she turned to him at last, to hear his self-accusing
monotone.
“God knows what I’m a-goin’ to do. But one thing shore, if I’ve sinned
I’ve got to pay. I reckon it’s a-goin’ to be a right big price I’ve
got to pay. Thar’s a wall around us—hit’s around these mountings—hit
shets us all out from all the world. Do ye reckon, Meliss’, if I was
able to make a way through—do ye reckon they’d say I’d paid?”
“Ye talk like a fool, man!” said she with sudden anger, “like a
fool! Ye let a limpy, glass-eyed doctor stir ye all up and fill yer
haid with fool idees. Ye say ye’re a-goin’ to quit me, that had our
babies—because of what? Yore duty’s to me—to me—me! Ye married me.
I want live children—hit’s a disgrace when a womern don’t have none.
Hit’s yore business to take care of me, an’ now ye say ye’re a-goin’ to
quit me. Ye’re a coward, that’s what ye air, the wustest coward ever
was in these mountings. I don’t want furrin ways myself—I don’t want
to go Outside—I don’t want ary of them new doctors comin’ in here,
fetched on from Outside. This is our country, an’ it’s good enough.
Ye talk about leavin’ me. Thar’s some other womern somewhars—that’s
what’s the matter with ye, Dave Joslin, an’ I know it!”
He rose now, gray, pallid, half-tottering as he stood under her tirade.
“That’s not true,” said he at last “I don’t reckon ye understand me,
er what I mean, er what I think. The only question is, what’s right.
We hain’t livin’ the way folks orter do to-day. The new doctor tolt
me what’s Outside. Why, womern, that’s the world—that’s life! More’n
that—a heap more’n that—that’s duty! If I stay here an’ make a little
corn an’ raise a couple of hogs a year, livin’ with ye an’ raisin’
a couple more of childern, I hain’t livin’ the way I’d orter. If we
wasn’t cousins—if I didn’t know now it’s a sin to live on this way—I
wouldn’t quit ye—I’d die first. I hain’t _a-goin’_ to quit ye now. As
long as I got a dollar in the world it’s yores. I’ll hep ye more by
goin’ out. An’ I’m a-goin’ out—I’m a-goin’ Outside.
“I’m sorry fer ye, Meliss’,” said he presently, as she sat stone-cold.
“I’m sorry fer all of the wimern like ye in these mountings, sorry fer
us all. God knows I don’t want to make it harder fer ye—only easier.
Hit’s just a question o’ what’s the right thing to do.”
There was a vast softness, a great pity in his voice as he spoke now.
He stood irresolute, and his eyes, in spite of himself, turned sideways
to where once had lain two small bundles at the foot of the unkempt bed.
“Ye coward!” she cast at him, bitter and intense. “Ye low-borned
coward! Ye’re a-goin’ to quit me, mother of yore dead childern. Well,
go on along. I won’t ax ye to stay. Git along.”
“My granny she’s a-goin’ to take keer o’ ye,” said David Joslin.
“She’ll be kind to ye, an’ ye’ll have no babies to bother over nuvver.
Don’t—don’t talk to me no more. I reckon I kain’t stand no more.”
He stepped to the mantel, took from it the old faded book that lay
there—no more and nothing else of all in the house that had been his.
Then he turned toward his own door.
She heard his slow footsteps stumbling through the sodden grass. There
closed behind him for the second time that evening a door opening upon
what he had once called home.
CHAPTER III
THE BLOOD COVENANT
DAVID JOSLIN turned from his own wastrel fire, his own decrepit gate,
as but now he had from his father’s, and he did not look back at what
he had left. Steadily his feet slushed forward, as he held his course
through the dripping rain, faced now up the valley of the stream near
which he lived. Here and there, on this side or that of the swollen
river, showed infrequent lights at the windows of homes—each a
hospitable home where he would be welcome at any time of the day or
night. But he did not turn to any one of these, homeless as he was
himself.
For a considerable distance he kept to the valley until finally he
turned into a narrow, deeply sheltered ravine which as he knew had no
occupant. It was a wild, uncultivated spot, the mouth of the gulch
known as Semmes’ Cove. At its foot trickled a stream of water leading
far back into the hills through a district where as yet home-building
man had not come. The tall trees still stood here unreaped—the giant
white oaks and the tremendous trees known as “old-time poplar,”
among which not even the slightest garnering had as yet been done by
timber-hunting man.
There were secrets of a certain sort up this gulch, as David Joslin
knew. Few men openly went into the mouth of this wild ravine, and there
was no definite path up the creek such as marked most of the others
thereabout. None the less Joslin in the darkness of the night turned
into it as one wholly familiar with the vicinity.
He was a woodsman, a wild man fit to conquer and prevail in any wild
land. He went now about the business he purposed as steadily as though
he were well accustomed to it. With not even the slight assistance of
an occasional star, he found the trunk of a giant poplar tree which
had fallen—perhaps he knew it from his many wanderings here. The bark
upon the trunk was dry, and with the aid of a broken branch he loosed
a long fold, sufficient for a roof when propped up on the trunk of the
tree itself. He felt within the rotted trunk and drew out an armful
of rotted but dry wood, which made him good floor enough for his bed,
keeping him above the dampness. A part of it also offered punk for
the tinder which he found within the breast of his own blouse. Here
also were the primitive tools of the frontiersman in this land—flint
and steel. And with flint and steel David Joslin now managed to build
himself a fire even in the dripping rain.
He cast himself down, not to sleep, but to ponder and to brood.
The wall of blackness shut him in all about, but before him passed
continually the panorama of his dreams.
The night wore through, and at length the gray dawn came. The wind was
rising now, high in the tops of the trees, and the air was colder since
the rain had ceased. Any but a hardened man who had slept thus would
have waked stiffened and shivering. Not so Joslin, who rebuilt his fire
and looked about him for something with which to stay a hunger natural
after twenty-four hours of abstinence. A few fallen nuts from the
trees, a frozen persimmon or so, made all the breakfast he could find.
In his cupped hand he drank from the little stream. In a few moments he
was at the débouchement of the creek trail leading up to his father’s
home. He halted here as he heard the sound of hoof-beats coming down
the stream bed.
A rider came into view making such speed as he could down the perilous
footing. He drew up his horse, startled at seeing a man here, but an
instant later smiled.
“That ye, Dave?” said he. “Ye had me skeered at fust.”
“What’s yore hurry? Whar ye goin’?”
“Hurry enough—I was a-comin’ atter ye,”
“What’s wrong?”
“Plenty’s wrong—yore daddy’s daid—right up thar.”
“What’s that?—What do ye mean?” demanded Joslin. “Daid—I left him
last night—he was well.”
“Huh! He’s daid now all right,” rejoined the rider, finding a piece of
tobacco, from which he bit a chew. “I was a-goin’ down atter ye. I seed
him a-hangin’ thar right by his neck on a tree this side the house. He
must of hung hisself, that’s all.”
“That’s a lie,” said Joslin. “My daddy kill hisself——”
“Come on an’ see then. If he hain’t daid by now, my name hain’t Chan
Bullock! He’s done finished what old Absalom started. I rid over to the
house to see how he was a-gittin’ along, an’ I come spang on him when I
come down offen the hill. He was still a-kickin’ then.”
David Joslin approached him, his hands hooked as though to drag him
from his horse. But an instant later he curbed his wrath, caught at
the stirrup strap of the rider’s horse, swung the horse’s head up the
stream, and urged it into speed, himself running alongside with great
strides which asked no odds.
He found full verification of all the messenger had told him. From the
forked branch of a tree, extending out beyond the steep side of the
bank, swung a grim bundle of loose clothing covering what but now had
been a strong man. A quick sob came into the throat of David Joslin
as he sprang to the bank. Even as he did so he heard the sound of
footsteps coming. The bent and broken figure of Granny Joslin came into
view.
“What’s wrong here? Who was that I heerd a-hollerin?—— My God
A’mighty, who’s a-hangin’ thar?—— My son—my son!”
She also was endeavoring to scramble up the bank.
“Was it ye a-hollerin’? Why didn’t ye cut him down, ye fool?” she
demanded of Bullock, who still sat on his horse.
“Hit hain’t lawful, Granny,” said he. “Ye mustn’t cut him down.”
“I’d cut him down if I was damned fer it,” cried the old dame. “Ye
coward, how long since ye seen this? When ye hollered? Was he livin’
then? Ye mought have saved his life. Git outen my way, boy,” she said
to her grandson, and an instant later she herself, old as she was, had
leaned far out along the branch and with a stroke of the knife she
always carried had cut loose the rope. There was a thudding, sliding
fall. The body of old Preacher Joslin rolled to the foot of the bank
among the sodden leaves.
Bullock dismounted and stood looking down at the limp figure. But David
pushed him aside.
“Leave him be,” said he, and so he slipped his arms around the body of
his father, and, lifting him, strode up along the little stream bed
to the home now left the more desolate and abandoned. The dead man’s
mother, dry-eyed, hobbled along behind. She showed where the body might
be laid.
“He hain’t daid yit, I most half believe,” said she, laying her hand on
his heart. “Lay him down here, boys, on his own bed. Thar kain’t no one
prove then he didn’t die in his own bed. The Gannts didn’t git him.”
If there was indeed a fluttering gasp or two at the lips after they had
placed the body of Preacher Joslin upon his own bed in his own house,
it was but the last that marked the passing. When not even this might
be suspected, Granny Joslin broke into a sort of exalted chant of her
own invention.
“I got a son!” she crooned in her shrill, high voice. “He’s strong an’
tall. He hain’t a-feared. He has the hand to kill. He’ll slay ‘em all.
He’ll strow the blood. He’ll make the fight fer me an’ him an’ all of
us!”
She chanted the words over and over again, the kindling of her dark
eyes a fearsome thing to see. Now and again she turned from the dead
man to the motionless figure of his son, who stood at his bedside.
“He’ll strow the blood,” she sang. “He’ll kill ‘em all!
“May God curse old Absalom Gannt an’ all his kin,” she said at last,
shaking a skinny hand toward heaven. “I pledge ye to it, Davy. Tell the
last one of them all’s gone, we’ll not fergit. Oh, Davy, it was fer
this that ye was borned!”
They stood thus, a grim enough group, when the sound of hoofs in the
creek bed intruded. Bullock stepped to the door and accosted the
newcomer.
“Howdy, Cal,” said he. “Light down an’ come in.”
The rider dismounted, casting his bridle rein across the top of a
picket.
“Andy home?” asked he.
“Well, he is an’ he hain’t,” said Bullock. “Come on in.”
“Well, I thought I’d come in an’ see him——”
“Come in. Ye can see all thar is of him,” and he led the way.
“Good God A’mighty! God damn _me_!” exclaimed the visitor, as he
caught sight of what lay on the bed in the room to which they led him.
“Granny, how come this? He’s daid!”
“Yes, he’s daid,” said Granny Joslin calmly. “He hung hisself down
below by the spring right now. Ye kin see whar the rope cut in his
neck. He was a-breathin’ when they put him thar. If that fool boy Chan
had had any sense at all he’d of cut him down an’ done saved him.”
“Well, now, Granny,” began the accused one. “Well, now——”
“Wait!” David Joslin raised his own hand. “Granny, don’t say that.
Hit’s the wish of the Lord. Blessed be the name of the Lord. I think
my father is better off. Sence he wished it, let’s call it well an’
good. I reckon it all got too much fer him.”
“Well, I was just a-comin’ down,” said the newcomer, Calvin Trasker,
“to ask ye all out fer a little frolic to-night over to Semmes’ Cove.
They’re a-goin’ to draw out this evening, an’ a lot of the neighbors’ll
be thar, like enough.”
“Old Absalom?” asked the tall young man, unemotionally.
“Yes,” he nodded, “him an’ his boys.”
“Not all of ‘em,” said the old dame suddenly. “My boy fixed a couple of
them people yesterday afore they got him. Lookahere, whar old Absalom
cut him”—her long, bony finger pointed out the spot. “Spite of ‘em he
wouldn’t of died. He killed _hisself_, an’ he died in his own bed. Thar
kain’t no Gannt on airth say they killed my boy.”
David Joslin quietly walked over to the foot of the bedstead and
unbuckled the belt of the heavy, worn revolver which he found hanging
there—the revolver without which his father rarely had traveled in his
circuit riding. This he fastened about his own waist, accepting the
burden of his father’s feud. He made no comment.
“Well, now, how come that diffikilty, Granny? Whar were it?” asked
Trasker. “War he hurt bad?”
“He got worse along towards mornin’,” said the dead man’s mother. “I
seen myself that he war cut deep in his innards, an’ couldn’t live long
noways. He lay all night a-beggin’ me to see that case he died the rest
of us would kerry on the quarl fer him. Now ye say Absalom an’ some of
his folks is a-goin’ to be over thar to-night?”
The visitor nodded.
“That’s a mighty good thing,” said Granny Joslin, nodding her own
approval. “Go on over, Davy. See what ye kin do. Will ye promise me
ye’ll go?”
“I promise ye, yes, Granny,” replied David Joslin slowly. “But I’ll
tell ye now, it hain’t to my likin’. I’m only goin’ fer one reason.”
Seeing that they all three stood looking at him in silence, he went on.
“I don’t believe in these fights and feuds no more. I don’t believe in
it even now that it’s come closeter than ever to me. I don’t believe
I’d orter go over thar an’ kill nobody else jest because they killed my
daddy. Hit hain’t right.”
They looked at him in cold silence. He raised his hand. “But because
I know ye’d all call me a coward if I didn’t go, I’m a-goin’ over
thar with you-all. I’m a-goin’ over thar before my own daddy is
real daid and buried. I’ll face Absalom Gannt an’ ary of his kin. I
reckon you-all will ride with me. Ye needn’t have no doubt that I’ll
flicker—I won’t—none of us nuvver did. But I’m a-tellin’ ye now I
don’t believe in it, an’ I don’t want to go. I pray on my knees I’ll
not have to kill no man, no matter what happens.”
He felt the strong clutch of a skinny hand at his arm. His grandmother
whirled him about and looked into his eyes with her own blazing orbs.
“My God, I more’n half believe ye’re a-skeered, Dave Joslin. God!—have
I fetched into the world ary one of my name that’s afeerd to kill a
rattlesnake like ary one of them Gannts? I wish to God I was a man my
own self—I’d show ye. I thought ye was a man, Dave. Hain’t ye—tell
me—hain’t ye, David Joslin?”
“No,” said Joslin, “I don’t think ... a coward! But I believe the law
orter have charge of all these things. If I kill ary man over thar
to-night, I’m a-goin’ to give myself up to the law.”
“Listen at the fool talk!” broke out his fierce grandma. “Listen at
him. Law?—law?—what’s the law got to do with a thing like this? I
reckon we-all know well enough what the law is.”
“I hope to live to see the real law come into these mountings yit,”
said David Joslin solemnly. “Only question is, what’s the law? I hope
I’ll live to see a different way of figgerin’ in these hills.”
“Then ye’ll wait till hell freezes,” said Granny Joslin, savagely.
“Hit’ll take more’n ye to reform the people in these mountings from
real men inter yaller cowards.”
“Come in an’ eat, men,” she added, and led the way to the side of the
table, where presently she brought a few half-empty dishes—the same
table which soon would hold the body of the dead man. “What we got
ye’re welcome to. I reckon somehow I kin run this farm alone an’ make a
livin’ here, an’ while I run it I’ll feed the friends of my fam’ly an’
I’ll shoot the enemies of my fam’ly that comes, free as if I’d been a
man. God knows I’d orter been, with the trouble I’ve had to carry. Set
up an’ eat.”
“Chan,” said she, after a time, her mouth full of dry cornpone, “ride
up the creek an’ git some of our kin to jine ye over thar in Semmes’
Cove this evenin’. They mought be too many fer ye.”
Chan Bullock nodded.
“I’ll go on with Dave up through the cut-off to the head of the
Buffalo, an’ jine Chan an’ the others up in thar,” said Calvin Trasker.
“Ye needn’t be a-skeered, Granny. Thar’s like enough to be some hell
a-poppin’ in thar afore we hold the funer’l here. Them Gannts may have
a funer’l too.”
“Come around tomorrow, them of ye that’s left alive,” said the old
woman calmly. “We’ll bury him out in the orchud, whar most of his folks
is. Come on now—lend me a hand an’ we’ll lift him up on the table. I
don’t reckon he’ll bleed no more now.”
CHAPTER IV
THE FROLIC AT SEMMES’ COVE
IT WAS late afternoon when David Joslin and Calvin Trasker, his
kinsman, started into the hills. They rode in silence as they followed
the winding little path which led up into the wilderness of the upper
ridges. Each was armed with a heavy revolver which swung under his
coat, and each carried in his side pockets abundance of additional
ammunition for his weapon. Neither spoke. Neither showed any agitation.
They pulled up at the imprint of horses’ hoofs on the trail coming up
from one of the little side ravines.
Trasker spoke. “Absalom, he don’t live so far off from here.”
“I wish’t he’d stay at home,” said David Joslin moodily.
“Look-a-here, Dave,” began the other testily. “What’s the matter with
ye? Is thar arything in this here talk I heerd about ye feelin’ maybe
ye was called to be a preacher, same as yore daddy?”
Joslin replied calmly. “I don’t know. I’m askin’ fer a leadin’. I
kain’t see that this here business is quite right no more.”
“Ye don’t belong in here then,” said Trasker, and half drew rein.
“I do belong in here, an’ nowhars else!” said David Joslin. “If I ever
was called—if I ever come to preach in these here hills, you-all’ll
feel I wasn’t no coward. I’m a-goin’ to prove it to you-all that I
hain’t.”
“Go ahead,” said Trasker succinctly, and again Joslin led the way up
the mountain slope.
They paused presently at the rendezvous where their kinsmen presently
would join them, granted Bullock had been successful in passing the
feudal torch. Trasker talked yet further.
“He was a great old sport, yore daddy,” said he. “I reckon he was shot
in half a dozen places in his time. Seemed like they couldn’t kill him,
nohow. An’ him an’ old Absalom had it fist an’ skull together more’n
once in their day.”
Joslin nodded. “That was afore he took up preachin’. Heathen—why, we
all been worse’n ary heathen in the world. An’ here’s ye an’ me worse’n
ary heathen right now, ridin’ out to squar what only the hand of God
kin squar.”
