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The Call of the Cumberlands

by Charles Neville Buck · English · Gutenberg #7776 · 529,679 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Call of the Cumberlands

Author: Charles Neville Buck


        
Release date: March 1, 2005 [eBook #7776]
                Most recently updated: December 30, 2020

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by Avinash Kothare, Tiffany Vergon, Charles Aldarondo, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CALL OF THE CUMBERLANDS ***




Produced by Avinash Kothare, Tiffany Vergon, Charles Aldarondo,
Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.




THE CALL OF THE CUMBERLANDS

BY

CHARLES NEVILLE BUCK




CHAPTER I


Close to the serried backbone of the Cumberland ridge through a sky of
mountain clarity, the sun seemed hesitating before its descent to the
horizon. The sugar-loaf cone that towered above a creek called Misery
was pointed and edged with emerald tracery where the loftiest timber
thrust up its crest plumes into the sun. On the hillsides it would be
light for more than an hour yet, but below, where the waters tossed
themselves along in a chorus of tiny cascades, the light was already
thickening into a cathedral gloom. Down there the "furriner" would have
seen only the rough course of the creek between moss-velveted and
shaded bowlders of titanic proportions. The native would have
recognized the country road in these tortuous twistings. Now there were
no travelers, foreign or native, and no sounds from living throats
except at intervals the clear "Bob White" of a nesting partridge, and
the silver confidence of the red cardinal flitting among the pines.
Occasionally, too, a stray whisper of breeze stole along the creek-bed
and rustled the beeches, or stirred in the broad, fanlike leaves of the
"cucumber trees." A great block of sandstone, to whose summit a man
standing in his saddle could scarcely reach his fingertips, towered
above the stream, with a gnarled scrub oak clinging tenaciously to its
apex. Loftily on both sides climbed the mountains cloaked in laurel and
timber.

Suddenly the leafage was thrust aside from above by a cautious hand,
and a shy, half-wild girl appeared in the opening. For an instant she
halted, with her brown fingers holding back the brushwood, and raised
her face as though listening. Across the slope drifted the call of the
partridge, and with perfect imitation she whistled back an answer. It
would have seemed appropriate to anyone who had seen her that she
should talk bird language to the birds. She was herself as much a wood
creature as they, and very young. That she was beautiful was not
strange. The women of the mountains have a morning-glory bloom--until
hardship and drudgery have taken toll of their youth--and she could not
have been more than sixteen.

It was June, and the hills, which would be bleakly forbidding barriers
in winter, were now as blithely young as though they had never known
the scourging of sleet or the blight of wind. The world was abloom, and
the girl, too, was in her early June, and sentiently alive with the
strength of its full pulse-tide. She was slim and lithely resilient of
step. Her listening attitude was as eloquent of pausing elasticity as
that of the gray squirrel. Her breathing was soft, though she had come
down a steep mountainside, and as fragrant as the breath of the elder
bushes that dashed the banks with white sprays of blossom. She brought
with her to the greens and grays and browns of the woodland's heart a
new note of color, for her calico dress was like the red cornucopias of
the trumpet-flower, and her eyes were blue like little scraps of sky.
Her heavy, brown-red hair fell down over her shoulders in loose
profusion. The coarse dress was freshly briar-torn, and in many places
patched; and it hung to the lithe curves of her body in a fashion which
told that she wore little else. She had no hat, but the same spirit of
childlike whimsey that caused her eyes to dance as she answered the
partridge's call had led her to fashion for her own crowning a headgear
of laurel leaves and wild roses. As she stood with the toes of one bare
foot twisting in the gratefully cool moss, she laughed with the sheer
exhilaration of life and youth, and started out on the table top of the
huge rock. But there she halted suddenly with a startled exclamation,
and drew instinctively back. What she saw might well have astonished
her, for it was a thing she had never seen before and of which she had
never heard. Now she paused in indecision between going forward toward
exploration and retreating from new and unexplained phenomena. In her
quick instinctive movements was something like the irresolution of the
fawn whose nostrils have dilated to a sense of possible danger.
Finally, reassured by the silence, she slipped across the broad face of
the flat rock for a distance of twenty-five feet, and paused again to
listen.