“Well,” rejoined Trasker, meditatively chewing his quid, “maybe with
four or five of us together we kin help the hand of God jest a leetle
bit. That’s the leadin’ I git, anyways, for this evenin’.”
“Well, here’s our fellers comin’,” he went on, turning in his saddle.
“Even a few is better’n none.”
They were joined now by three other riders, Chan Bullock and two
younger men, one scarce more than a boy, the beard not yet sprouted on
his face. They did not make even a salutation as they drew up alongside
the two horsemen who had tarried at the rendezvous.
They turned up the hillside, once more resuming the winding path along
the crooked divide which separated the two forks of the main stream
which bored deep into the Cumberlands thereabouts. They all knew well
enough the entry point for the head of Semmes’ Cove, and here in due
time they halted to hold counsel.
“Sever’l been here,” said David Joslin, pointing out the horse tracks
which led down into the thickets of the unbroken gulch before them.
Without any comment they all dismounted and advanced, leading their
horses, Joslin ahead. They walked in this way for perhaps a quarter of
an hour. Then Joslin, without a word, turned and tied his own horse to
a tree, the others following his example.
There had been an illicit stillhouse in this wild ravine how long none
might tell—in fact, many stillhouses had been there sporadically
and spasmodically conducted as the fancy of this man or that might
determine, for the region was wild and remote, and never visited by
any of the outside world. These visitors all knew well enough where
the present stillhouse was hidden—in a thicket of laurel just at the
edge of a rock escarpment which jutted out upon the farther side. They
followed on now steadily, alertly, until at length Joslin raised a hand.
Silently they pushed their way into the edge of the thicket. Sounds of
laughter, of song, greeted them. A faint, sickish odor rose above the
tops of the low laurel. The visitors, five in all in number—Joslin,
Calvin Trasker, Chan Bullock, and two other “cousins,” Nick Cummings
and Cole Sennem—all pulled up at a point whence they could view the
scene, whose main features they knew well enough without inspection.
There were a dozen men here and there, taking turns at the little
copper cups which stood upon the hewn face of a log. A couple of
barrels, a copper pipe between, made pretty much all the visible
external aspect of the still. The great bulb was hidden in one barrel,
the curled copper tube cooled in another. Here and there lay empty
sacks once carrying corn. A cup-peg or so driven into a tree trunk
showed the openness and confidence with which matters hereabout had
been conducted, and the spot showed every sign of frequent use.
One of the men, taking up one of the copper vessels from the low log
table, stooped at the pipe at the foot of one of the barrels, watching
the trickle of white liquid which came forth. He drank it clear and
strong as alcohol, undiluted. Like fire it went through all his veins.
“Whoopee!” he exclaimed, throwing up a hand. “I’m the ole blue hen’s
chicken! I kin outwrastle er outjump er outshoot ary man here er
anywhar’s else.”
“Ye wouldn’t say that if old Absalom war here,” laughed a nearby
occupant of a rude bench.
“No, nor if Old Man Joslin war, neither.”
“I would too! I hain’t a-skeered o’ nobody,” replied the warlike youth.
“I’ll show ary of ‘em.”
“_What’ll ye show us?_” demanded David Joslin. Silent as an Indian
he had left the fringe of cover, and stood now in the open, his eyes
steady, his arms folded, looking at the men before him. And now at his
side and back of him ranged his little body of clansmen.
Sudden silence fell upon all those thus surprised. They looked at him
in amazement.
“Whar’s old Absalom?” he demanded of a man whom he knew, who stood, the
half-finished cup of liquor still in his hand.
“Air ye lookin’ to start ary diffikilty?” replied his neighbor, also
with a question.
“That’s fer us to say,” said David Joslin. “My daddy’s daid. He got
hurt yesterday by old Absalom an’ his people. I come over here to-day
to see old Absalom an’ ary kin he happens to have along with him. Whar
is he?”
Silence for a long time held the group. It behooved all to be cautious.
“He’s been in here somewhar,” went on Joslin, “an’ he hain’t fur now.
Tell me, is he down at the dance house?”
“Well, ye mought go an’ see,” rejoined the first speaker, grinning. “Ye
know, Dave Joslin, I hain’t got no quarl with ye, nor has ary o’ my
people. Ye set right here now, boys,” he continued, sweeping out a long
arm toward the merrymakers, who still lingered about the liquor barrel.
“Thar’s more of them than thar is of ye,” he whispered hurriedly to
Joslin as he stepped up. “The house is full, an’ they’re dancin’. Three
or four gals from down on the Buffalo is in thar now. They’re havin’ a
right big frolic.”
Without a word Joslin turned and hurried down the path. He knew the
location of the building to which reference had been made—a long log
structure rudely floored with puncheons, sometimes employed locally as
a sort of adjunct of the still. The sounds of dancing, the music of
one or two reedy violins, the voice of a caller now and then, greeted
the party of avengers who now approached this curious building hidden
in the heart of the mountain wilderness. Whether or not all of the
occupants of the dance house were of Absalom Gannt’s party, neither
David Joslin nor any one else might tell. There might be a general
mingling here of friend and foe until some overt act should light again
the ancient fire, forever smouldering.
Joslin beckoned to his companions. “Git behind them rocks right over
thar, boys,” he whispered. “I’m a-goin’ up to the door.”
The young men with him went about their business with perfect calmness,
although the eye of each was alert and glittering. They took their
stations under the leadership of the man who they now regarded as the
chieftain of their clan, and watched him go to what seemed certain
death.
Joslin advanced steadily to the door, his thumbs in the waist band of
his trousers. With his left hand he knocked loudly on the jamb of the
door. He spoke to some one, apparently an acquaintance, who noticed him.
“Is Absalom Gannt here?” he demanded. “If he is, tell him to come out.
I’ll wait till he comes out fair.”
“Good God A’mighty, Davy,” said the other who stood within. “Air ye
atter trouble? This is jest a little frolic.”
“Tell him to come out,” repeated Joslin. “I want Absalom Gannt!” The
courage of this deed went into the sagas of the Cumberlands—the act of
a man who scorned certain death.
It must have been some friend of Absalom Gannt, some relative perhaps,
who heard this summons and saw the gray face of David Joslin staring
into the half-darkened interior. With a shout he himself sprang to the
door, gun in hand. Joslin leaped aside. As he did so he heard the roar
of a heavy revolver back of him. Chan Bullock, the long blue barrel
of his six-shooter resting on his arm at the top of the protecting
boulder, fired at the man who appeared in the door. The latter fell
forward and slouched over on his face, his head on his arms.
A half instant of silence, then came the roar of a pistol at the window
near where Joslin stood. The men at the boulders, in turn, began firing
generously at every crack and cranny of the house, regardless of who or
what might be within. The marksman at the window was deliberate. With
care he rested the barrel of his weapon against the window sash. At its
third report, Joslin heard back of him a heavy groan, but he did not
see Calvin Trasker roll over on his back, his doubled arm across his
face.
The sound of gunfire now was general on every side. None might say who
was harmed, who as yet was safe. As for Joslin, he had work to do.
Absalom Gannt was still inside the house.
He stepped forward again deliberately to the door, pushed aside the man
who stood there peering out, and broke his way into the crowd. Two or
three women, cowering, shrank into the farther corner of the room. Men
stood here and there, each with weapon in hand. The acrid taste of
gunpowder, which hung in the blue pall of smoke, was in the nostrils of
all.
“Absalom Gannt!” rose the high, clear voice of David Joslin, “I’ve come
fer ye. Come out here an’ meet me fair if ye hain’t a coward. Absalom
Gannt! Absalom Gannt——”
That was the last word the friends of David Joslin heard him speak,
and, as they told the story, it was apparent that the Joslin blood
“never flickered onct.”
What happened to David Joslin they did not know—he himself did not.
He was perhaps conscious of a heavy blow at the base of his head, then
came unconsciousness, oblivion. He fell upon the floor of the rude
revel house.
Firing ceased now. The occupants of the cabin rushed out. The defenders
of the line of boulders, three only in number now, broke and sprang up
the mountain side, pursued by a rain of bullets which touched none of
them.
The frolic at Semmes’ Cove had found its ending—not an unusual ending
for such scenes.
CHAPTER V
THE AWAKENING OF DAVID JOSLIN
IN THE old apple orchard of Preacher Joslin—whose gnarled trees had
been planted by some unknown hand unknown years ago—a long and narrow
rift showed in the rocky soil. The owner of these meager acres was now
come to his rest, here by the side of many others of his kin whose
graves, unmarked, lay here or there, no longer identified under the
broken branches of the trees.
A neighbor blacksmith had wrought sufficient nails to hold together a
rough box. In this he and Granny Joslin had placed the dead man. Word
passed up and down the little creek that the burying of Andrew Joslin
would be at noon that day; so one by one horses came splashing down
the creek—usually carrying a man with a woman back of him, the woman
sometimes carrying one child, sometimes two.
These brought fresh word. Calvin Trasker, killed in the frolic at
Semmes’ Cove, had already been buried. He was accounted well avenged.
It was almost sure he had killed his man before he had received his own
death wound. As for Chan Bullock and his two young cousins, they were
no less than heroes. Four of the Gannt family had been left accounted
for, whether by aim of the fallen or that of the three escaping
feudists none might say. The Joslins had none the worst of it. Had not
one of them—which, no one could tell—fired the shot which broke old
Absalom’s arm? This funeral party, practically a rallying of the Joslin
clan, was no time more of special mourning than of exultation. The talk
was not so much of the dead man, not so much of the dead man’s son
David, who was still missing, as it was of the victory attained over
the rival clan.
And so they buried Preacher Joslin, and thereafter, all having been
duly concluded, and a simple, unmarked stone having been set up at the
head of his grave, old Granny Joslin, robbed of her son and her son’s
son, asked them once more to eat of what she had, and so presently bade
them good-by.
“I’ll git along somehow, folks,” said she. “Don’t you-all worry none
about me. If Davy’s daid, why, he’s daid, an’ that’s all about it.
Atter a few days, you-all go over in thar an’ watch for buzzards an’
crows—if they hain’t buried him deep, we’ll find out whar he’s at.”
But after the funeral party had departed, plashing their way back up
the creek-bed road, Granny Joslin sat down to make her own accounting.
David—her boy Davy—the one who understood her—whom she understood
so well—where was he? Had they indeed killed him? Was he lying out
there in the mountains somewhere, his last resting place unknown to any
save his enemies?
“Curse the last of them—them cowardly Gannts!” Again she raised her
skinny hand in malediction. “May mildew fall on them an’ theirs. May
their blood fail to breed, an’ may they know sorrer an’ trouble all
their lives! I wish to God I was a man. Oh, God, bring me back my
man—my boy Davy!”
But the mountain side against which she looked, against which she
spoke, made no answer to her. She sat alone. A film came over her
fierce eye like that which crosses the eye of a dying hawk. Whether or
not a tear eventually might have fallen may not be said, but before
that time old Granny Joslin rose, grunting, and hobbled back into her
own desolate home. She lighted the fire. She set all things in order.
The castle of the Joslins had not yet been taken. But David came not
back that day, nor upon the third, nor yet upon the fourth day. By that
time she had given him up for dead.
Yet it was upon the morning of that fourth day that David Joslin
himself sat concealed, high upon the mountain side, and looked down
upon the broken home of Granny Joslin. He saw the smoke curling up from
the chimney, and knew it as the banner of defiance. He knew that the
old dame would live out her life to its end according to her creed.
His keen eye saw the new mound in the apple orchard—the broken clay
now dried in the sun of several days. He could guess the rest. For
himself, he was alive. He had been dead, but now he was born again.
At the end of the fight in Semmes’ Cove, there was a general scattering
and confusion. The Gannt party finally had taken care of their own
dead and wounded, and, passing on up the ravine toward the usual paths
of escape, had tarried at the stillhouse only long enough to refresh
themselves as was their need. For those of the attacking party left
behind they had small care. A man or two was down somewhere behind the
rocks. As for the man who had broken into the house—David Joslin—he
was dead. Had they not caught him neck and crop, and thrown him
headlong into the gully? Yes, one thing was sure, David Joslin was
dead; and he had been the leader of the attack. Therefore, the Gannts
accounted themselves as having won a coup also for their side of the
feud.
When Joslin awoke to the consciousness of bitter pain, he reached out
a hand in the darkness which enshrouded him. He felt damp earth. So,
then, he reasoned, he was dead and buried, and this was his grave! For
some time he made no attempt to breathe or to move. Yes, this was his
grave. He lay he knew not how long in the full realization that life
was done for him.
Then, as the cool of the night refreshed him, he felt about him, felt
the weeping of dew-damp leaves above him, and slowly reasoned that he
was not dead at all, and not in his grave, but that he had been flung
somewhere here into the bottom of the ravine.
Slowly he struggled to his knees. He staggered up the side of the slope
as best he might, more by chance than otherwise, taking that side which
lay nearest the dance house. He saw in the gloom the low boulders,
behind which his fighting men had lain. He stumbled across the dead
body of Calvin Trasker, left where he had fallen. There remained to
him sensibility enough to put the dead man’s hat across his face; but
he could do no more than that. He knew that if he were found here he
would be killed indeed. So, knowing that there was no longer need for
him or chance for him here, he staggered on down the ravine of Semmes’
Cove, until at length he could go no farther, and so fell once more
unconscious.
When again he awoke it was broad sunshine. How long he had lain he
could not tell. But now thirst assailed him, thirst which he might
quench in the trickle of water which lay below. The provender of the
woods, a few nuts, a pawpaw or so, seemed grateful to him now. He
staggered on, knowing that it would be no more than two or three miles
down the ravine until he came to the little camp he had made in the
rain, after he had left his own home on that unhappy day. And so at
length he found that bivouac and dropped into the bed of rotten wood
once more, and lay prostrate all that day and the next.
It was really upon the morning of the fourth day after the
encounter—although Joslin himself could not have said as to
that—that, strong enough now to walk, he staggered out of the
thicket-covered lower entrance of Semmes’ Cove into the little creek
bed, which made the path to his father’s home. He must look once more
at the house where he himself was born.
Was born, did he say? No, he had been born a second time! In these
long hours of misery and pain, David Joslin had taken accounting as
best he might with life and the philosophies thereof. In his fashion
of thought, he had gained the conviction that his “call” had come to
him. He was called for a different life. There was no doubt about it.
New duties lay before him—all of a new life—because he had been
born again! To him his salvation was not less than a miracle, and
he accepted it as such solemnly and reverently, feeling himself now
consecrated fully for some cause. What the form of that consecration
might be he himself did not clearly know as yet.
But there came to him, with this feeling, the solemn conviction that he
must leave this country. This opportunity seemed to him providential.
No, he would not even go to say farewell to his wife, nor to greet his
grandma, Granny Joslin, to give counsel to her. He, being dead, must
depart secretly forever from these hills until he might return to them
to do the thing given him to do.
Such, unnatural and hard as that might seem to others, was the ancient,
grim, uncompromising creed of David Joslin of the Cumberlands. Let the
dead bury its dead. Let the living live their own lives.
Weakly, slowly, he climbed along the mountain side above the creek bed,
to avoid any passerby, and so at length reached the point upon the
opposing hill whence he might look down upon the little home once owned
by the man who lay there now, under the drying yellow ridge in the
apple orchard planted by his sires.
How long David Joslin sat here, his chin in his hands, he himself might
not have told. He sat looking down, pondering, resolving.... Yes, he
was born again! What must he do?
At length he rose, staggeringly rose, seeking about for some broken
branch to aid him further in his journey. For now he purposed a long,
long journey out from these hills. He was going away from his own
people!
His hand fell against something hard in the side pocket of his
ragged coat. It was the old book he had borrowed of his father—the
well-thumbed volume of Calvin’s Institutes. His belt and revolver were
gone—he knew not where—but here was this ancient, iron book. He
recalled now, with the tenacious memory of the mountaineer, a passage
which he had read therein:
Truly, I have no refuge but in Him. Let no man flatter himself, for
of himself he is only a devil. For what have you of your own but sin?
Take for yourself sin, which is your own. Your righteousness belongs
to God. Nature is wounded, distressed and ruined. It needs a true
confession, not a false defense.
“A true confession—not a false defense!” All the honesty, all the
ignorance, all the hope of these mountains were in the mind of David
Joslin, as he repeated these vague words of the old mystic to himself.
He now felt himself a prophet.
And now, a prophet, he was going out into the world.
CHAPTER VI
THE WANDERING WOMEN
WHEN Joslin finally rose and set his face away from the sight of the
hearth fire he had known, with staff and scrip to start out into
the world, he followed along the winding height of land below the
summit leading towards Hell-fer-Sartin—the objective of his father’s
last circuit riding. Here he crossed the Bull Skin Valley, fording
the shallow stream, and made directly into the harder going of the
divide between that stream and the Redbird. Feeding himself as best
he might, he lay out yet another night in the hills; but by this time
the seasoned vigor of his own frame began to reassert itself. He grew
stronger in spite of the pain of his wound, in spite of his long
abstention from wholesome food. He evaded all sounds of life at the
little farms scattered here and there among the mountains. A rail fence
caused him to turn aside; the sight of a smoke drove him deeper back
into the hills.
It was perhaps ten o’clock of the second morning, when he found himself
on the river trail of a fork of the Kentucky River, that he paused
at the sound of a human voice. It seemed not to be approaching, but
stationary—a woman’s voice, now raised in some sort of old ballad
tune. It seemed to him he might go forward.
She sat on a pallet of leaves at the side of the road, a little above
its level, in a sort of natural cave or opening in the cliff face. A
shelf of limestone extended out perhaps twenty feet, and left under it
a sort of open-faced cavern. The roof was black with many smokes—it
always had been black with smoke since the memory of white men in that
region; for here, tradition told, had dwelt the last two Indians of the
Cumberlands, when the whites rallied and slew them both. This white
woman had taken up the ancient lair of men scarce more wild than she
herself seemed now.
She was an old-seeming woman, albeit perhaps once comely. Her dark
hair, not fully grayed, fell about a face once small-featured,
large-eyed. What charm she once had had was past or passing; yet
something of her philosophy of life remained, enabling her to sing at
this hour in the morning.
“Howdy, stranger,” she said, looking at him with a direct and easy
familiarity singular enough in the circumstances, for the mountain
women are shy and silent with men. “Whar ye bound?”
“Howdy,” said David Joslin. “I’m a-goin’ down the creek a ways.”
“If ye air, I wish ye’d see if my darter is along in the field below.
Tell her to come on back home. She’s got her little girl along with
her—ye’ll know ‘em if ye see ‘em.”
“Home?” said David Joslin rather vaguely, looking at the blackened roof
of the cavern. The woman laughed.
“All the home we got, my darter an’ me. We’ve lived here off an’ on
many a year. They call me Annie. They call her Min. Hit’s no difference
about the rest of the name.”
“I know ye hain’t born in these parts or ye’d know about us two,” she
continued. “This has been my home—all I’ve ever had in my life—I
kain’t say how many years. I move up an’ down. Sometimes I’m up on Big
Creek—sometimes on the Kaintucky. I follow the rafts. I’ve even been
Outside. Min, she nuvver has. Some of my other girls has, maybe.”
“Yore other girls?” began Joslin.
“I’ve had seven children—four girls,” said she quietly, unemotionally.
“I don’t know yore fam’ly,” said David Joslin, hesitating still.
“I hain’t got no fam’ly, I told ye, an’ I don’t come o’ no fam’ly. Us
two lives here together—we’re the wanderin’ wimmern—that’s what they
call us in this country. Don’t ye know about us?
“Well, now”—and she turned her once bold eyes upon him with renewed
defiance, as he did not reply—“I told ye I’d had seven children. Ye
want to know who’s the father of Min? I kain’t tell ye rightly. She
couldn’t tell ye rightly who’s the father of her girl she’s got along
with her now. I’ve had seven children. Who’s their fathers?—I don’t
know. What’s more, I don’t keer. What’s the difference? Who air we,
back in the hills? What chancet have we got?”
Joslin stood leaning on his staff, pale, hollow-eyed, gaunt. In his
eyes was a vast pity, a terrible understanding.
“Kin I wait here for a minute or so?” said he. “I’m right tired.”
“Ye’ve been hurt,” said she, pointing to his bandaged head, for which
he had made such care as he might. “Well, I don’t ask ye no questions.
I’ve seen plenty of men hurt, in the raftin’ times.”
“We’re stoppin’ here now,” she went on explaining. “Because, mought
come a tide any time, an’ then the rafts’ll come. They tie up yander at
the big tree thar—the men come acrosst. Well, here’s home for Min an’
me. She’s young. I’m gittin’ pretty old. Few cares fer such as me.”
Then she went on. “That’s our life, stranger. Ye kin guess the rest.
We’re the wanderin’ wimmern. There’s no hope fer us. We never had no
chancet.”
“Kin ye read?” asked David Joslin quietly. “Kin ye write? Kin yore
darter?”
She shook her head.
“I kin read jest a little bit,” said he himself slowly. “I kin write
jest a little bit. Ye say ye’ve had no chancet. That’s true. What
chancet have ary of us here? Whar can we learn anything? I’m a-goin’
Outside. I’m a-goin’ on a journey.”
“Set down an’ eat,” said she, with the unfailing hospitality of the
mountains. “We hain’t got much. I kin parch ye some corn, maybe. Min’s
down below trying to find some hickernuts an’ some corn. Folks don’t
mind our foragin’ around. Why, even sometimes I’ve slept in a cabin now
an’ then. They don’t mind if we sleep in the corn cribs sometimes when
the weather’s cold. The husks is right warm—warmer’n leaves, I kin
tell ye that.”
Joslin looked about him. A ragged gunny sack or so, a quilt or two,
were heaped into one corner over a pile of leaves—there was no other
sign of couch. In another corner of the cavern a blackened spot showed
where they built their fire. With flint and steel the old woman now
began her fire anew. There was a broken bit of iron, once a skillet. In
this she managed to parch some grains of corn for the traveler.
“Eat, stranger,” said she. “Hit’s from Annie, the wanderin’ womern,
that never had a chancet.”
He ate, and drank from a broken gourd of water which she gave to
him. For a time he sat looking across the pageant of the hills, still
radiant in their autumn finery.
At length he placed a hand in his pocket. “Take this,” said he. “I’ve
got just thirty-five cents. I’ll keep the dime, fer I mought need it. I
know the people in the mountings don’t take pay fer what they give to
eat, but won’t ye please take this?”
“What do ye mean, man?” said she looking at him curiously, but refusing
the money which he offered. “Ye seem like a quare feller to me. Air ye
outen yore haid?”
“Maybe I got some good sense knocked into my haid, I don’t know. All I
know is I’m a-goin’ Outside.”
“Outside?” The voice of the old woman was low. “I’ve got some
girls—Outside, somewhar. Ye mustn’t say they wasn’t my children, for
they was. They nuvver only had no chancet.”
“I know that,” said David Joslin. “That’s why I’m a-goin’ out. I’m
a-goin’ to try some time, somehow, to make a school, er a church, er
something, in these hills. We’ve got to learn how to read an’ write.
I’ve got a callin’ that that’s what we’d orter do. I never seen ye
before—maybe I never will again—but listen now. Some time, if I ever
build a school, I’m a-goin’ to build another one right in here.” His
eyes were streaming tears.
“I’ll tell ye the place,” said she eagerly. “Down below, about hafe a
mile, thar’s a place whar two stones come together—great big ones.
Thar’s a level floor under that, wider’n the floor of this here place,
an’ it’s covered in from the rain. Thar’s leaves thar—ye could fetch
in pine needles a-plenty if ye wanted to, fer thar’s pine about. Rain
or shine ye could hold school down thar. Hit would be sich a purty
place.”
“Good luck, stranger,” said she. “Ye may be crazy—I reckon ye air—but
God knows thar orter be more crazy people like that in these hills.”
Her guest turned and followed on down the winding stream in the muddy
pathway. A quarter or a half-mile below, he paused and looked across
the vine-covered remnant of what once had been a rail fence. He had
heard a rustling in the corn, and saw now the figure of a young woman
who stood looking at him; at her side, clinging to her tattered skirt,
a young child, perhaps four or five years old. This child had in her
little apron a store of nuts, gathered in the wood beyond. Her mother
carried half an armful of ears of corn.
“Howdy,” called David Joslin across the fence, in customary salutation
of the hills.
“Howdy,” she replied, but still stood motionless.
“Won’t ye come up a little closeter?” he resumed. “Yore mammy up
yander——”
The young woman slowly advanced, the child clinging still to her
skirt. She was a wild-looking creature, but quite comely, with a sort
of Indian cast to her features, her skin dark, whether with sun or with
other blood none might tell. Her eyes were black as night, and her
figure lean and slender, not quite so angular as that of the average
mountain woman. Young enough she was, and goodly enough she might have
been if ever she “had had her chance.”
The child at her skirt, an elfin youngster, had much of her mother’s
darkness of hair and eyes, her mother’s wide mouth of white, even
teeth, a thing unusual thereabouts. She now stood staring straight at
the stranger, motionless and silent.
“Ye’re Min, I reckon,” began David Joslin. “Yore mammy—she told me
to find ye an’ tell ye to go on home now, that it’s nearly time fer
breakfast.”
“Who air ye, stranger?” asked the young woman. “Which way ye bound?”
“My name is David Joslin,” he replied. “I live, or useter live, over on
the Bull Skin, near the mouth of Coal Creek.”
“What’s yore business? Air ye lookin’ fer logs?”
“No, I hain’t. I’m a-goin’ Outside.”
She stood staring at him, uncertain, silent, awkward. David Joslin
returned her gaze with his own frank, gray eyes. “Ye’ve lived jest the
way ye could,” said he. “Ye needn’t tell me nothin’. I know about the
raftsmen. I’ve been a raftsman myself. I’ve been Outside many times. I
run down the other fork, don’t ye see? I’m yore own sort of people. I
hain’t no better’n ye, God knows.
“I’ve got to be goin’ now,” he added. “I hope to see ye agin some time
in here. I’m jest a-goin’ Outside fer a little while, ontel I can learn
to read an’ write.”
“I reckon ye don’t know all about us—my mammy and me,” she began,
a slow flush now upon her face. This was a different sort of man—a
preacher, perhaps?
“Oh, yes, I do. I know all I need to know or want to know. I know ye
nuvver had no chancet.”
“I’ll say good-by now,” he added, extending a hand, which wandered to
the tangled crown of the little girl.
And so he turned and left her standing there, the child at her side,
the wild forage of the mountains to be their sustenance no one might
say yet how long. When the raftsmen came——
CHAPTER VII
THE FABRIC OF A VISION
THE mountaineer’s keen eye noted a change in the river along which his
pathway led. There had been rain back in the hills, and now what the
mountaineers call a “tide” was coming down, discoloring the stream.
Passing more than one abandoned raft, its logs submerged in the sand,
at length he stopped, having spied a pair of great logs of the yellow
poplar, such as the raftsmen use as floaters for the hardwood logs they
make up into their rafts. Himself an experienced river man, he saw now
the means of hastening his progress.
With aid of a hardwood lever, he managed to get both his logs afloat
in the deep pool at whose edge they lay. Waist deep he waded, binding
his logs together with a length of grapevine, which he tore from a
nearby tree. He found here and there some bits of boards, flotsam and
jetsam of the stream, and on these, spread crosswise, he laid bits of
brush, making a little mound midships of his craft. When presently he
had found a twelve-foot pole for guiding oar, he had done his work in
building himself a boat. He stepped aboard it with the confidence
of the river man. He knew the stream would carry him three, four or
five miles an hour, sometimes six miles, in its more rapid reaches. He
advanced, bend after bend, through a beautiful panorama of flame-decked
river banks now gilded by the failing sun. He heard sometimes the bells
of wandering cattle, now and again the lowing of a cow, the neighing of
a horse; and saw by the river banks many a home of a mountaineer who
had settled here none might say when. But the eyes of David Joslin were
not for these things.
It was sunset when the hurrying flood of the river brought him to the
mouth of that other tributary in whose valley he himself had dwelt
all these years. Here was the confluence of the two main forks of the
Kentucky. He knew every house of the little village at the forks, every
feature of the hills, which rose about the village on either side.
He swung straight past, on the bosom of the rising and augmented river,
his craft swimming steadily enough under his accustomed guidance. He
scarce saw the little houses, their smoke rising for the evening meal.
It was something more which came to his gaze as he traveled here.
He saw, or thought he saw—it might have been but the ragged heads of
thunder clouds beyond the rim of the hills—the roofs and stacks of
buildings—not one, but many buildings. They sat there on the hill
that rose above the town—yes, he was sure of it. There were many of
them—there was a city of them! Yonder on the hill there stood again
visualized the thing which he had dreamed! It was but a vision, caught
for an instant as the yellow flood of the river swept him on, but it
was enough for David Joslin. A strange confidence came to him. He felt
all the zeal of the old covenanters, the assurance that God was with
him, and that his “calling” now was clear.
But the Kentucky River, coming into full tide, mocked at a man who
thought of anything else but things at hand. Joslin knew what was on
ahead a few miles—the great Narrows of the Kentucky, fatal to many a
raft and many a raftsman. Here, at the foot of a long reach of still
water, lay a great rock dam, where the hillsides came close together.
The river, narrowed and compressed, was flung furiously out over the
rock ledge, to drop a certain distance, and then to curl up and back
in a high white wave extending entirely across the stream—what the
raftsmen always called the “king breaker” of the Narrows.
There was a sort of pathway along the sides of the Narrows, by which
one could come below the big swell, but Joslin, whether moody and
distrait, whether in indifference, or whether resolved to take his
chances and test his fate, made no attempt to land his frail craft. He
headed straight for the great stretch of slack water, which lay above
the rolling crest of the Narrows.
Always he had been chosen steersman for his raft in the river work he
knew, and he knew this spot well enough—the fatalities which attended
it—but he did not hesitate, and with his long sweep straightened his
craft for what he knew would be the great plunge. He took it fair,
crouching forward, his knees bent, his eyes ahead, just as he had
steered more than one raft through in earlier times, and caught the
full blow of the great wave, as he plunged from the darkness into the
white of the stream, now under the blanket of the twilight in the deep
defile.
He was flung entirely free of his two logs, as they were rent asunder
by the force of the swell. He went down into the white—how deep he
could not tell—perhaps halfway down to the bottom of the great pool
which lay below the Narrows. He emerged, dazed, but his arm found no
supporting logs—the two had been flung far apart, and by this time
were rolling down the middle course of the white water. With what
strength remained to him, he struck out for the right-hand shore, and
had strength enough to fling up a hand and ease himself of the current
along the rock ledge.
For a time he swung, breathing hard, then drew himself up and out,
and lay flat upon the rocks. It was almost night, and it was cold. He
was chilled and weak. He had traveled long and far without rest, and
without sufficient food. But the rugged rearing he had had stood him
once more in stead. He managed once more, by means of his priceless
flint and steel, to build him a little fire, though how he lived
through the night he scarce could say.
He knew that it was thirty miles down to the first settlement below,
and that there were few houses between. He must walk. Half barefooted,
penniless, hungered, wearied and weak, he staggered on as though a man
in a trance. At least he was able to make his painful way all those
weary miles. It was again evening, and late, when at length he saw the
red lights of the little mill town of Windsor, where more than once
before then he had pulled up with others of the wild raftsmen, among
whom he had spent his youth.
He was at the edge of the great Outside. This was Ultima Thule for
the hardwood rafts. And all of Thule, all of the great, unknown,
mysterious world lay on beyond. It was a wild figure that this gaunt
and haggard young man presented as, hesitant, he stood gazing out at
the habitations in which, near at hand to which, beyond which, must lie
the answers to the questions of his soul. He saw not the town where the
rafts landed. In his mind still lived the vision of yon other city on
the hill.
CHAPTER VIII
MARCIA HADDON, AND THE MERRY WIFE OF WINDSOR
THE single hotel of Windsor was a raw and rambling structure, for
the most part frequented by raftsmen and mill hands. Joslin knew
the proprietor, commonly known as Old Man Bent. That worthy stood
quizzically regarding the young man, as the latter accosted him, and
explained his almost penniless plight.
“Ye’re plumb wore out, an’ I can see it,” said he. “Go in an’ go to
bed, atter ye’ve had a squar’ meal, an’ don’t say nothin’ about pay
ontel times is better fer ye. Hit’s many a dollar ye’ve paid to me,
raftin’ times.”
Without further word, Joslin stepped into the dining room, and ate his
first real meal for more than a week—ate ravenously, like any animal;
and all that night he slept in a stupor of exhaustion.
When morning came once more he found his host. “I’ve got to git work,”
said he. “I kain’t live here withouten I go to work right away. Ye know
that.”
Old Man Bent looked at him with pursed lips. “I’ll tell ye what I’d do.
Ye go down to Jones’ brick yard an’ see if he’ll give ye something to
do fer a little while, ontel ye kin turn yoreself somehow.”
The Windsor brick yard was run by a man by the name of Jones, who
himself was not above driving a canny bargain, as he noted the stalwart
figure of this applicant.
“I could put ye to work carryin’ the molds from the mixer out to the
dryin’ yard,” said he. “Sixty cents a day ain’t much, but I kin git
plenty of men at that. They mostly work barefoot, anyways.” He glanced
down at Joslin’s shoeless feet, worn with the hard going.
So this was David Joslin’s first encounter with the great outside
world—for so even this village might be termed. Without murmur he
went to work—twelve hours a day, with a back-breaking load each trip,
carrying the wet clay of the molded bricks. The reflex of the wound
in his head gave him a continuous headache. He still was weak. But he
worked that day and the next. Then once more he went to his landlord.
“I kain’t nohow make it even,” said he. “I don’t feel right payin’
ye only fifteen cents a day, when I know ye charge everybody else a
dollar. I been eating only two meals here now, trying to make it easier
for ye.”
Old Man Bent understood the stern quality of the mountain character
well enough, and accepted, at its face value, the rugged independence
of the man before him.
“I’ll tell ye what I’d do if I was in yore place, Dave,” said he. “I’d
go over to the Widow Dunham’s place. She ain’t got no man there now to
hep her aroun’, an’ her regular price for board is only three-fifty a
week. Maybe ye could manage to git a place to sleep an’ three squar’
meals a day.”
After his fashion, silent, Joslin nodded, and forthwith went over to
the boarding house of the Widow Dunham, a few streets distant from the
hotel. He placed before that dame a fair statement of his own case,
explaining that sixty cents a day was all he was earning, that he was
very, very hungry, but that he could perhaps do with two meals a day.
The widow smilingly estimated the tall young man before her, reviving a
somewhat ancient dimple as she did so.
“Men is mostly troublesome,” said she. “I’ve married two of ‘em in my
time. The first one was kilt out in the hills, and the second one was
so triflin’ he went out into the Blue Grass, an’ I never did hear from
him no more. I orter have some sort of man around the place to fetch in
the water an’ git me some wood now an’ then. Ye come in and take keer
of them chores like, an’ pay me fifty cents a day, an’ we’ll call it
even.
“Ye’d orter have a pair of shoes, by right,” added she, “an’ maybe a
coat. Sometimes I have quality come here to my place—I’m expectin’
some any time now from outside. Mr. James B. Haddon of New York, him
and his wife is comin’ in, he writ me. Natural, if I have folks like
them around ye’d orter have a pair of shoes an’ a good coat, anyways of
nights.”
She stepped back into her own well-ordered domicile, and presently
emerged with a pair of shoes, not much worn. To these she added a coat,
which, beyond question, never had seen fabrication in this part of the
world.
“Here’s something that Mr. Haddon lef’ here, last time he was in. He
goes back into the hills, or leastways he intended to if he ever got
started to it, because he’s the Company man. He threw them things away,
so I reckon ye’ll be welcome to ‘em.”
Joslin took these articles and looked them over. To put on another
man’s clothing was to him the hardest trial of all his life. Proud as
the proudest of aristocrats, it cut him to the core to use these things
thus offered. Concluding that it was his duty, he accepted it with the
other punishments which life was offering him.
“Thank ye, ma’am,” said he. “They’ll come right handy, I’m sure.” He
did not smile as he spoke.
As for the Widow Dunham, she herself did smile, as he went out the
gate. “Hit’ll be right good to have a man around the house onct more,”
said she to herself.
This was of a morning. As dusk fell, Joslin appeared once more at the
door of his new home. He was not left long idle.