At the far edge lay a pair of saddlebags, such as form the only
practical equipment for mountain travelers. They were ordinary
saddlebags, made from the undressed hide of a brindle cow, and they
were fat with tight packing. A pair of saddlebags lying unclaimed at
the roadside would in themselves challenge curiosity. But in this
instance they gave only the prefatory note to a stranger story. Near
them lay a tin box, littered with small and unfamiliar-looking tubes of
soft metal, all grotesquely twisted and stained, and beside the box was
a strangely shaped plaque of wood, smeared with a dozen hues. That this
plaque was a painter's sketching palette was a thing which she could
not know, since the ways of artists had to do with a world as remote
from her own as the life of the moon or stars. It was one of those
vague mysteries that made up the wonderful life of "down below." Even
the names of such towns as Louisville and Lexington meant nothing
definite to this girl who could barely spell out, "The cat caught the
rat," in the primer. Yet here beside the box and palette stood a
strange jointed tripod, and upon it was some sort of sheet. What it all
meant, and what was on the other side of the sheet became a matter of
keenly alluring interest. Why had these things been left here in such
confusion? If there was a man about who owned them he would doubtless
return to claim them. Possibly he was wandering about the broken bed of
the creek, searching for a spring, and that would not take long. No one
drank creek water. At any moment he might return and discover her. Such
a contingency held untold terrors for her shyness, and yet to turn her
back on so interesting a mystery would be insupportable. Accordingly,
she crept over, eyes and ears alert, and slipped around to the front of
the queer tripod, with all her muscles poised in readiness for flight.

A half-rapturous and utterly astonished cry broke from her lips. She
stared a moment, then dropped to the moss-covered rock, leaning back on
her brown hands and gazing intently. She sat there forgetful of
everything except the sketch which stood on the collapsible easel.

"Hit's purty!" she approved, in a low, musical murmur. "Hit's plumb
dead _beautiful_!" Her eyes were glowing with delighted approval.

She had never before seen a picture more worthy than the chromos of
advertising calendars and the few crude prints that find their way into
the roughest places, and she was a passionate, though totally
unconscious, devotée of beauty. Now she was sitting before a sketch,
its paint still moist, which more severe critics would have pronounced
worthy of accolade. Of course, it was not a finished picture--merely a
study of what lay before her--but the hand that had placed these
brushstrokes on the academy board was the sure, deft hand of a master
of landscape, who had caught the splendid spirit of the thing, and
fixed it immutably in true and glowing appreciation. Who he was; where
he had gone; why his work stood there unfinished and abandoned, were
details which for the moment this half-savage child-woman forgot to
question. She was conscious only of a sense of revelation and awe. Then
she saw other boards, like the one upon the easel, piled near the paint
-box. These were dry, and represented the work of other days; but they
were all pictures of her own mountains, and in each of them, as in this
one, was something that made her heart leap.

To her own people, these steep hillsides and "coves" and valleys were
a matter of course. In their stony soil, they labored by day: and in
their shadows slept when work was done. Yet, someone had discovered
that they held a picturesque and rugged beauty; that they were not
merely steep fields where the plough was useless and the hoe must be
used. She must tell Samson: Samson, whom she held in an artless
exaltation of hero-worship; Samson, who was so "smart" that he thought
about things beyond her understanding; Samson, who could not only read
and write, but speculate on problematical matters.

Suddenly she came to her feet with a swift-darting impulse of alarm.
Her ear had caught a sound. She cast searching glances about her, but
the tangle was empty of humanity. The water still murmured over the
rocks undisturbed. There was no sign of human presence, other than
herself, that her eyes could discover--and yet to her ears came the
sound again, and this time more distinctly. It was the sound of a man's
voice, and it was moaning as if in pain. She rose and searched vainly
through the bushes of the hillside where the rock ran out from the
woods. She lifted her skirts and splashed her bare feet in the shallow
creek water, wading persistently up and down. Her shyness was
forgotten. The groan was a groan of a human creature in distress, and
she must find and succor the person from whom it came.

Certain sounds are baffling as to direction. A voice from overhead or
broken by echoing obstacles does not readily betray its source. Finally
she stood up and listened once more intently--her attitude full of
tense earnestness.

"I'm shore a fool," she announced, half-aloud. "I'm shore a plumb
fool." Then she turned and disappeared in the deep cleft between the
gigantic bowlder upon which she had been sitting and another--small
only by comparison. There, ten feet down, in a narrow alley littered
with ragged stones, lay the crumpled body of a man. It lay with the
left arm doubled under it, and from a gash in the forehead trickled a
thin stream of blood. Also, it was the body of such a man as she had
not seen before.