“I’ll tell ye, Mister,” said the widow, “I ain’t axin no questions
about how ye come here—I’m mountain myself, an’ I kin keep my mouth
shet. If ye’ll fetch me some worter from the well yander, an’ go down
to the river an’ git me some slabs fer the fire, an’ saw ‘em up, I’ll
be obleeged to ye. Then ye’ll have yore supper. How ye beginnin’ to
feel now?” She turned her glance to the wound in the back of Joslin’s
head.
He made no answer, but accepted the pail which she handed him, and
presently brought in the water. He never in his life had taken orders
from a man, far less from a woman, and no duties could have been harder
for him than these menial ones of the household.
About the second portion of his errand, Joslin went to the slab pile,
which lay above the saw mill near the boat landing, which itself was
about a half a mile above the last of the locks of the Kentucky River.
As he rose, having gathered his armful of bits of sound pieces for
firewood, he heard the chug of a power boat, so unusual a thing in
that part of the world that for a time he stood motionless, looking at
the craft as it approached. It was a river skiff, driven by an ouboard
motor, the latter operated by a stranger, perhaps a hand from some
garage in a downstream town.
The other occupants of the craft might at a glance be seen to be
“furrin,” as the local phrase would go. A stout, middle-aged man,
florid of face, exceedingly well clad, immaculate as to collar, cuffs
and shirt bosom, sat in the bow, looking anxiously ahead. Midships
was a yet more extraordinary figure for that locality—a young woman,
perhaps twenty-four or twenty-five years of age, nicely turned out in
tailor-made traveling suit, and wearing gloves, apparel unheard of for
a woman in the mountains. Of extremely beautiful face was she, with
large, somber gray eyes, defined strongly by the dark brows above them,
and a mouth of exceeding sweetness, which softened the grave repose of
her features. Withal, a figure of striking comeliness and grace for any
surroundings, she was a miracle, an apparition, here in this rude hill
town. Joslin had never seen her like nor dreamed it She was a creature
of another world.
It bid fair to be a clumsy landing on the part of the steersman, who
seemed none too well accustomed to his task. “Damn it! Look out!”
irritably called the man in the bow. “You’ll have us over yet. Lend a
hand there, can’t you?”
His last remark was addressed to Joslin, who without noting the
imperative nature of the words, at once dropped his armful of slabs,
and hurried to the edge of the wharf, steadying the bow of the boat as
it came in. He made fast the painter at a projecting bit of the wharf
floor, and went so far as to steady the stranger by the arm, as he
clumsily stepped out from the boat. The latter himself gave a hand to
the other passenger.
“Well, here we are, Marcia,” said he; “end of the world, anyway as far
as I’ve been myself before. So we’re even at that, anyhow.”
“Well, stranger,” said he, turning once more to Joslin, “who are you?”
Joslin knew that he was meeting none other than the “quality folks,”
Mr. and Mrs. Haddon of New York—the man whose coat and shoes he was
at that time wearing. But with his genius at reticence, he made no
comment..
“I jest come down from the Widow Dunham’s to git a little firewood,”
said he. “Kin I hep ye up with any of yore things, ma’am?”
The strangely beautiful young woman stood looking at him gravely and
unsmilingly, yet kindly. Instinctively, he recognized the soul of a
real gentlewoman.
“Thank you,” said she to him now. “There are some things there”—she
hesitated, as she turned toward the boat.
“That’s all right, ma’am. I’ll fetch up a bunch of ‘em when I come.”
So he turned to these additional duties, so foreign to his life and
taste; but suddenly it seemed to him that just in return for that
gaze of hers, not critical, not appraising him as some wild creature,
not twitting him or degrading him, he would be willing to do almost
anything in the world.
The newcomers were welcomed most effusively by the Widow Dunham
herself, who escorted them into the best room of the house, and dusted
off all the chairs with her apron, talking meanwhile volubly, and
assuring them of her great delight at seeing them.
“Ye’ll like it here, Ma’am, onct ye git used to it. I know yore husband
right well—he was here last year. Air ye going back into the hills
with him?”
“I think we are not quite sure about that yet,” replied Mrs. Haddon.
“It’s very pleasant here, and I’m very tired. Do you suppose, Jim,”
said she, turning to her husband, “we could rest here for a while? It’s
very beautiful here, and I feel I’m going to be comfortable.”
“That’s how we try to make everybody feel,” said the Widow Dunham.
As she spoke to the woman, her eyes were upon the man. She was what
was sometimes termed by her neighbors a marrying woman, and all men,
married or single, she estimated with a keen eye and one experienced.
Haddon laughed a gusty laugh. “We’re fifty miles short of the real
Cumberlands here, Marcia. Our property runs from thirty to fifty or
even sixty miles back in. To tell the truth, I haven’t seen any of our
lands, although we’ve got more than a million invested in here.”
“There’s a power of land been bought—timber an’ coal rights—for the
last twenty year,” assented the Widow Dunham. “Now they do tell me that
they’re a-findin’ oil on some of that land up in yander. No tellin’
what’ll happen. There’s even talk maybe there’ll be a railroad up
Hell-fer-Sartin one of these days afore long.”
“Who told you about these things?” inquired the newcomer with a certain
asperity. “Don’t let it get out—don’t talk about anything. By the way,
I’ve got to get some sort of guide—some man who knows that country,
and will take me in. Know of anybody?”
“Why, I don’t know, Mr. Haddon,” replied the widow ruminatingly, “who
ye could git to take ye in. There’s a young man I got around the
house—he just come out.”
“You don’t mean the chap that was down at the boat-landing, do you?
He’s out in the yard now.”
The Widow Dunham nodded contemplatively. “Yes. His name’s David Joslin.
Folks here knows the Joslins. He’s a mounting man—borned an’ bred up
in there, fifty mile or so. He’s one of the best raft steersmen on this
river—been right wild in his time, but he ain’t a-skeered of nothin’.
That’s the name he’s got in these mountings. Maybe ye’d better ax him.
He’s a-workin’ down to the brick yard now, an’ tell I give him yore
old coat an’ shoes he didn’t have a stitch of clothes to his name, so
to speak. He orter be willin’ to go to hell for a dollar a day, an’ I
reckon he would.”
“Well, I guess it’ll be a hell of a trip up in there,” said Haddon in
reply. “What do you think, Marcia?”
But Marcia Haddon neither then nor at any later time, while partaking
of the rude fare of the place, made any comment or expressed any
discontent.
When they had finished their evening meal, Haddon led his wife out to
the scanty gallery of the Widow Dunham’s home, which, fenced off only
by a broken paling against the street, looked out toward the western
prospect of the hills. It was starlight now; the last glow of the
sinking sun had disappeared. Here and there the slow sounds of the
village life, now about to adjust itself to sleep, came to their ears.
The fragrance of Haddon’s fine cigar hung heavy in the air. They sat in
silence. Haddon himself spoke more often to others than to his wife,
so it would appear, and as for her, she was reticent by instinct. Her
hands folded in her lap, she sat without comment, looking out toward
the shadowy outline of the mountains which crowded down to the river.
At length Haddon rose and stepped back into the house, where he found
the Widow Dunham standing in the hall in converse with the tall young
mountaineer.
“Now, now, Amy,” said he, advancing boldly, and chucking the comely
dame under the chin, “no visiting with anybody else but me, you
understand—you haven’t forgotten your old friend, have you?”
Joslin stepped back, somewhat astounded at this familiarity on the part
of the stranger, but the latter only laughed in his face.
“Come along, young man,” said he. “Come out on the porch. I want to
talk to you for a while.”
Joslin silently followed him out, and stood leaning against the rail of
the gallery, as Haddon seated himself and began to explain what he had
in his mind.
“See here, young man,” said he. “They tell me you’re from back in these
mountains.”
“I was born thar,” said Joslin quietly.
“How’d you happen to come out here?” demanded the newcomer.
“I don’t reckon it’s ary man’s business but my own,” replied Joslin
calmly.
“Well, you’re going back in, aren’t you, after a while?”
“I hadn’t planned ter,” said the young man. “I come out because I
wanted ter. I’m a-goin’ on Outside because I think I’d orter. I’ve got
to work. What I want is a chancet.”
“Well, I’ve got a chance for you.”
“How do ye mean, stranger?”
“Near as I can tell, you’re the very man I’m looking for. I’m the
manager and vice-president of the land company that’s been buying
stuff up in here for the last twenty years. We’ve got big holdings up
in there—on the Laurel and Newfound, and the Rattlesnake and Buffalo,
and Big Creek and Hell-fer-Sartan—we’ve got timber or coal or both
located all through there. Now, listen—I’m in here now because there’s
talk of oil being found in there. Do you know anything about that?”
“They said they found some along some of the creeks not fur from whar I
lived at.”
“Have you ever heard anything about the railroad?”
“Yes, I was huntin’ on Hell-fer-Sartin not more’n two months ago, an’
I seen the stakes. There hain’t no other way they kin git through but
only jest that one.”
“What is there in the way of moonshining going on in there? Any danger
for an outsider to go in there?”
“I don’t know nothin’ at all about that,” said David Joslin. “If I did
I wouldn’t tell ye.”
Haddon sat frowning in silence for quite a while. “You’re a funny lot,
you mountain people,” said he. “It’s hard to do business with you.”
“Some ways it mought be hard with me,” replied Joslin.
“Well, don’t you need the money that I could pay you?”
“There’s nobody in the world needs money more’n I do. But I tolt ye I
was headed the other way.”
“Won’t you go back in if I pay you the right wages?”
“No, I’m headed the other way.”
“Well, now, listen,” said Haddon irritably. “I need some native that
knows those damned people. They tell me there’s no such thing as roads,
and you have to ride horseback or muleback wherever you want to go.”
“That’s so,” replied the mountain man. “That’s the onliest way. There
hain’t no sich thing as towns. Ye’d have to stop at the cabins. Ary
man’s welcome in there if they think he’s all right, an’ hain’t
a-lookin’ fer nothin’ er nobody.”
“Oh, ho!” said Haddon, nodding understandingly. “Some trouble in there,
eh? Well, I suppose you’ve seen your share of it.” He grinned, as he
looked at Joslin’s head, where he had already noted the wound still
unhealed.
“We don’t say nothin’ about sich matters in these hills, stranger,”
said Joslin quietly. “I’m a-tellin’ ye if I went in thar with ye, ye’d
be all right. But I hain’t a-goin’. Ye kain’t noways hire me.”
“You’re pretty danged independent,” rejoined Haddon testily. “The woman
here just told me that you’re wearing my coat and my shoes right now.
You must be hard up against it. Probably you were run out of these
hills, and that’s why you want to get outside. And now I offer you
fair pay—good pay, in fact—five dollars a day, or ten—just to go
in and show me the timber and coal in that country, which you don’t
own but we own—and you say you won’t go. Is that the way you treat a
stranger?”
“Hit mought be the way to treat some strangers. As fer yore shoes
an’ coat, ye needn’t say I’m a-wearin’ ‘em no longer.” And so,
deliberately, Joslin removed both the shoes and the coat, and stood
coatless and barefooted, leaning against the gallery rail. He felt with
a certain mortification the straight gaze of the young woman who had
sat listening quietly. She spoke now.
“Mr. Joslin,” said she in the low and even tones usual for her speaking
voice, “I think you need those things. I quite understand how you feel
about wearing them, but you will oblige me very much by keeping them
until you are able to earn something better.”
David Joslin, the shame, humiliation and hot anger of his heart
struggling for mastery, turned to her, for the moment unable to speak.
Then, silently as he had removed the offending articles, he replaced
them.
“I thank ye, Ma’am,” said he. “I reckon ye know better’n I do what I’d
orter do.”
“Well, sir,” said she, turning toward him in the twilight a face that
to him had the charm of an angel’s, “my husband wants you to go back in
there with him. Why is it impossible?”
“Hit’s impossible, Ma’am, because when I make up my mind to a thing
it’s impossible to change it.”
She sat looking at him curiously. Never in all her life had she seen a
personality more powerful than that of this half-wild heathen who stood
before her. The feel of the iron of his soul came upon her with strange
effect.
“I’ll not ask you why you’re going outside,” said she, after a moment.
“Jest because ye don’t ax me, I’ll tell ye,” said Joslin suddenly. “I’m
a-goin’ outside to git a education.”
“An education? There aren’t many schools back in there?”
“Thar hain’t no schools at all, Ma’am. My daddy war a preacher afore he
died. I kain’t read in no book to amount to nothin’. I kain’t hardly
write my own name. I’m a-goin’ outside to git a education, because I’m
a-goin’ to build a college, Ma’am.”
“A college!”
“Yes, Ma’am. I’ve got to do it. My people have been a-killin’ each
other in thar fer a hundred years. They kain’t read, they kain’t write,
they kain’t think. They hain’t amountin’ to nothin’ whatever in the
world. They’re a great people, Ma’am. They’re worth savin’. Well, it
kind of come to me, in a sort of callin’, that I’d orter save them. So,
like I said, I’m a-goin’ Outside to git me a education, soon as I kin.”
The situation had suddenly become extraordinary. They waited for the
mountaineer to go on, as presently he did.
“I’ve nuvver been further down the river than a couple of locks below.
I’ve rafted here sence I was fourteen year old, but beyant the aidge of
the hills I don’t know nothin’ of the world. Kin ye tell me whar I kin
git my education? I don’t reckon it’ll take long—us mounting people
larn right fast, Ma’am, when we git a chancet.”
Then, after a pause, he went on, anxiously: “I’d do arything in the
world to obleege ye, Ma’am—I’d go back in thar right now with ye if I
had time. But ye see, I’m twenty-eight year old, an’ I hain’t got no
time to lose.”
Marcia Haddon sat in silence for a time and looked at her husband, who,
moody and irritated, was flicking at the end of his cigar.
“This is rather an extraordinary thing, Jim,” said she. “Do you
suppose—is there any way we could help this man?”
“He doesn’t seem any too willing to help us,” replied Haddon grimly.
“I hain’t said that, Mister,” said Joslin evenly. “I’d do arything in
the world I could fer ye people if it was right.”
Haddon gave a snort of laughter. “You people in here haven’t got a
thing in the world—we bring in all the money you’ll ever see. You’ve
got your resources to sell, and you aren’t willing to sell them. Well,
what do we owe you?”
“I don’t know as ye owe us anything,” said David Joslin, the slow color
rising to his face. “As fer me, I don’t allow to owe ary man arything
very long. I reckon ye understand that, Ma’am.”
He turned now to the woman, who nodded. He knew that she did understand.
“Is there anybody else that you can get to take us in there?” demanded
Haddon impatiently. “Damn it all, I’ve almost a notion to turn around
and go back again! For half a cent I’d advise the boys to charge off
the whole damn thing to profit and loss. I’m sore—that’s what I am.”
The low voice of Marcia Haddon began once more, and as before she
addressed not her husband, but the young mountain man.
“You spoke about going in at some later time,” said she. “You
interest me. My husband and I have no children. I’d like to do
something—something for those children back there in the hills.”
“Ma’am,” said David Joslin, his voice trembling, “if ye could do that
God A’mighty shore would nuvver fergit it, not whiles He had a universe
to run. If ye could do that—I’d do arything in the world fer ye.”
“Well, now, come,” said Haddon, still argumentatively. “You say you
don’t know anyone else that you can get to take me in there?”
“I don’t, sir. The Gannts an’ the Joslins is both a-ridin’ now. Thar’s
been men killed, an’ goin’ to be more killed. If ary stranger went in
thar, he’d be liable nuvver to come out at all.”
“Well,” rejoined Haddon, “I don’t think my salary will warrant my going
in there and getting shot up by some long-legged son-of-a-gun toting a
squirrel rifle. That doesn’t appeal to me any whatever. Listen, man!”
Haddon sat up suddenly in his chair as an idea flashed upon his keen
business brain. “Listen now,” and he extended an arresting forefinger.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do with you. You know that country and I
don’t. I’ll pay you ten dollars a day and all your expenses to New
York if you’ll go back with me. I want you to address a meeting of my
company and some other companies that are in the business. That’ll do
just as well, if you tell a good straight story, as if I went in there
myself. You do know the country, don’t you?”
“I know it day an’ night, through an’ through. I know every coal seam
in them hills. I know most every old-time poplar tree an’ big white oak
from Hell-fer-Sartin to the mouth of Rattlesnake, an’ from Big Creek to
the Main Forks. I don’t know nothin’ else.”
“Now then—now then—now then,” resumed Haddon excitedly—“that’s
the answer! That certainly is the answer to the whole thing. Now, you
come back with us—I’ll get you some clothes, and that sort of thing,
of course. I’ll pay your railroad fare and expenses, and ten dollars
a day, and I’ll keep you in New York until this business is over.
In return for that, all I want you to do is to tell my men what you
know about that country—how many trees there are to an acre on that
Hell-fer-Sartin tract—where the oil croppings are, so far as you
know—where the railroad’s got to come. Can you show it on a map?”
“I don’t know about maps, stranger,” said David Joslin, “but if ye
could tell me the names of the places on the maps, like rivers, ye
know—ye see, I kain’t read very well, not yit.”
“Sure, sure, I’ll fix that all right I’ll show it for you just like a
book. A child could read it.”
“I kain’t read no better’n a child, Mr. Haddon, but if ye kin show me
whar the creeks is marked on the map I kin show ye whar the railroad
has got to go. I kin put my finger on every place whar oil has been
found, er gas—ye know, thar’s places whar gas has been burnin’ fer
forty year, ever sence the War, an’ thar didn’t nobody know about it.”
“There doesn’t anyone know that there’s a continuance of the big West
Virginia anticline right through these mountains,” rejoined Haddon
grimly. “Oil?—There’s got to be oil in here, and I know it. Our
geologists figured that all out before you ever told me there had been
oil found in here. Why, man—I can’t afford _not_ to take you back with
me. And you can’t afford not to come.”
“What do ye think of this, Ma’am?” said David Joslin, turning toward
the quiet young woman. “I reckon ye mought be ashamed of me if I went
along with ye.” He flushed dully.
“No, Mr. Joslin,” said she, quickly. “You’ll learn. You wouldn’t be
unhappy, I think. I want you to feel that we want to help you. Let my
husband take care of the business part. I’ll see what I can do toward
getting you a chance to study. If money is good for anything, Jim, it
ought to be good for just some such thing as this.”