CHAPTER II


Although from the man in the gulch came a low groan mingled with his
breathing, it was not such a sound as comes from fully conscious lips,
but rather that of a brain dulled into coma. His lids drooped over his
eyes, hiding the pupils; and his cheeks were pallid, with outstanding
veins above the temples.

Freed from her fettering excess of shyness by his condition, the girl
stepped surely from foothold to foothold until she reached his side.
She stood for a moment with one hand on the dripping walls of rock,
looking down while her hair fell about her face. Then, dropping to her
knees, she shifted the doubled body into a leaning posture,
straightened the limbs, and began exploring with efficient fingers for
broken bones.

She was a slight girl, and not tall; but the curves of her young
figure were slimly rounded, and her firm muscles were capably strong.
This man was, in comparison with those rugged types she knew,
effeminately delicate. His slim, long-fingered hands reminded her of a
bird's claws. The up-rolled sleeves of a blue flannel shirt disclosed
forearms well-enough sinewed, but instead of being browned to the hue
of a saddle-skirt, they were white underneath and pinkly red above.
Moreover, they were scaling in the fashion of a skin not inured to
weather beating. Though the man had thought on setting out from
civilization that he was suiting his appearance to the environment, the
impression he made on this native girl was distinctly foreign. The
flannel shirt might have passed, though hardly without question, as
native wear, but the khaki riding-breeches and tan puttees were utterly
out of the picture, and at the neck of his shirt was a soft-blue tie!
--had he not been hurt, the girl must have laughed at that.

A felt hat lay in a puddle of water, and, except for a blond mustache,
the face was clean shaven and smooth of skin. Long locks of brown hair
fell away from the forehead. The helplessness and pallor gave an
exaggerated seeming of frailty.

Despite an ingrained contempt for weaklings, the girl felt, as she
raised the head and propped the shoulders, an intuitive friendliness
for the mysterious stranger.

She had found the left arm limp above the wrist, and her fingers had
diagnosed a broken bone. But unconsciousness must have come from the
blow on the head, where a bruise was already blackening, and a gash
still trickled blood.

She lifted her skirt, and tore a long strip of cotton from her single
petticoat. Then she picked her barefooted way swiftly to the creek-bed,
where she drenched the cloth for bathing and bandaging the wound. It
required several trips through the littered cleft, for the puddles
between the rocks were stale and brackish; but these journeys she made
with easy and untrammeled swiftness. When she had done what she could
by way of first aid, she stood looking down at the man, and shook her
head dubiously.

"Now ef I jest had a little licker," she mused. "Thet air what he
needs--a little licker!"

A sudden inspiration turned her eyes to the crest of the rock. She did
not go round by the path, but pulled herself up the sheer face by
hanging roots and slippery projections, as easily as a young squirrel.
On the flat surface, she began unstrapping the saddlebags, and, after a
few moments of rummaging among their contents, she smiled with
satisfaction. Her hand brought out a leather-covered flask with a
silver bottom. She held the thing up curiously, and looked at it. For a
little time, the screw top puzzled her. So, she sat down cross-legged,
and experimented until she had solved its method of opening.

Then, she slid over the side again, and at the bottom held the flask
up to the light. Through the side slits in the alligator-skin covering,
she saw the deep color of the contents; and, as she lifted the nozzle,
she sniffed contemptuously. Then, she took a sample draught herself--to
make certain that it was whiskey.

She brushed her lips scornfully with the back of her hand.

"Huh!" she exclaimed. "Hit hain't nothin' but red licker, but maybe
hit mout be better'n nuthin'." She was accustomed to seeing whiskey
freely drunk, but the whiskey she knew was colorless as water, and
sweetish to the palate.

She knew the "mountain dew" which paid no revenue tax, and which, as
her people were fond of saying, "mout make a man drunk, but couldn't
git him wrong." After tasting the "fotched-on" substitute, she gravely,
in accordance with the fixed etiquette of the hills, wiped the mouth of
the bottle on the palm of her hand, then, kneeling once more on the
stones, she lifted the stranger's head in her supporting arm, and
pressed the flask to his lips. After that, she chafed the wrist which
was not hurt, and once more administered the tonic. Finally, the man's
lids fluttered, and his lips moved. Then, he opened his eyes. He opened
them waveringly, and seemed on the point of closing them again, when he
became conscious of a curved cheek, suddenly coloring to a deep flush,
a few inches from his own. He saw in the same glance a pair of wide
blue eyes, a cloud of brown-red hair that fell down and brushed his
face, and he felt a slender young arm about his neck and shoulders.

"Hello!" said the stranger, vaguely. "I seem to have----" He broke
off, and his lips smiled. It was a friendly, understanding smile, and
the girl, fighting hard the shy impulse to drop his shoulders, and flee
into the kind masking of the bushes, was in a measure reassured.

"You must hev fell offen the rock," she enlightened.

"I think I might have fallen into worse circumstances," replied the
unknown.

"I reckon you kin set up after a little."

"Yes, of course." The man suddenly realized that although he was quite
comfortable as he was, he could scarcely expect to remain permanently
in the support of her bent arm. He attempted to prop himself on his
hurt hand, and relaxed with a twinge of extreme pain. The color, which
had begun to creep back into his cheeks, left them again, and his lips
compressed themselves tightly to bite off an exclamation of suffering.

"Thet thar left arm air busted," announced the young woman, quietly.
"Ye've got ter be heedful."

Had one of her own men hurt himself, and behaved stoically, it would
have been mere matter of course; but her eyes mirrored a pleased
surprise at the stranger's good-natured nod and his quiet refusal to
give expression to pain. It relieved her of the necessity for contempt.

"I'm afraid," apologized the painter, "that I've been a great deal of
trouble to you."

Her lips and eyes were sober as she replied.

"I reckon thet's all right."

"And what's worse, I've got to be more trouble. Did you see anything
of a brown mule?"

She shook her head.

"He must have wandered off. May I ask to whom I'm indebted for this
first aid to the injured?"

"I don't know what ye means."

She had propped him against the rocks, and sat near-by, looking into
his face with almost disconcerting steadiness; her solemn-pupiled eyes
were unblinking, unsmiling. Unaccustomed to the gravity of the
mountaineer in the presence of strangers, he feared that he had
offended her. Perhaps his form of speech struck her as affected.

"Why, I mean who are you?" he laughed.

"I hain't nobody much. I jest lives over yon."

"But," insisted the man, "surely you have a name."

She nodded.

"Hit's Sally."

"Then, Miss Sally, I want to thank you."

Once more she nodded, and, for the first time, let her eyes drop,
while she sat nursing her knees. Finally, she glanced up, and asked
with plucked-up courage:

"Stranger, what mout yore name be?"

"Lescott--George Lescott."

"How'd ye git hurt?"

He shook his head.

"I was painting--up there," he said; "and I guess I got too absorbed
in the work. I stepped backward to look at the canvas, and forgot where
the edge was. I stepped too far."

"Hit don't hardly pay a man ter walk backward in these hyar
mountings," she told him. The painter looked covertly up to see if at
last he had discovered a flash of humor. He had the idea that her lips
would shape themselves rather fascinatingly in a smile, but her pupils
mirrored no mirth. She had spoken in perfect seriousness.

The man rose to his feet, but he tottered and reeled against the wall
of ragged stone. The blow on his head had left him faint and dizzy. He
sat down again.

"I'm afraid," he ruefully admitted, "that I'm not quite ready for
discharge from your hospital."

"You jest set where yer at." The girl rose, and pointed up the
mountainside. "I'll light out across the hill, and fotch Samson an' his
mule."

"Who and where is Samson?" he inquired. He realized that the bottom of
the valley would shortly thicken into darkness, and that the way out,
unguided, would become impossible. "It sounds like the name of a strong
man."

"I means Samson South," she enlightened, as though further description
of one so celebrated would be redundant. "He's over thar 'bout three
quarters."

"Three quarters of a mile?"

She nodded. What else could three quarters mean?

"How long will it take you?" he asked.

She deliberated. "Samson's hoein' corn in the fur-hill field. He'll
hev ter cotch his mule. Hit mout tek a half-hour."

Lescott had been riding the tortuous labyrinths that twisted through
creek bottoms and over ridges for several days. In places two miles an
hour had been his rate of speed, though mounted and following so-called
roads. She must climb a mountain through the woods. He thought it
"mout" take longer, and his scepticism found utterance.

"You can't do it in a half-hour, can you?"