“Is it a trade, man?” said the Northerner suddenly.
“I believe I’ll go with ye, Ma’am,” said David Joslin quietly for his
reply. He did not speak to the man.
It was a trade! When Jimmy Haddon stepped back once more into the
house, to the side of the table where the flickering oil lamp stood, he
caught the Widow Dunham gaily about the shoulders, chucked her under
the chin once more, and kissed her fair on the lips. It chanced he did
this just as his wife came into the hall, so that she saw the whole
transaction. She made no comment. She also had made her trade, years
ago, when she married. If she had lost, she would not yet complain. But
Joslin saw the hot flush on her cheek.
CHAPTER IX
POLLY PENDLETON
“WELL, Marcia, here we are,” said James Haddon, as at last their long
railway journey drew to its close in the swift sweep of the train up
the gates of the great city by the sea. “Better begin to round up your
wild man—I saw him standing in the vestibule looking out of the window
as though he was in a trance. What are we going to do with him, now
we’ve got him?”
“We’ll take him with us to our home, of course, Jim. He’d be lost
anywhere else. He knows no more than a child.”
“Pretty husky child, some ways,” said Haddon. “Well, all right, all
right! I suppose you’re glad he’s different from me. You don’t seem to
have a lot of use for me any more, some way—you’ve been like a clam
ever since we left New York, and you’re more like a clam now that we’re
getting back. There’s worse fellows in the world than Jimmy Haddon,
and maybe you’ll live to see it yet. I’ll show you, if this deal goes
through—and it will if your wild friend makes good.
“But now here we are getting into the tube—I’d better catch the wild
man, or he may get scared and jump off the train. All right—we’ll take
him up home.”
The rushing whirl of the city received them—the city, a place
occupied, so it seemed to this stranger, with sad-faced madmen hurrying
here and yon without purpose. Mad—mad—hopelessly mad—so it all
seemed to David Joslin as, himself frightened with the noise, the
clamorings, the uncertainty of it all, he finally emerged from the
gates of the railway station and stood close to the side of the woman
who now made his main reliance in this new world of the great Outside.
A deferential man in livery came toward them and led them to a long,
shining limousine car which stood at the curb. A moment later they
were whirling away through the crowded streets, escaping death every
instant, so it seemed to the newcomer, by the miracle of a second’s
fraction. He held his peace, as he had now for five days in a new,
mad world of which he had not dreamed. They passed on out through the
crowded traffic street until they reached paved ways leading to the
north, and so, after a long and steady flight of the car, drew up at
the entrance of a great apartment building on the river drive.
Joslin followed in. He never in his life before had been in a passenger
elevator. He felt a strange sinking at the pit of his stomach, and
caught instinctively at the bars of the gate. He was still less at ease
when they led him into the silent and dim apartments where Haddon and
his wife lived, as luxurious as any of the Riverside, the rent of which
each month was more than any farm in all the Cumberlands would bring in
a year.
But Joslin was now in the home of a gentlewoman. Quietly she took him
in hand, relieving his embarrassment, setting him at his ease, showing
him where he might live, and telling him kindly what might be expected
of him. He looked about him at his own room with awe. These furnishings
to him were so unbelievably luxurious that he dared not sit down upon
a chair. He gazed upon the bed, with its yellow coverlet of silk, with
but one resolve—he would sleep upon the floor, but never venture
further—nor did he. And when presently they called him to table he
felt his heart sink yet further in these strange surroundings, so that
he could not eat. He had accosted as “Mister” the servant who went to
his room with him—he saw the same man now, and wondered that he stood,
and did not eat with the others—wondered that no one noticed him nor
the white-capped maid who passed. Surely it was all a strange, mad
world.
“Well,” said Haddon, after his hurried finishing of his own meal, “I’ve
got to get down to the little old shop right away, Marcia. They’ll not
be expecting me, of course, but it’s a good piece of business that I’m
back when I am, and just the way I am.”
“I presume you’ll have plenty to do,” commented his wife.
“Listen! I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’m going to get together all the
directors of the Company, and we’ll pull off a little dinner at the
Williston—in the Gold Room. How’ll that do, my Christian friend?” said
he, grinning at Joslin as he stepped to the hall table and picked up
his own hat and gloves.
“Of course, I can’t do that right away,” he continued, turning back,
his stick over his arm, his well-brushed hat now on his head. “Maybe a
couple of days. I’ll be busy. Maybe I’ll have to stay down at the club
to-night, Marcia. I’ll check up about dinner time.”
He did not call up at about dinner time, nor at all until past noon the
next day, when he explained that he had been crowded at the office and
unable to get his own apartments by phone—explanations with which his
wife was fairly familiar.
As for Joslin, he passed the two days in what seemed to him a
continual kaleidoscope of madhouse change. Now in charge of one of the
chauffeurs, sometimes in the more gracious company of his hostess, he
spun up and down the streets of the great city, looking at the untold
thousands of its inhabitants, wondering at its stately buildings,
wondering at the beauty of its parks, so like and yet so unlike the
woods he had always known. In the evening, in his own room, he read
steadily, as best he might, spelling out the complex, stern theology
of old John Calvin. Now and again he raised his eyes and wondered what
Calvin would have done had he been here.
They brought to him now certain other clothing of Jimmy Haddon’s,
a trifle short, a trifle large, but serving better than anything
he yet had had. He was not happy in all this—no man ever was more
unhappy in all his life than David Joslin now. Moreover, there came
to his heart, every moment of the day and night, the most exquisite
of pain—nostalgia—the actual illness of homesickness. He longed
unspeakably for the sight of the mountains, for the smell of the
wood-smoke of the fires, the look of the stars at night, the pink of
the dawn when morning came. Life here was a fearsome thing, and long
and hard seemed the unknown road that lay before him.
Haddon came home after his second night away and announced that all was
in readiness for the great banquet of the men whom he represented in
his business affiliations.
“I’m going to give you your first chance in public speaking now,
Joslin,” said he. “Believe me, you’ll have an attentive audience for
once, if you never do again—weren’t you talking of being a preacher,
or something? Talk business, son, straight business—that’s all we want
to hear. If you make good, you’ll have the time of your life. Help us,
and we’ll help you—see?”
“How about clothes?” He turned questioningly to his wife, who was in
the room at the time. “Of course it’s evening dress—is there a spare
suit of mine around anywhere?”
Marcia Haddon looked at the two for a moment “Perhaps Mr. Joslin would
not prefer it,” said she.
Joslin shook his head. “No,” said he. “I hain’t a-goin’ to change from
these clothes I’ve got on now. I’m used to ‘em a little.”
Haddon’s companion, therefore—and Haddon rather prided himself on his
invariably well-groomed appearance—presented something of a noticeable
turn-out when they entered the lobby of the great hotel where the
banquet was to be, but he did not notice the apologetic grimaces Haddon
gave in response to certain lifted eyebrows of his friends whom he met
here and there.
“Well, come along, old man,” said he to his guest, at length. “We’ll
leave our coats and hats here, and go and see if we can find some more
of the fellows.”
He was not at a loss as to the place of search. The long glazed
and marbled bar of the Williston at that time was thronged with
hundreds, much athirst. Behind the vast reaches of mahogany stood
many bartenders, all busy. Men in evening dress, with top hats and
beautifully fitting evening wear, men impeccable in gloves and
glasses and fit for presentation in any city of the world—stood here,
laughing, talking, jesting, drinking. One after another all these now
accosted Haddon, some with a sly word, a glance, a hint, a jest—things
which he hushed down as soon as might be, for he knew the keen
suspicion of the mountaineer.
“Well, what are you going to have to drink?” said he to Joslin at
length, edging his own way up to the bar. “We’ve got to lay some sort
of a foundation for the dinner, you know. What kind of cocktail do you
want—Martini?”
“I never did drink nothin’ but plain corn liquor,” said Joslin. “If I
could have jest a leetle of that now, maybe——”
“Nonsense! Have a cocktail. It’s too early for hard liquor yet. Make
him another, John,” and he nodded to the bartender.
Joslin raised the little glass, whose contents seemed, in color at
least, not unfamiliar to him as a mountain man, but he drank no more
than half of the contents, and then set down the glass. It was his
first and only cocktail. He made no comment as his host urged him,
but moved away from the bar. Haddon himself remained to finish two or
three more of the insidious potions before he himself turned and with
the others began to move toward the quarters set apart for the banquet
party.
By this time the crowd was much like the usual male banquet crowd—a
trifle flushed of face, a trifle garrulous of tongue, each in his own
heart happy, and each in his own belief quite witty and very much
aplomb. They were seated in due course at the long tables arranged
after the fashion of a Maltese cross. Haddon, it seemed, was to
preside. He placed his guest at his own right, in the place of honor.
“Trust little old Jimmy to pull a thing off,” said one merchant to
another. “He never went down to that country for nothing. He’s got
the goods with him, and you can gamble on that. He told me himself
how he caught this wild mountain man and brought him on to talk to us
to-night. He knows every foot of the land in there, and he can tell us
the whole works. Coal—gas—oil—those lands of ours are full of it!
Looks like we were going to make a killing. Trust Jimmy. He’s one grand
little live wire, if we’ve got one in our village.”
The dinner wore on, much as these things usually run—the original
stage of hilarity somewhat modified under the sobering influence of
food. It was all strange to Joslin, who, so it seemed to him, scarcely
had one plate set before him before it was taken away and replaced by
yet another. Few noticed what he did.
Presently, when all were well forward with coffee and cigars, Haddon
rapped loudly on the table as he rose. A change came over the entire
personnel of the assemblage. Here but now had been a riotous meeting
of full-blooded men, young men, middle-aged men, gray-haired men,
bent on nothing better than drinking and eating. But now anyone who
glanced down these tables would have seen a steady keenness, a fixity
of purpose, on the face of practically every man present. They were
hard-headed American business men on the instant now, each man ready
for the purpose which really had brought him here. Money—the pursuit
of money—the keen zest of the game of business—that was the real
intoxication of these men, and not that of alcohol. They listened now
in perfect silence to what their representative might have to say.
Haddon told them briefly something of his late trip into the
Cumberlands, told why it had been ended so abruptly for a second
time, admitted that he had never been over much of the Company’s land
holdings, in the mountains, and explained the reasons why that was a
difficult thing. He showed that it was necessary to have a guide to
make a successful exploration of the properties in that country, and
adverted to the benefits of direct testimony rather than hearsay,
explaining how he had brought this mountaineer, who had spent all his
life in the middle of the Company’s properties, to the city with him to
tell them his own first-hand story of the land.
A large map hung on the wall, and to this he adverted from time to
time. Joslin’s eyes followed him. Yes, he knew these streams—he could
locate this or that territory familiar to himself, here on the map. He
knew on the ground what Haddon pointed out upon the map. So presently,
when they called upon him to speak, he rose with no great diffidence on
his own part.
They greeted him with a generous round of applause, which startled him,
for he had never heard anything of the sort. But after all David Joslin
was a man of great dignity and self-respect, with great powers of mind
as well as of body. And there lurked somewhere within him, as in so
many of these strong characters of the hills, natural instincts of the
orator.
He spoke strongly, simply, powerfully, with no attempt at
embellishment, but in such terms as left no doubt whatsoever as to
his meaning. After a time he stepped to the map, and, pointing out
here and there, explained as nearly as he himself knew the nature
of the Company’s holdings. He told them where the coal cropped out
at the headwaters of this or that creek, told them that on some of
the mountain sides three veins of coal had been known ever since he
could remember, the middle vein over eight feet thick, the lower four
feet thick, and that nearest to the mountain top almost as deep. He
explained to them that there was coal over more than a hundred miles of
that country, as he knew, and told them how nearly everyone mined his
own coal on his own land, and did not trouble to cut wood for much of
the year.
As for the new strikes of oil, Joslin could put his finger upon the map
where every one of these discoveries had been made. He said that his
own people cared little for that, for they had long grown to believe
there was no way for them to get out into the world. He explained to
them that there were no roads in that country, that logs were dragged
down the mountain side by cattle, rolled into the shallow streams by
hand labor, and left to the chance of the infrequent “tides.” He told
them that in many of those streams there were logs enough to touch end
to end from one end of the creek to the other—logs enough bedded in
the sand to floor the creek entirely for half its length—black walnut
logs two and a half feet through—white oak logs three and a half feet
in diameter—and poplar four and a half feet. Their eyes glistened as
he went on telling all these things naturally, simply, naively, as one
fully acquainted with them. He explained to them the ways of all these
methods of logging, how no one could run a saw mill in that region with
profit, how no raftsman ever made more than a living at his work, hard
as it was. Then he told them how he himself had seen the stakes of the
new railroad line coming across the head of Hell-fer-Sartin and making
for the upper waters of Big Creek, and passing thence on to the older
railway lines.
“When the railroad comes, gentle-_men_,” said he, “things has got to
change in thar. We’ve been alone—no one knows much about our lands. Ye
come in thar twenty years ago, when no one cared for nothin’. Ye bought
yore land fer skercely a dollar a acre, most of it, an’ thar’s trees on
it thar that’s wuth ten an’ twenty dollars fer every log in ‘em, onct
ye git ‘em out, an’ two, three, four logs to the tree. The railroad
will let the world in, an’ it’ll let us out. I reckon the time has come
fer that. All I ask ye in turn fer what I’m a-tellin’ ye, is to treat
my people fair. Give them a fair value fer what they’ve got. They’re
pore, they’re ignerint, they’re blind. I’m as ignerint as the wust of
‘em. But we’re squar’ with ye. We want ye to be squar’ with us.”
A blank silence greeted this last remark. Men looked from one to the
other. Once in a while there might have been a cynical smile or sneer
that passed. After he had spoken for an hour, perhaps more than an
hour, and had answered all such questions as they asked him, David
Joslin sat down. A voice in the back part of the room arose.
“What’s the matter with Jimmy Haddon?”
A vociferous chorus answered. Joslin did not understand the methods of
these men, but vaguely he gathered that what he had said had been well
received.
On the whole he felt content. Now, he said to himself, on the very next
day he would go about his own business. He would leave this place,
which confused him so much. He was done with the city now. He had done
his duty.
But this did not by any means close the entertainment of the evening as
these men conceived it. As they had been revelers and again business
men, so now once more they laid aside the habit of affairs and turned
again to the business of banqueting. Waiters came quickly and filled
up glasses, large glasses, with bubbling wine. Again mingling voices
arose, laughter, jests. The glasses were filled again, and yet again.
The business of the day was over. Joy was to be more unconfined.
Men drew back curtains at the head of the hall, revealing a little
platform where stood a piano, which was wheeled into place. At a
signal from Haddon there entered an orchestra of foreign sort, and
they mingled music and jangling discord of the usual kind, perhaps
among other things a melody or so of the hour; for voices arose, and
sounds of hands and feet keeping time. A basso, very knock-kneed and
small of chin, appeared from some unknown region, sang a solo, bowed
and disappeared. A quartet of negro singers furnished rather better
entertainment, so it seemed. And then men began to push back their
chairs, so that they might easily see the entrance of the room.
All at once a round of general and vociferous applause arose. Jimmy
Haddon arose and hastened to greet the latest comers.
There stood in the doorway two young women, dressed with a certain
similarity, their long cloaks held together by clasps, their arms
in long white gloves. There were two, but there might as well have
been but one, for the older of the concert team of Pendleton and
Stanton—Pollie Pendleton and Nina Stanton, known in every theater of
the land that year—lacked so much of the charm of her companion that
she quite resigned herself to the amiable role of foil.
They were young women of that sort known in Babylon and Boston. Whence
they come, who shall say? Whither they go, who knows—the young women
of the world, the beloved and the forgotten. The world has always had
them, and perhaps will always have them—young, splendidly beautiful,
splendidly alluring—who come from none knows whence, and who go no one
knows whither.
The assembled males applauded when they saw these two young women
standing there—short of skirt, low of slipper, low of gown. All but
one rose gaily to welcome them. One man sat transfixed.
There was revealed to David Joslin, in the person of Polly Pendleton,
such a vision as never had he known in all his life, a dream which he
not yet had dreamed, nor could have dreamed, so wholly outside of all
his possible experience must it have been called. He never before had
seen woman at her frank best in sheer riot of the beauty of her sex. It
awed him.
She was a woman, but scarce seemed that to him. To his eyes she was not
woman, but some supernal thing, a Presence, a Being. And in the sheer
fact that she was of his genus, of his species, that she was woman and
he was man, he sat suddenly exalted, glorified himself, superman—for
now at last his eyes had seen!
She smiled at them all in her swift and comradely fashion, and stepped
promptly toward the little platform. Not a man there who did not know
Polly Pendleton of the Follies, the best-liked girl on the stage that
year. Singer, violinist, dancer—she had made her way up by one or
the other of her arts or all of them, until now she might use all or
either, as she liked.
A woman of about middle stature was Polly Pendleton, of covetably
slender and firm-set figure. Her eyes were large and dark, with long
lashes, her face a strong, clean oval, her skin clear, her teeth
brilliant, her head a mass of short, dark curls. So much might be said
of many women, perhaps, but Polly Pendleton had some strange plus charm
of her own, that charm for which managers pay any price. She seemed
the very spirit, the very embodiment of life, youth, eagerness—of
vital joy itself. The thought of evil could not touch her, so sweet and
clean she seemed, in every fiber of her being there was such life and
such joy in living. Her gestures were those of the young animal, of the
bird, careless, unstudied. She had no art, but succeeded through her
lack of art and through her own zest, her sheer vitality.
When Polly Pendleton stood waiting for something, interested in
anything, keyed up, not even her feet could rest upon the floor. She
had a strange way sometimes, even when talking to one, of dancing up
and down on her toes, light as a feather, her young limbs seeming not
to feel the weight of her body. There seemed an ethereal air about her,
as though she needed not to walk, needed not to stand, unless she liked.
She stood now before them, having drawn from beneath her coat her
cherished violin, whose music had pleased so many thousands. Obviously
she intended first to play. She laid aside her cloak and stood, eager,
interested, slightly leaning forward, anxious, dancing up and down
upon her little feet. Youth, life, joy, vitality, freedom from care,
absolute ignorance and disregard of toil or trouble or anxiety—there
stood Polly Pendleton.