"I'll jest take my foot in my hand, an' light out." She turned, and
with a nod was gone. The man rose, and made his way carefully over to a
mossy bank, where he sat down with his back against a century-old tree
to wait.

The beauty of this forest interior had first lured him to pause, and
then to begin painting. The place had not treated him kindly, as the
pain in his wrist reminded.

No, but the beauty was undeniable. A clump of rhododendron, a little
higher up, dashed its pale clusters against a background of evergreen
thicket, and a catalpa tree loaned the perfume of its white blossoms
with their wild little splashes of crimson and purple and orange to the
incense which the elder bushes were contributing.

Climbing fleetly up through steep and tangled slopes, and running as
fleetly down; crossing a brawling little stream on a slender trunk of
fallen poplar; the girl hastened on her mission. Her lungs drank the
clear air in regular tireless draughts. Once only, she stopped and drew
back. There was a sinister rustle in the grass, and something glided
into her path and lay coiled there, challenging her with an ominous
rattle, and with wicked, beady eyes glittering out of a swaying, arrow
-shaped head. Her own eyes instinctively hardened, and she glanced
quickly about for a heavy piece of loose timber. But that was only for
an instant, then she took a circuitous course, and left her enemy in
undisputed possession of the path.

"I hain't got no time ter fool with ye now, old rattlesnake," she
called back, as she went. "Ef I wasn't in sech a hurry, I'd shore bust
yer neck."

At last, she came to a point where a clearing rose on the mountainside
above her. The forest blanket was stripped off to make way for a fenced-
in and crazily tilting field of young corn. High up and beyond, close
to the bald shoulders of sandstone which threw themselves against the
sky, was the figure of a man. As the girl halted at the foot of the
field, at last panting from her exertions, he was sitting on the rail
fence, looking absently down on the outstretched panorama below him. It
is doubtful whether his dreaming eyes were as conscious of what he saw
as of other things which his imagination saw beyond the haze of the
last far rim. Against the fence rested his abandoned hoe, and about him
a number of lean hounds scratched and dozed in the sun. Samson South
had little need of hounds; but, in another century, his people, turning
their backs on Virginia affluence to invite the hardships of pioneer
life, had brought with them certain of the cavaliers' instincts. A
hundred years in the stagnant back-waters of the world had brought to
their descendants a lapse into illiteracy and semi-squalor, but through
it all had fought that thin, insistent flame of instinct. Such a
survival was the boy's clinging to his hounds. Once, they had
symbolized the spirit of the nobility; the gentleman's fondness for his
sport with horse and dog and gun. Samson South did not know the origin
of his fondness for this remnant of a pack. He did not know that in the
long ago his forefathers had fought on red fields with Bruce and the
Stuarts. He only knew that through his crudities something indefinable,
yet compelling, was at war with his life, filling him with great and
shapeless longings. He at once loved and resented these ramparts of
stone that hemmed in his hermit race and world.

He was not, strictly speaking, a man. His age was perhaps twenty. He
sat loose-jointed and indolent on the top rail of the fence, his hands
hanging over his knees: his hoe forgotten. His feet were bare, and his
jeans breeches were supported by a single suspender strap. Pushed well
to the back of his head was a battered straw hat, of the sort rurally
known as the "ten-cent jimmy." Under its broken brim, a long lock of
black hair fell across his forehead. So much of his appearance was
typical of the Kentucky mountaineer. His face was strongly individual,
and belonged to no type. Black brows and lashes gave a distinctiveness
to gray eyes so clear as to be luminous. A high and splendidly molded
forehead and a squarely blocked chin were free of that degeneracy which
marks the wasting of an in-bred people. The nose was straight, and the
mouth firm yet mobile. It was the face of the instinctive philosopher,
tanned to a hickory brown. In a stature of medium size, there was still
a hint of power and catamount alertness. If his attitude was at the
moment indolent, it was such indolence as drowses between bursts of
white-hot activity; a fighting man's aversion to manual labor which,
like the hounds, harked back to other generations. Near-by, propped
against the rails, rested a repeating rifle, though the people would
have told you that the truce in the "South-Hollman war" had been
unbroken for two years, and that no clansman need in these halcyon days
go armed afield.




CHAPTER III


Sally clambered lightly over the fence, and started on the last stage
of her journey, the climb across the young corn rows. It was a field
stood on end, and the hoed ground was uneven; but with no seeming of
weariness her red dress flashed steadfastly across the green spears,
and her voice was raised to shout: "Hello, Samson!"