She laid the violin to her cheek and, her eyes now aside and high, drew
a strong, firm bow across the strings. When she did this she drew out
the heart and soul from the body of David Joslin.
But David Joslin never really had heard the violin before. Of actual
music he knew nothing. He had never heard a master of any instrument in
all his life. But the sound of the violin itself, last keen climax in
this atmosphere of exhilaration, where now the young spirit of this one
fragile girl commanded the strong masculine spirit of all these massed
men—for David Joslin constituted an overwhelming experience.
She finished her number, and when the roar of applause had ceased
turned to her associate, who seated herself at the piano. They both
sang—one of their duets; and as part of this Polly Pendleton herself
danced—whirling about in pirouettes where her toes seemed scarce to
find a footing, her round, strong limbs insouciantly exposed. She was
but the spirit of youth, of life, of joy.
Now certain of the critical began to demand something known earlier as
especially delectable.
“Sing us the real one, Polly!” they cried. “Sing us ‘The Only Man,’ why
don’t you?”
“Yes; that’s it—that’s it—give us ‘The Only Man,’ Polly;” and
vigorous handclapping ensued.
She stood facing them again at the little raised dais, her lips parted,
her white teeth visible under her short, smiling upper lip. She was
always eager to please, counting not the cost of herself—a rich and
generous soul indeed was hers. Not so much her fault as ours was it
that she was here, one of the sacrifices, the perishing imperishables
of the world.
But Polly began to sing. The words matter little. It was the chorus
which had brought her fame. She left the dais now, and advanced down
the long table, her whole face a-laugh. Her eyes were fixed on a
certain large, red-faced and very bald gentleman who sat halfway down
the table at the left. Him she approached, singing as she came. She
bent above him, put an arm about his face, a hand under his chin, and
drew his head back as she bent above and sang to him.
“For you are my Baby!” sang Polly Pendleton. “You are my Baby! You’re
the only, only, _only_ man for me.”
Roars of laughter greeted this. They sang in chorus with her: “You’re
the only, only, only man for me!”
“Come here, Polly,” called this man and that. “This way! You certainly
are the only girl for me.”
But Polly Pendleton was back at the head of the table once more, still
singing, still light of foot, still gay of song. She stood and faced
them just for a moment. Something she saw which seemed to arrest her
own attention—a grave, unsmiling face, with eyes like coals, a white
face which looked straight at hers....
It was no more than a pace or two for Polly to reach the head of the
table, to push a hand out against the raised one of Jimmy Haddon as he
sat there flushed and laughing. The next instant she had stopped, and
with the audacity of her very nature, so used to being allowed its own
freakish will, she passed an arm about the head of David Joslin, a hand
beneath his chin. She drew his white face back, looked down into his
eyes, and sang—for a little while at least—“_You’re the only, only,
only man for me!_”
Something in the tense tableau they saw—some note, undefinable,
caused every man of that virile assemblage to cease his laughter and
applause. They stared. They saw the great hands of the man close tight
about the white wrists of Polly Pendleton. She ceased to stroke the
strong hair of David Joslin, and stood back, finishing her song out of
touch and out of tune. Some thought her voice quavered just a little.
But she sprang back tiptoe again upon the little dais, and finished
boldly—yes, and added thereto the notes of her violin. None the less,
there had been a scene. Someone had not played the game. And they must
take care of Polly.
They broke into applause. Someone started to pass a plate down the
table. It was heaped up with money, in great part yellow in color.
Coins fell on the floor—but there were no small silver ones. Some near
by flung money in the general direction of the little platform where
the two young women stood, smiling and bowing deeply—smiling at what
they knew to be the success of their little offerings that evening.
“Here you go, Polly!” as one man after another cast toward her
something folded. And Polly, grave and a trifle white now, leaving her
associate bowing on the stage, passed down the aisle, met the heaped
plate on its way, stopped here and stopped there, laughing and talking,
chattering like some innocent child, picking up money—money—more
money than David Joslin had thought there was in all the world. He
alone gave nothing, for he had naught to give—only the happiness and
peace of a human soul.
There was so much tribute that Polly made great show of thrusting part
of it beneath her garter, till she could hold no more in that fashion.
Some she thrust into her bosom, and then, turning, carried the rest of
it to her partner, who happily was provided with a reticule.
Everybody laughed—everybody was pleased. It had cost them very
little—perhaps a few hundred dollars—to make these two girls feel
that they had made a hit. The wine was excellent. Everything had been
splendid in every way. The cost? Why, what Jimmy Haddon had done for
them in bringing this geezer here to tell them about their property
would bring them more than ten thousand times the cost of the banquet,
or the cost of the whole investment.
And so, after a time, the banquet ended, very late—ended, indeed,
when Polly Pendleton and her friend, laughing and kissing their
hands—Polly with her violin tucked under her arm and her cloak over
all—turned once more to the door of the crystal and gold room of the
Williston banquet suite. Men rose and waved serviettes at them, shouted
good-by, asked them to come again. Haddon himself walked with Polly
Pendleton to the door, kissed her hand, bowed goodnight.
As he turned back he saw standing, staring at him fixedly, the tall,
white-faced figure of the mountaineer, whom he had utterly forgotten.
The eyes of David Joslin were like coals.
“Some girl, eh—what?” said Haddon admiringly to his uncouth friend.
But Joslin made him no reply. What he had seen, what he had felt that
night, was epochal, abysmal for him. He had looked into her eyes.
He had seen her face framed in her dark hair—had caught the very
fragrance of her hair itself. He was mad.
A motor car stood below, waiting for the popular team of Pendleton and
Stanton. It whirled them now far uptown, to the little buffet flat
which made their home. Nina, matter-of-fact as usual, busied herself
about her preparations for the close of the day’s work. But, singularly
enough, Polly, usually riante and active to the very last moment of the
day, sat, cigarette in hand, silent, somewhat triste.
“What’s the matter, Polly?—Why don’t you get ready?—I’m sleepy as an
owl. What are you wolfing about?”
“What makes you ask that, Nina?”
“Well, it’s something.”
Silence for a time, and then Polly spoke. “How do you think it went
to-night, Nina?”
“Well, all I’ve got to say,” replied that worthy young woman, “if it
went this well about one or two more nights a week or a month, we could
retire and live along the Sound like ladies the rest of our lives.”
“I wish it was all back,” said Polly Pendleton, somberly.
“What do you mean?”
“Why, the money.”
“Well, of all _things_!” exclaimed Nina Stanton, staring at her
partner. “What’s the matter with you, Polly? Have you gone crazy?
What’s set _you_ thinking this way? Of all _things_!”
“Well, it was that man, maybe. He mighty near queered me. It’s always a
man, you know—a girl can’t get away from that.”
Nina still looked at her in wonderment. “You’re out of your head, kid,”
said she. “If anyone in little old New York ought to be happy to-night,
it’s you, sitting right there grouching like you are. They didn’t see
me—I wasn’t there at all. You were the whole works. I hate to take the
money from you—and I wouldn’t if I didn’t know you’d only spend it. I
have to watch you like a mother, kid.”
But Polly sat, shaking her head in somber discontent, the little blue
rings of her cigarette rising undisturbed before her.
“Who was he, Nina?” she asked after a time.
“Who was who? The big bald-face guy down the table?—that was Rankin of
Rankin and Swan. He acted like a good sport. As for Jimmy Haddon, he
must have chipped in fifty, anyways.”
But Polly was shaking her head from side to side.
“Oh, of course, you mean the reuben at the head of the table you were
joshing. It was the hit of the evening.”
“Was it, though?” said Polly vaguely.
“The hit of the evening, kid. That’s what brought them across.”
“Well,” said Polly, “it was a raw deal for him, I suppose. Look here.”
She held up her wrist. It showed a blue line about it. “I never felt
a man’s hand like that in all my life. He could have broken my arm if
he’d wanted to.” She pushed a bracelet reflectively up and down across
the bruised ring which the clutch of Joslin’s fingers had left upon her
white skin.
“Oh, I guess he liked it all right,” commented Nina casually. “They
mostly do.”
“That’s the trouble,” rejoined Polly sagely. “I can’t tell how it was,
but somehow that man made me feel _ashamed_! There was something in his
face—I can’t tell you what. Ever since, I’ve been feeling as if this
money didn’t belong to us. I’ve a notion to give you my share, Nina.”
“You can’t, kid. I’ve always been on the level with you. I’ll take you
over my knee and give you a spanking now if you don’t shut up. You talk
silly. An ordinary hayseed from the hills—you better be thinking of
Rankin with his private yachts, or little old Jimmy, your solid. You
can’t complain. You’d better be content with what you got.”
“What do you mean, Nina? I only say I feel sort of ashamed. I never
felt my skirts were short before in all my life. I did then.”
Nina only turned with a short laugh as she stooped to unfasten her own
shoes in her progress towards her night toilet. Polly arose and went
to the panel where protruded the handle of the wall bed which these
two loyal and thrifty partners occupied in common. She pulled down the
bed, went to the little wardrobe for her own night robe, and, moodily
silent, prepared herself for sleep. At last she paused.
“Nina,” she said again, with a certain imperative quality in her tone.
“What is it, kid?” demanded her good-humored friend.
“You know what I think?”
“No, I don’t. I don’t think you think at all.”
“Well, I’ll tell you. Sometimes I think I’ve had about enough of this
sort of thing. I’m sore on it. It makes me sick. All those men——”
“But if it was the ‘only, only, _only_ man’?” grinned Nina.
“I wonder,” began Polly to herself—“I wonder now——”
But what she wondered she did not vouchsafe. It was some time later, in
the darkness of the night, that Nina felt a hand upon her arm, shaking
her.
“What’s the idea, kid?” she said sleepily. “Can’t you let a fellow
sleep? I’m almost dead.”
“Nina, tell me!” demanded Polly, a strange earnestness in her voice.
“Am I bad? Nina—tell me—am I as bad as that?”
“Oh, shut up, kid,” said Nina, bored. “Go on to sleep. There’s bats in
your garret to-night, sure thing.”
CHAPTER X
MR. HADDON’S POINT OF VIEW
HADDON, puffy about the eyes, trembling of fingers, sat at table the
next day offering a very fine example of the morning after organized
hilarity. The man opposed to him, haggard and hollow-eyed, might have
been suspected of indulgences similar to those of his host, although
such would have been an unjust accusation.
Haddon found two stiff drinks of whisky needful to attract his interest
to his breakfast. Then he broke the moody silence which had marked him.
“I say, old man,” he began, “you made a pretty fair speech to the boys
last night. We’re holding down more than three hundred thousand acres
of land in the Cumberlands. We’re in deep, and some of the fellows were
getting cold feet until I brought you on to tell them something about
our holdings.”
Joslin sat looking at him in silence, and he went on presently.
“You see, our money has been in there for twenty years, some of
it—that was long before I went into the Company, of course. The
holding of raw resources is a waiting game—you cash in stiff after a
long wait. That’s what we’ve got to do now.
“But the way to handle this thing is to crowd when the line begins to
break. It’s time now for us to begin to crowd. We’ve got to begin to
cash in before long, for the interest and taxes have been eating us up
long enough.
“Now, we need a good man down in there. The boys have been sending me
because they couldn’t do any better. You and I between us know about
how much I know—we both know that you know a lot more than I do. Now,
you’ve been talking to me a lot of rot about starting a college or a
school, or something—I don’t remember what all you were saying. Forget
it! Cut out all that business about saving your country. Think a little
bit about saving yourself. This business of doing a whole lot for other
people is all right on paper, but when it comes down to practical life
there’s nothing in it. A fellow’s got to think of _himself_.
“Now, what are you doing for yourself? You’re sitting here in my
house—not that I want to rub it in by telling you so—in a suit of my
clothes and a pair of my shoes. You’re wearing my shirt and my socks
right now. You haven’t got a dollar of your own money in your clothes
to-day. You told me that you had a wife and a grandmother. What are you
going to do about them? Any way you look, you’re in a fine position to
build a college! Why, hell!
“On the other hand, New York ain’t such a slow village, is she? Pretty
nice, eh? Something of a party last night, what? Some girls, huh?
“Now, listen. You might do a lot worse than staying right here in New
York this fall and winter—you’d be on the pay roll all right. We could
make a pretty good thing of it for you if you went in with us and stood
by us through thick or thin, right or wrong. We might think of a lot of
things we’d like to ask you.
“You’ve been talking a lot of bally rot about your duty to these
people—seeing that we wouldn’t rob them in the price we paid for the
land or the oil leases. You know mighty well we can go down there and
lease a whole farm a hundred years for a dollar. Now, you can crab our
whole act—that’s easy to see—if you go down there and tell those
people they’re fools, and that they ought to have two dollars an acre
for their oil rights—more’n we’ve paid them for _all_ their coal and
their timber and their land any time these last twenty years! You can
see easily enough from the class of men I’ve shown you here last night
that we’ve got all the money we need, all the money that anybody needs
to pay for what we want. But we want loyalty. We want service. We want
someone to stand with us, thick or thin, right or _wrong_. Do you
understand?”
Joslin looked at the puffy face of the man who spoke, his heavy
cheeks, his thickening neck, his watery eyes, somewhat reddened about
the rims. He replied slowly.
“Yes, Mr. Haddon, I reckon I do understand,” said he.
“Well, well, then, what about it? Do you find New York such a poor
place to live in? Isn’t there anything here to light you up a little
bit more than anything you ever saw down in the Cumberlands?”
Joslin looked at him, his pale face going still paler. “I’ve seen
things here I didn’t know was in all the world. But ye wasn’t asking me
to sell out my own people, was ye?”
“There you go again!” retorted the irritated man across the table from
him. “Rot! I’ve told you the question of right or wrong don’t come into
business at all. Business is _business_. Highbrow things don’t come
into it at all. Don’t you want to know what life is—don’t you want to
branch out—don’t you want to see what the world has—all the people in
it, the _life_ of it? Why, man, at first you looked to me as though you
weren’t a sissy or a simp.”
The moisture on Joslin’s forehead meant nothing to the man who faced
him, who knew nothing of the self-loathing, the self-reproach, that lay
in Joslin’s heart.
“Well, anyhow, if you lived in this country for a while you might
change your point of view,” finished Haddon, pushing back his chair.
“What’s your hurry, getting out of town? You haven’t got a cent to your
name, you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t know what to do. I’m
sorry for you——”
“Ye needn’t be,” said David Joslin. “Ye kain’t pity a mounting man—he
won’t have it!”
“Hell’s bells!” ejaculated the irate man whom he addressed. “I’m not
trying to change any of those damned hill-billies down there. That’s
not the question. I put it up to you that you’re here in New York, and
you’ve got a chance to save up a little money to _buy_ your bally old
education. You don’t have to lose any of your principles. It’s just
_making good_—that’s all there is to it. If you want to make good
you’re on. If you don’t—good-by!”
He rose from the table, irritated, his nerves still a-jangle; but a
sort of compunction came to him, or perhaps the feeling that he was
making a business mistake in crowding this man. A sudden half-smile
came to his face as he turned when the house man brought his hat and
stick for him.
“It’s a stiff gait we travel here,” said he. “Now I’m going to my shop
to see if I can earn a dollar or two to pay the rent. I believe I’ll
turn you over to my chauffeur and let him drive you ‘bout town for a
day or so. You remember that kid that was there last night—one that
sang and played to us—Polly Pendleton, her name was. I saw you having
a good look at that young dame. Some calico, what? Yeh, some girl.
Now, listen here—how’d you like to go up and have a little visit with
Polly around eleven-thirty or so? I could fix it up. Touch of life, eh?
Gad, she seemed to be interested in you somehow—scared or something.
Now——”
David Joslin went suddenly white. “Ye fergit, I reckon—I told ye I
was a married man. I’ve got a wife—we had two children, down thar in
Kentucky.”
“Well, I’ve got a wife too,” rejoined Haddon contemplatively. “If I had
any children I’d need that much more of something to make me forget my
condition of servitude. I don’t know where the Missus has gone to, but
she’s shook us this morning, that’s plain! You go up and talk religion
to Polly, while I go down to the office and try to make a dollar and a
quarter. Maybe you can save a human soul—eh? That’s up to you.
“Life is so short,” he went on presently, finding a cigarette in his
pocket. “Why hang crêpe when life is so darned short? I don’t blame you
for wanting to learn the alphabet and the multiplication table, but if
a man came to me and gave me a chance like this, I’d postpone those
things.”
Jimmy Haddon went grimly chuckling to his own desk, and left the
question of the gentleman from Kentucky and the lady of Harlem strictly
upon the knees of the gods.
CHAPTER XI
POLLY PENDLETON’S VISITOR
THE cynically smiling driver of Haddon’s car at a late hour that
morning deposited a solitary passenger at the door of a certain
apartment building high up on Manhattan Island. Seeing the bewilderment
of his charge, the chauffeur himself entered the elevator with him and
touched as with no unaccustomed hand a certain button near a door. He
then discreetly departed.
The door opened. There appeared almost in the face of the waiting
visitor the figure of a young woman—exceedingly comely even at that
hour of the day—a young woman of oval face, of dark, long-lashed eyes,
of dark curling hair, of shapeliness of figure scantly veiled by the
pink kimono which she wore in morning negligée.
It was Polly Pendleton. She was alone. Her praiseworthy partner had
before this arisen for her morning cocktail, her morning coffee, her
morning cigarette, and her morning stroll downtown.
Joslin stood motionless, silent. In a flash she recognized him. Then he
stalked in.
“Well!” said she. “I wasn’t expecting anyone this morning.” She
flushed, half angry. “I don’t allow this.”
“My name is Joslin—David Joslin,” began her visitor. “Ye don’t
remember me—last night——”
“Oh, yes, I do,” said Polly. “Of course I do. You wore the same clothes
then you’re wearing now.”
“They’re the only ones I have,” said the young man, “an’ they’re not
mine. I don’t reckon ye want me to come in?”
“Why, yes,” said she, for one half instant hesitant, and closed the
door. “Why not, after all?”
He looked about him curiously at the narrow quarters. So, then, this
was her home! These were her belongings—the half-emptied glasses on
the little buffet, the ashes in a tray, the powder puff, pink-stained,
on the dresser-top, the manicure nail pad, the little burnt cork on a
hairpin’s end.
“Won’t you sit down?” began Polly Pendleton, more flustered than she
had ever been in all her life. “Will you have a little drink?”
He looked at her in astonishment “Surely ye ain’t meanin’ that ye’d
take a drink of liquor, Ma’am?” said he.
“Well,” said Polly Pendleton, with a _moue_, “once in a long
_while_—in case I’m not feeling well, you know! How about yourself?
You look rocky.”
He looked in grave contemplation at the half-filled bottle upon the
tiny buffet—the glasses which had seen use.
“Ma’am,” said he, “sometimes in my country a man takes a drink of
liquor. Sometimes a woman smokes a pipe. But I don’t think I’ll take no
drink this mornin’. It ain’t my usual custom.”
Polly seated herself in a deep-cushioned armchair near the window, her
half-consumed cigarette still between her fingers. A pleasing enough
picture she presented, as, half leaning forward, she sat staring
curiously at this apparition of the morning.
“You’re an odd sort!” said she, at length, flinging up a hand
nervously. “Well, I’ve not got down to the pipe yet.”
“Say, friend,” she went on suddenly, half apologetically, “I was
talking to my partner last night. She said that she thought our act
rather broke you up. Of course you know it was all joshing—nothing
more. That’s the way we do at those dinner parties—they sort of expect
it of us girls, you know. There’s nothing in it, of course. I hope you
didn’t mind it?”
“No,” he said quietly, “I didn’t mind. The ways of sin are allurin’,
Ma’am.”
“What’s that!” But then she spread out her hands. An awkward silence
fell.
The eyes of David Joslin, roaming around the little apartment, spied
Polly’s violin resting upon the dresser-top.
“Ye play the violin, Ma’am,” said he. “Ye’re the first womern I ever
knew in all my life who could. I reckon ye studied?”
“Years,” said she simply. “It cost me a lot of money—and at that they
don’t like the best things I do. You can play?”—eagerly.
“Only a few of the mounting tunes—ballets such as our folks teached us
years ago.”
“Ballads? You mean the folk songs?”
“Maybe. I could play ‘Barbara Allen.’ They tolt me it was Scotch.”
“The Scotch have pretty melodies sometimes,” said Polly Pendleton
judicially. Then she smiled frankly. “You see, I’m half Irish
myself—and half French.”
“What?” David Joslin sat up suddenly and looked at her straight.
“Ma’am, my own granny was half Irish and half French. There wasn’t
nuvver a womern in all the mountings like her. That maybe accounts fer
a heap of things. My granny loves to sing and dance. She’s over ninety
year old.”
The unweighed flattery of his tone was a thing to be valued. She
extended to him the instrument and bow.
“Play for me,” said she. “Play ‘Barbara Allen.’ Do something for _me_
this morning!”
So David Joslin, student of Calvin, Cumberland mountaineer,
self-elected minister—and as he now fully felt, lost soul—thus cast
away in a buffet flat of upper Manhattan, played the old ballad of
“Barbara Allen” to one of the gayest young persons at that time in the
great city. He played it in minors, bowing very badly, missing the key
sometimes a half-note or so, slurring here, over-accentuating there,
phrasing after his own quaint mountain fashion, but none the less
producing something which might have been called a melody. Polly’s foot
began to beat upon the floor, her fingers upon the arm of the chair.
“Man!” said she, after he had finished, “if I could take you into
vaudeville, we’d break this country! That’s _class_!”
“It’s not much,” said he, misunderstanding. “I nuvver had no lessons.
I’ve nuvver been to school in all my life, an’ I nuvver seen a music
book in all my life—I reckon that’s music ye got over thar?” He nodded
towards the sheets which he saw standing in their rack.
“You’re an odd chap,” said she, with a strange softness in her tone.
“I’ve never seen a man like you—never in all my life. You’re a strange
chap. What brought you here?”
“I come out, Ma’am, to build a college fer my people. I come out to git
my education. I come up here with Mr. Haddon, jest to talk to a few
friends of his’n about timber an’ oil, ye know.”
“Jimmy Haddon, eh?” Polly’s lips set rather tight together. “Well, he’s
a good business man. You have to hand him that. But say—keep an eye
on him, that’s all. Listen here, son—you’re what we call ‘easy’ in the
city. You don’t belong here—you’re too straight—you’re too good for
it.”
“What do ye mean?” said he. “Too good! I’m the wustest of sinners.
But if I accepted sin—say, if I made a lot of money—several hundred
dollars a month—an’ had it clear—would ye tell me to throw that over
an’ go back home?”
The dark eyes of Polly Pendleton looked straight into his face now.
“There’s a lot of things a girl can understand without explaining very
much,” said she, simply. She saw the rising somber flame in this man’s
eyes that met her own so straight. And then, suddenly, he broke out,
all restraints gone.
“Last night ye _touched_ me—it was in a joke—ye was makin’ me
foolish. Ye don’t know how foolish ye made me then. Ye took away my
brains. Ye got my soul. God!”
“I don’t want you to talk that way to me!” flashed Polly, swift tears
in her eyes. “No, no—don’t—don’t! It wasn’t right for me to make fun
of you—I ought to have known you were different. I came home last
night, and I talked about you to my partner. Somehow, I don’t know why,
you seem like a preacher to me. Besides, once in a while a woman sees
something in a real man that gets close to her.”
She rose now and spread out her arms, a very beautiful vision of young
womanhood, a sort of fair frailness about her after all, in spite of
her eager vitality and her overflowing joy in life.
“Why, listen,” said she. “I know about men. You needn’t make any map
to explain anything more to me. You’d be foolish, you’d be crazy; and
I’ll not have it. I’m not good enough for you. You mustn’t stay here.
You mustn’t be foolish over a girl like me—I’m not worth it. I’m—I’m
notgood!” She slurred the last two words hurriedly together. “Get on
out of here before you’re spoiled.”
Her voice trembled. “The city will get you, some time. It’s got me.
It’s got my partner. We’re gone. Lost souls! You? Oh, don’t, _don’t_!
You haven’t gone the gait that we have. Listen to me now—I think
enough of a good square chap not to want to see him go the wrong way.
Can’t you see that a dancing girl can be a good pal after all? I’m
trying to _help_ you.”
“Easy!” said he, his voice trembling in his own self-scorn. “I had
nothin’, only what ye taken away from me.”
“Take some of this, won’t you?” said Polly Pendleton, her doubled hands
full of bills which she held out to him, her dark eyes shining. “Here,
take it. Do something with it. You wouldn’t call that tainted money,
would you?... It isn’t tainted yet. Look!”
But he put back her hands. “No,” said he. “My God! No! From ye?”
He hurt her, because she wholly mistook his real meaning. Her face
fell, but she shook her head bravely, like a fighter taking a blow in
the ring.
“Ye never cared,” he added; “ye don’t feel—ye don’t care.” The low
notes of his voice rumbled through the little room.
An odd feeling of helplessness seized her all at once. “It’s a good
thing for you, I don’t,” said she at length. “Don’t I know men are
fools enough without making another fool to add to the list? If I
cared—good God, if I _cared_! Why, I don’t _dare_ care for anybody.
Now, don’t you think you’d better be going?”
She had his hat in her hand, and was replacing the violin and bow.
He rose and stood before her, his hands clenched tight, his eyes still
burning, his voice vibrant.
“Ma’am,” said he, “I nuvver seen ye but once. Maybe I nuvver will agin.
But I’ll al-_ways_remember what ye said to me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was hopin’ ye’d say it would be a good piece of business fer me to
stay here this winter fer a while. I was hopin’ I could see ye an’
hear ye play some time, now an’ then. I was hopin’—I was hopin’ what
I ortern’t to hope. Ma’am, I nuvver seen no womern like ye in all my
life. I reckon I nuvver will agin.”
“Well,” said Polly Pendleton, at length having herself in hand, “you’ve
got none the best of me at that—I’ve seen a considerable many fools in
my time, but you’re the human limit, son! The best thing I can do is to
tie a can to you and get you started West as soon as possible. You’ll
spoil over _night_. You ain’t strictly human. You’re the worst Rube
that ever hit this island from any place on earth. Get out now—you’re
liable to be arrested any minute!
“And yet,” she added—still laughing kindly, and all the half-virginal
softness of her original nature coming into the wistfulness of her
tone—“I’m so glad you came! You’re a good sort.” She held out her
hand. “Listen, friend—when you think of me I hope you’ll say I was a
good sort too.”
He reached out his arms, his hands trembling. “Ma’am,” said he, “I’m
a married man. I had two children, onct. My father was a preacher. Ye
was right, I’m startin’ out to be a preacher myself. I was startin’ out
to do something in the world to hep the rest of them. But if ye hadn’t
said what ye said jest now to me, I’d be willin’ to throw it all away
for jest—for jest—for jest——”
How, he knew not, nor she, he caught her arms, soft and white, in the
grip of his great hands, and stood looking down at her fiercely, she as
helpless as a child in his grasp.
She was struggling to escape him now. “It’s not right!” said she. “I’m
alone here—Oh, are you any kind of a man after all?”
At this he dropped her arms, his own falling lax.
“Why, of course I’m a man,” said he quietly. “Of course I am. That’s
all I am. I’m a lost man, a damned one.”
“Go!” she whispered to him hoarsely. “I’m not worth that. Go on away,
and leave me something decent to remember.” She heard the door close
softly.
Within half an hour after Joslin had left, Polly Pendleton, unfinished
cigarette in hand, turned in her cushioned armchair as she heard the
strident call of the telephone.
“Yes?” she replied. “Who is it, please?... You, Jimmy?... No, don’t
come up. I’m awfully busy to-day.... I’ve got to work.
“Who?—the wild man?... Keep him?... Ask him to stay here this winter?
I should say _not_! I told him to get out of town!
“Oh, come now, Jimmy,” she went on in rejoinder to what she evidently
heard. “There’s no use talking that way.... Oh, you’re sore? Well, I
can’t help it. I wouldn’t have done any different even if you had told
me what you wanted.... You don’t care if I never come back? Oh, very
well—same to you, and many of ‘em!... So long, Jimmy, and when you get
decent come up. I may let you in, and then again maybe not.”
CHAPTER XII
THE STRAIGHT AND NARROW WAY
WHEN next Haddon and his wife met at the breakfast table Haddon was
more than ordinarily out of sorts, his wife rather more than ordinarily
grave and silent. At length he flung back from the table.
“Well, don’t it beat the devil,” said he, “how ungrateful some people
are! Here our hill-billy turns up missing this morning. Where do you
suppose he is?”
“I fancy he’ll find his way back. Perhaps we’ll hear from him soon.”
She spoke quietly, not evincing any of her own uneasiness over Joslin’s
disappearance.
“You seem to have a very good notion of him and his ways! I’ll say he
didn’t have much politeness about him—just to pull his freight without
a word of thanks. He may have left town for all I know.”
“He’s a strange man in some ways!”
“Well, if he’s gone, he’s thrown over the best chance he ever had in
his life. He didn’t have a cent when we picked him up. I think he was
a nut, that’s what I think he was, talking about starting a college
when he didn’t have the price of a pair of shoes to his name. Why, our
Company’d build him a half-dozen colleges if he’d come along with us.
I just wanted a little more talk with him, and here he’s gone, no one
knows where.”
“I gave him the name of a little school out in the town where I was
born—don’t you know—Brandon College?”
“Well, Brandon, Ohio, don’t happen to be on the map of New York or the
Cumberland Land and Mineral Company.” He was scowling, his red face
puffy, unlovable.
“Good-by,” he concluded abruptly. “I’ve got to get downtown to a
meeting—and I’ve got a hell of a lot of explaining to do. This
Kentucky friend of yours has put me in strictly Dutch.”
Without further salutation he turned to the hall door. She rose,
sighing, and passed out of the room.
At just about the moment that the foregoing conversation was taking
place in Haddon’s home, another interview was advancing, in the smoking
room of a west-bound passenger train heading from the city. Of the
speakers one was a grizzled old passenger conductor who had spent his
life on the line, who stood now regarding a tall raw-boned young man,
whom he had been obliged to accost for a second time, so much absorbed
did he seem in a certain book over which he was poring.
“_Tick_-ets, please!”
“Good mornin’,” said the young man, looking up. “I didn’t buy any
ticket, sir, because I didn’t have no money. They let me through the
gate in the crowd.”
“Well,” said the conductor, “you’ve no business here without one. Where
do you want to go?”
“I’m a-goin’ to Brandon, Ohio,” replied the young man, his fingers now
between the pages of his closed book. “I’ve got thirty-five cents to my
name.”
“Brandon, Ohio—on thirty-five cents! What do you think we are?”
“I didn’t expect ye to carry me all the way to Brandon fer that much,”
replied David Joslin. “I only wanted to git out into the aidge of town
if I could, so I could find work. Please put me down whar thar’s a
brickyard, an’ I kin work my way. I’m a-goin’ out thar to study to be a
preacher, ye see.”
The gray old railway conductor looked at him steadily for a time. There
was something so frank in the gray eyes that all he could do was to
shake his head. “I’ll see you when I’ve finished making my train,” he
growled, frowning; but he purposely delayed until after the train was
more than two hundred miles west of the city!
“Well, young man,” said he then, “I guess you’d better get off about
here. My run ends here. This is quite a manufacturing town, and you
can get work in a brickyard, or most any place, I should think. Lord
knows, labor’s scarce enough so that anyone can find work who really
wants to work.”
“I thank ye very much, sir,” said David Joslin, simply. “Ye’ve been
right kind to me. I believe the Lord will bless ye.”
The conductor, abashed, made no reply whatever, but stood looking after
him as he slowly strode up the station platform, his gaze this way and
that.
The kindly advice of the railroad man proved useful Before
mid-afternoon Joslin had once more engaged in day labor in one of the
brickyards of this place, a city devoted to manufacturing interests. He
was delighted to find that here his wages would be as much as a dollar
and a half a day. The foreman showed him a row of little buildings
where, among foreigners of all sorts, it might be possible to get
quarters and food sufficient to keep soul and body together. Here,
then, in a little room half lighted by flaring gas light, within the
sound of profanity and continuous card-playing, David Joslin sat down
for his first evening alone in the great world of the Outside.
He began his daily practice of copying the letters of the alphabet,
using a piece of brown paper which he had found, and the stub of a
broken pencil. Having completed a certain amount of this exercise,
he turned to the pages of his book, laboriously to read, as best he
could, the words of old John Calvin, written long ago, about Eve, and
the Garden, and the Serpent and the first great Sin.
He read until he slept even as he sat. But as he slept he dreamed and
started moaning. He felt on him all the weight of the original Sin.
BOOK II
CHAPTER XIII
THE CLANS
IN THE two years that passed after David Joslin left his home, no word
was received from him by any of his friends or his kin, even by his old
grandma left alone in the hill cabin. Even had he written, few could
have read. But no letter came to the little post-office. David Joslin
had vanished as though swallowed up by the great Outside. His enemies
sneeringly declared him dead or else “run out.” His friends had much to
do to keep their faith in him, Afterward a report came up from Windsor
that he had been seen there. None might know that David Joslin was
biding his time.
It was two years before a vague stirring came into the life of the
little settlement near which he had lived. Then, upon a certain day
of the late summer time, there came winding down the rugged pathways
of the Cumberland coves, along the rocky creek bottoms, and at length
along the well-beaten trails of the larger streams, little groups of
riders. For the most part they were tall and silent men, their eyes
watchful as they rode. All of them were armed. In many cases a woman
sat back of her husband on the family mule. It was a gathering of the
clans, and it was well known that in case a man were hurt, his own
women folks could nurse him better than anyone else. As for that, the
women of the mountains were as grim and savage as their lords and
masters.
Slowly, steadily, watchful, alert, these strange people of the
hills came riding down, the little threads of the broken procession
converging toward the Forks where, so went the vague word, there was
going to be a sort of meeting for a day or two—for what purpose, few
seemed to know. The general understanding was that this meeting was
to be held at the old mill building across the river. The village
postmaster and the village blacksmith had passed the assembly call
impartially.
There was other advice of import tacitly accepted, but, while it was
generally understood that there might be, and probably would be, a
reckoning between the tribes of the Gannts and the Joslins, those not
immediately concerned in the family quarrel treated both parties with
politeness. To carry word from one to the other would have been an
act of treason, and punishable by the unwritten law of that country.
Men went about their daily duties and talked little even to their own
families.
The single street of the little village—scarce half a hundred houses
and shops in all—was filled now with groups of men idly strolling,
every one of than armed, old and young. Among these were boys, some
not older than fifteen years, yet each confident in his own ability to
draw quick and hold straight, and longing for the chance. The fingers
of many a youth itched to get at the handle of the brand-new gun with
which before now he had practiced so faithfully, saving his coppers
for “hulls” to feed it. The older men strolled about unagitated. Group
passed group upon the street, each man staring into the eyes of his
enemy, his own face immobile, over his eye an impenetrable film—the
eye of the dangerous man.
Men who casually estimated the respective representation of the Joslins
and the Gannts thought there were forty or fifty men on each side. It
was doubted if half of these would ever get out of town unhurt. The
sheriff was somewhere far to the west, at the county seat. There was
no peace officer, nor would it have been a good place for one. It was
a meeting of the clans. The Cumberlands were going about their ancient
business in their own ancient way.
Some, fitfully interested, spoke of the new railway now advancing from
the Middle Fork up Hell-fer-Sartin. There was talk that a pike road had
been built in as far as the county seat from somewhere very far in the
west, as much as twenty miles. In a general way there seemed to hang
in the air an unsettled feeling, as though all knew great events yet
might happen. The war Outside—the railroad now impending—the old feud
now about to break aflame again—it was a grave time for these strange,
somber folk.
But a day passed, two days, and nothing broke. The leaders studiously
kept away from the young men all that fiery liquor which, would be
certain to set them beyond control. The tenseness of the long hours
began to tell on all. Men became restless—boys stood here and there
in groups, talking sullenly, looking this way and that, nodding a head
hither or yon. But after their old and usual fashion, the leaders of
both factions held them together—old Absalom Gannt and Chan Bullock
and their respective attendants. “Wait, fellers,” was the arresting
word that went around. “Come to the meetin’ at the mill.”
The main floor of the mill building at the Forks afforded a room
perhaps fifty feet in one dimension, low-ceiled and dark. The reticent
postmaster and the blacksmith had provided a few flickering lamps.
And finally thither, soon after twilight of the appointed day, the
mountaineers turned, group by group, man after man, silently, two score
Joslins and as many or more of the Gannts, all of them too proud to
stay away even though a stern mystery lay ahead. Every man of them
was armed, every one of them ready for what might come. The old mill
building, the only meeting place tacitly held neutral and the only
practical town hall available, bade fair to see red history this night.
And there was history done that very night. They had all gathered, the
men of both clans, thronging the dark interior. For half an hour they
had sat, silent and alert, squatting here or there on their heels,
slouching on sacks of grain or something of the sort. The Gannts were
on the left-hand side, the Joslins on the right, as one entered the
door. No one seemed to know what was expected. There still was mystery
as to what had brought them here. Perhaps the postmaster and the
blacksmith knew. If so, they would tell in time. That word had been
passed to the Gannts that the Joslins would be here, and to the Joslins
that the Gannts would come, was the only sure thing; and it was quite
enough.
The blacksmith and the postmaster passed here and there, setting
alight their lamps. No man spoke on either side. Both factions sat
looking across the little white-floored lane of No Man’s Land which
lay between them. A quick motion, a shout, the sound of a shot, would
have been fatal to half the men present here; but if any one of them
felt agitation, it was not manifest by any word or sign, by any paling
of the face or trembling of the hand. Unagitated, calm, they sat, each
with his eye on his own selected man, ready for what might happen.
What did happen was this: The door darkened against the pale
starlight. There stepped slowly into the interior, where the shadows
lay heavy upon the floor, the figure of a tall man.
It was a man whom they all knew. As he came into the circle lighted by
the lamps, a sort of sigh went up, audible in its united volume.
It was David Joslin!
Now they knew why they were to come here. The leader of the Joslins
had come back! That meant trouble. He had not died—everybody knew
that—everybody had heard from down the river that he had run out and
left the country. But now he had got courage to come back!
Yes, it meant trouble. The men on both sides eased off their pistol
belts, loosened their holsters, under pretense of settling their coat
tails or fumbling for tobacco.
But David Joslin raised his hand at once. “Wait!” said he. So, still
silent, still motionless, they sat and looked at him, many in contempt,
as many in judgment suspended.
He seemed thinner even than when he had left. His face bore a certain
scholarly whiteness visible even under the burning of the sun—Joslin
did not tell them so, but the truth was he had walked more than half
the way from Brandon College—where for two years he had slaved at
learning as no man in all the history of that school had been thought
able to slave. Penniless at his hopeless start, he still was penniless
after his overleaping of all rules and schedules and curricula. He had
walked to this, his great trial. In some way he had been fed. In his
own conviction that had been by direct act of God.
Better clad than when he had left, in a dark suit of clothing which did
not fit him ill, with shoes at least not badly broken, and with certain
touches of refinements of the civilization outside, none the less he
remained the mountain man they had known so well. But something in his
voice seemed different His diction had altered perceptibly, if not
consistently. He stood before them now at ease, a leader, a speaker,
even an orator of some sort, at least in the possession of that gift of
oratory which in simple terms commands the attention of an audience.
“Wait!” said David Joslin. “Don’t make any move. I know why you’re here
as well as you do, maybe a good deal better. I sent word in for you all
to come. I’ve asked you to come here myself—I arranged this meeting
with some of my friends here at the Forks. I wanted every moonshiner
and feudist in the mountains to be right here to-night, where I could
look him in the eye, and he could look me in the eye, and we could have
it out together.
“No! I don’t mean to have it out in the old way. I want to tell you
those times are past I see you sitting there, Absalom Gannt—I know
you’re not a-scared of me, and I’m not a-scared of you. You’re
fighting men, every one of you. And you’ve come here to fight each
other once more—to kill each other, just like you and I and our
fathers have been doing here in these mountains farther back than any
of us can remember. You don’t know why you do that, but you think you
ought to do it. It’s a sort of religion with us, just to kill each
other. We don’t know no better—we never have.
“You thought I was a coward because I didn’t tell anyone where I was
going. I didn’t tell any of my own people. In a way, I just sneaked out
of this country, that’s true, because I wasn’t yet sure about it all.
I went down the river. I got to the railroad. I went up North. After a
while I got so that I could go to school. That’s what taken me out of
the mountains.
“Before I left these hills I had resolved to learn how to read and
write and to cipher a little bit. I didn’t know then how much there was
to be learned in the world. I didn’t know how hard it was to start—nor
how easy once you get started.
“I’ve been at school less than a quarter of the time any boy of these
hills ought to have been there. I’ve learned more than I thought
there was to be learned anywhere. And this is the first thing I’ve
learned—that it’s time we mountaineers stopped raising our children
for the slaughter.
“I’ve learned that the only way to stop that sort of thing is by way
of schools. You know how my own father died, and he was a preacher.
I’m a-going to be a preacher myself some time—I’ve preached once or
twice—they made me, up North there. But I don’t want to preach now. I
just want to talk to my neighbors.
“Now, I didn’t run away. You know I won’t flicker. If it’s war, I’m
here for war—but I don’t want it to be war.
“Outside, in the Old World, where our great-grandpaps came from once,
maybe, they’re having war. It’s worse than any of you dream. But
they’re all fighting for a principle, as they think. We’re fighting for
nothing down here.
“Now, I want to see peace in the Cumberlands. I’m telling you, I want
to start a college right here, on the hill yonder. I’m going to do that
some time. Don’t you believe me?”
He was looking straight at old Absalom Gannt, and the old man, his eyes
fixed steadily upon the speaker, answered him now.
“What law have we got to believe ye? Ye’ve got no money to start a
school. Ye couldn’t keep a teacher thar if ye did.” Thus old Absalom.
“That’s true,” replied David Joslin quietly. “That’s the Gospel truth!
As I stand here now I haven’t got two dollars in my pockets. It’s plumb
taken all the money I’ve got to keep the soul alive in my body so I
could study hard as I had to. But when I do get through up there, I
promise you I’ll come here and start a college. Money or no money—help
or no help—I’ll come and start that college! If I do, will you promise
me that between now and that time you’ll not start any trouble here?”
The grizzled old man—leader of his people, therefore leader by
strength of mind as well as body—sat silent now, looking him straight
in the face, and Joslin returned his gaze with equal fearlessness.
“You know I never flickered, Absalom Gannt! You know my people won’t
run away, not one of them. You know I won’t run away. You all know why
I left; and now you know why I’ve come back.
“I’ve come here to do a mighty work, you’ll have to admit that fair.
It’s a terrible task for all of us. We’ve got to change the ways we’ve
been living here for more than a hundred years. We’ve got to break a
hole in this wall that shuts us out of the world where we belong, that
makes us children and paupers where we ought to be men and citizens.
We’ve got to make our own way out.
“Now, if I agree with you to make you a college, and keep it open—a
place where the children of these mountains can come to learn to read
and write and cipher, and maybe go higher than that—if I can bring
people here from the outside to show you what a big world it is that
you don’t know about—tell me, will you promise me to keep the peace
ontel I’ve succeeded or failed—ontel I’ve made good or ontel I’ve told
you I’m a failure?
“Oh, I haven’t got much,” he went on hurriedly. “I’ve had a hard
enough time up there—they laughed at me at first—I was ignorant as a
child—I was only a savage, a wild man, ignorant as any nigger in the
world—and wild—wild. And I was as big a sinner as any in the world—I
had a lot of things to forget—me trying to be a preacher. Oh! haven’t
I sinned! But I thought if I would come down here and get you all
together and promise you that if you didn’t like what I told you, you
could kill me here—it seemed to me it would part way make up for the
heap of sinning I’ve done in my life, young as I am.
“I’m a Joslin. You’re Gannts over there—you and your kinpeople. We’re
fine men, both families of us here. We can kill fifty fine men here in
three minutes. Or we can build a school up yonder on the hill, across
the river, inside of a couple of years. Which do you want to do?”
He stood silent for a long time, and all he heard was the heavy,
half-panting breathing of the men at his right, at his left. There was
not the shuffling of a foot, not the movement of a hand on either side.
The eyes of each faction were glued upon the faces of the other. A
tenser scene could not have been; nor could aught but starkest courage
have evoked and dared it.
There came a movement upon one side of the dimly lighted room. A
hundred hands went backward, a hundred pairs of eyes gleamed.
It was old Absalom Gannt who had moved. But his right hand went up
above his shoulder, above his head. And it was empty!
He rose slowly now to his full, gnarled height, and stood, his right
hand, empty, still above his head.
“Wait, boys!” he said. He turned and looked toward his right. Silently
as a cat in his motion, Chan Bullock had also risen. But as he saw
Absalom’s hand thrown up thus, he himself paused. The two faced one
another, each sternly gazing into the face of his foe.
Joslin himself stood motionless, looking from the one to the other, his
own hands dropped empty at his sides. He had spoken. But he knew that
the fate of the Cumberlands rested here on the decision of these two
men.
One false movement on the part of anyone, and the closed space had been
a shambles. But Bullock with a quick gesture threw his own right hand
above his head. He advanced toward old Absalom, the latter toward him,
steadily, grimly, each with boring eyes that never yet had “flickered.”
Then there was heard a strong and calm voice.
“Fer’s I’m concerned,” said old Absalom Gammt, “I’m through if ye
fellers air.”
“Suits me,” rejoined Bullock.
And so closed the meeting at the Forks of the Kentucky.
CHAPTER XIV
THE CROSSROADS
IF EVER was happy wayfarer, that was David Joslin, as now he held his
course back to the little Ohio village which had been his home these
past two years. He walked eagerly, hurrying as does a man who realizes
that there is much to be done with little time for the doing.
He had no staff nor scrip, nor needed any in the course of his journey
out from the Cumberlands to the edge of the great plateau. Here he
found the railway leading to the north, and followed its line as any
common tramp, for the good reason that he had not money for railway
fare. Certain gentry of the road he met, but they neither accepted him
as one of the guild, nor hindered him in his going, for they could not
classify this man who walked slightly stooped, with pale face, but with
long and steady stride, a man whose clothing betokened no luxury, but
who still had something about him which did not grade him as one of the
hopeless drifters of the world.
At a little town along the road another kindly railway conductor
lifted him far along his northern journey, so that presently he was
coming to the lower edge of what might have been called the North; for
now he approached the great Ohio River and its scattered string of
thriving communities. He had eaten only when he found the means to pay
for what he ate. Twice he found it necessary to stop in a little town
and work for a period of a day or so. Rarely did he sleep in a room. He
was still a man of the wilderness.
And he was happy, was David Joslin. For the first time, it seemed to
him, the clouds were lifting from his soul. Now, it seemed to him, he
had done something to offset his own sin.
Driving his worn body mercilessly, he was footsore and weary when at
length he arrived in one of the little towns on the banks of the Ohio
River, a junction point where all the north and south railway was
crossed by one of the greater systems running east and west, a place of
some five or six thousand inhabitants—one of those many communities
which have their own pretensions at metropolitanism, each like to a
thousand others.
Certain features of these centers of civilization still continued to
interest Joslin, a man of such extraordinary lack of opportunity.
He stood to-day, therefore, boylike, reading the lettering on the
Strattonville billboards which announced certain attractions in the
theaters and cinema houses for that evening. And he saw something which
caused him to flinch as though smitten.
He could not turn away from the great letters which he saw, two feet or
more, widely displayed.
POLLY PENDLETON! POLLY PENDLETON!
HER OWN COMPANY
DIRECT FROM HER GREAT BROADWAY SUCCESS
Polly Pendleton! Polly Pendleton! David Joslin knew not how many times
the name stood there in print. That a team of vaudeville artists had
grown into a certain vogue in the city; that this vogue had become,
for one of the performers, a sort of reputation; that a concert singer
had grown into being something of an actress, and the actress into
some sort of a star heading a company of her own; that this star and
her company—whether for reasons of success or lack of success—had
left the city to tour “the provinces”—David Joslin knew none of these
things. All he knew, or cared to know, or could understand, was that
without doubt she was here! She, the _corpus delicti_ of his sin!
As the criminal will return to the very place of his crime, so now
David Joslin found his feet going where he did not list. There came
into his soul a great recklessness. He forgot the occupation of his
last two years, forgot the long road before him. Independence,
prodigality, seized him as fully as it might any gilded youth. So,
since prodigality also is a wholly relative thing, David Joslin
bought him a ticket to the theater that night, repaired to a nearby
restaurant, and ate what was to him the most expensive meal of all his
life.
No longer the happy wayfarer, but an anxious, downcast and distraught
man, on his soul a shadow, he found his way to his seat—his first time
in any actual theater. The whirl of it all, the light, the warmth, the
color, the music, at first were things rather of torture to him. Where
was she?
But presently she came, bowing, smiling, light-footed—it was she, her
very self! Yes, these were her eyes, dark and large as ever. Her little
mouth, turned up a-corner, was as sweet as ever. Her dark hair curled
as it did that other time. Her straight young figure was the same, with
all its tender curves. Above all, her frank smile, her compelling air
of comradery, were just the same as then, that time, two years ago.
She had the same little habit of balancing up and down on her toes,
impatient for the music to give her her cue. Her little chuckling laugh
of sheer enjoyment in herself and in life was just the same. She was
still the very spirit of life and joy she had been yonder, two years
ago—two centuries ago it seemed to David Joslin! Then he had been
another man. And now—he was again that other man!
As to the play, so-called, it was nothing to him, and he knew not how
long it endured. The concordance of the strings and brasses meant
naught to-night, though otherwise they might have meant much indeed,
new as they were to his acquaintance. He sat mute, his eyes fixed
steadily upon one figure upon the stage, the sum total of the sensuous
appeal lost for him in the charm of its central figure.
And then, electric, a clash in the music touched him to the marrow. The
orchestra leader waved his baton. A few violins, a flute or two, struck
into the opening bars of an air that David Joslin knew!
Polly Pendleton was at that moment off-stage, but now ran tripping from
the wings, smiling, shrugging up her scant shoulder strap as she came.
Her violin was under her arm. She waved a hand to quiet the enthusiasm,
and played with the orchestra a few staves of the air.
“You’re the Only Man for Me”—that was what Polly Pendleton would play,
of course. Did not David Joslin know?
When she came to the chorus, she stepped down to the footlights and
extended her two round, white arms, bare to the shoulder—her slender,
up-curved little fingers reaching almost to the face of the bald-headed
leader of the orchestra, himself of a family of eight. To him she
sang, her eyes dark and pleading, her little feet tiptoeing, her
voice no less than blandishment itself—“For you are my Baby—you are
my Baby—you’re the only, only, _only_ man for me!” And then Polly
Pendleton laughed with her audience at the jest of it.
She ran off-stage, but must come back again, to be sure. This time
she raised her hands and her eyes to a solid-looking citizen, who sat
in a proscenium box—a banker and a leading figure of the town, it
chanced, well known to all in the audience. To him also, pleadingly,
bewitchingly, she asserted, “You’re the only, only, _only_ man for me!”
And so in time Polly Pendleton hitched up her shoulder-strap once more,
and ran off in her final exit.
David Joslin found himself, slightly reeling, passing out to the open
air with the others. Some men whistled, others bore copies of a song,
which they had purchased from the ushers at the door. He never could
remember how or why he went to the principal hotel. Certainly it was
not to find quarters for himself. Aimlessly he walked down the cross
hall of the lobby to another entrance; and so sheer accident favored
him.
He knew that the rustle of skirts at the door of the “ladies’ parlor”
meant the presence of the woman he sought—knew it by some strange
super-sense that came to him. A moment later Polly Pendleton herself
appeared at the door, looking across the hall to the open door of the
café upon the other side.
“All right, Jimmy,” she called out to someone beyond, invisible to
Joslin. “I’ll be in right away. Order me a milk-fed, won’t you, and a
bottle of pale—with you in just a minute.”
She stepped back into the parlor. Without announcement, Joslin followed
on in, and so once more found himself face to face with her.
She stepped back, startled, surprised, frightened almost. “Oh!” she
exclaimed; and then frowned. “I didn’t ask for anyone. Who are you?”
she demanded.
Then with a sudden revelation she remembered. Yes, pale and hot-eyed as
when she had seen him last; it was the same man, the wild man from the
mountains!
She could not quite evade him. “What do you want? How did you get in
here?” she gasped.
He did not answer at first, and she herself, not knowing what manner
of scene might be expected, resourcefully took him by the sleeve and
led him far over to the further corner, where a sofa afforded seats
for two. She pushed him down into one end of it, and moved as far as
possible into the other.
“You don’t remember me?” His voice was broken and hoarse. She nodded.
“Don’t talk so loud. They’ll hear us.”
He seemed unconscious of her warning.
“Why are you here?” he demanded, as though she owed him an explanation.
“Haven’t you seen? We’re playing here to-night This one-night business
is getting my goat.”
David Joslin stared at her. “I know—I saw it all. Sometimes a man’s
hard to manage.” His voice was savage.
“That’s the truth!” said Polly Pendleton. “I’m not big enough to throw
you out, and I don’t like to call the porter, but I’ve got to have my
supper before long. Have you had yours?”
“Yes. It cost me six bits. That’s the mostest I ever spent for one meal
in all my life.”
“Is that so?” said Polly wistfully. “I wish I could get mine down to
that scale! Sometimes it’s—well, rather more.”
“It left me thirty-five cents,” said David Joslin, smiling bitterly.
“Huh! That’s just about what you had the last time you saw me. Is it
the same thirty-five cents you had then?”
Again she laughed, and then rippled out in her irrepressible
generosity, her sympathy. “Poor chap!” said she. “Haven’t you got ahead
any farther than that in two years?” Polly Pendleton could not see any
suffering unmoved. She herself had lived.
“It’s odd,” she said, something of his old story coming back to her.
“You must be thirty-five or six, aren’t you?—or maybe forty?”
“Not yet quite thirty,” said he.
“And you said you were married?”
“I was—once.”
“Then what are you doing here? What were you doing there in my
apartments in New York? Don’t you ever stop to think?”
“I’ve stopped to think about everything in my life except this. But
now all that’s done. I’m not going back to school any more.” He looked
directly at her now.
“Why? What do you mean? Why do you say that? You talk foolish! Why,
listen, where do you get this sort of stuff, anyhow? What are you
making me out to be? Have I ever asked anything of you, I’d like to
know? What do I owe you, or you owe
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