The young man looked up and waved a languid greeting. He did not
remove his hat or descend from his place of rest, and Sally, who
expected no such attention, came smilingly on. Samson was her hero. It
seemed quite appropriate that one should have to climb steep
acclivities to reach him. Her enamored eyes saw in the top rail of the
fence a throne, which she was content to address from the ground level.
That he was fond of her and meant some day to marry her she knew, and
counted herself the most favored of women. The young men of the
neighboring coves, too, knew it, and respected his proprietary rights.
If he treated her with indulgent tolerance instead of chivalry, he was
merely adopting the accepted attitude of the mountain man for the
mountain woman, not unlike that of the red warrior for his squaw.
Besides, Sally was still almost a child, and Samson, with his twenty
years, looked down from a rank of seniority. He was the legitimate head
of the Souths, and some day, when the present truce ended, would be
their war-leader with certain blood debts to pay. Since his father had
been killed by a rifle shot from ambush, he had never been permitted to
forget that, and, had he been left alone, he would still have needed no
other mentor than the rankle in his heart.

But, if Samson sternly smothered the glint of tenderness which, at
sight of her, rose to his eyes, and recognized her greeting only in
casual fashion, it was because such was the requirement of his stoic
code. And to the girl who had been so slow of utterance and diffident
with the stranger, words now came fast and fluently as she told her
story of the man who lay hurt at the foot of the rock.

"Hit hain't long now tell sundown," she urged. "Hurry, Samson, an' git
yore mule. I've done give him my promise ter fotch ye right straight
back."

Samson took off his hat, and tossed the heavy lock upward from his
forehead. His brow wrinkled with doubts.

"What sort of lookin' feller air he?"

While Sally sketched a description, the young man's doubt grew graver.

"This hain't no fit time ter be takin' in folks what we hain't
acquainted with," he objected. In the mountains, any time is the time
to take in strangers unless there are secrets to be guarded from
outside eyes.

"Why hain't it?" demanded the girl. "He's hurt. We kain't leave him
layin' thar, kin we?"

Suddenly, her eyes caught sight of the rifle leaning near-by, and
straightway they filled with apprehension. Her militant love would have
turned to hate for Samson, should he have proved recreant to the
mission of reprisal in which he was biding his time, yet the coming of
the day when the truce must end haunted her thoughts. Heretofore, that
day had always been to her remotely vague--a thing belonging to the
future. Now, with a sudden and appalling menace, it seemed to loom
across the present. She came close, and her voice sank with her sinking
heart.

"What air hit?" she tensely demanded. "What air hit, Samson? What fer
hev ye fetched yer gun ter the field?"

The boy laughed. "Oh, hit ain't nothin' pertic'ler," he reassured.
"Hit hain't nothin' fer a gal ter fret herself erbout, only I kinder
suspicions strangers jest now."

"Air the truce busted?" She put the question in a tense, deep-breathed
whisper, and the boy replied casually, almost indifferently.

"No, Sally, hit hain't jest ter say busted, but 'pears like hit's
right smart cracked. I reckon, though," he added in half-disgust,
"nothin' won't come of hit."

Somewhat reassured, she bethought herself again of her mission.

"This here furriner hain't got no harm in him, Samson," she pleaded.
"He 'pears ter be more like a gal than a man. He's real puny. He's got
white skin and a bow of ribbon on his neck--an' he paints pictchers."

The boy's face had been hardening with contempt as the description
advanced, but at the last words a glow came to his eyes, and he
demanded almost breathlessly:

"Paints pictchers? How do ye know that?"

"I seen 'em. He was paintin' one when he fell offen the rock and
busted his arm. It's shore es beautiful es--" she broke off, then added
with a sudden peal of laughter--"es er pictcher."

The young man slipped down from the fence, and reached for the rifle.
The hoe he left where it stood.

"I'll git the nag," he announced briefly, and swung off without
further parley toward the curling spiral of smoke that marked a cabin a
quarter of a mile below. Ten minutes later, his bare feet swung against
the ribs of a gray mule, and his rifle lay balanced across the
unsaddled withers. Sally sat mountain fashion behind him, facing
straight to the side.

So they came along the creek bed and into the sight of the man who
still sat propped against the mossy rock. As Lescott looked up, he
closed the case of his watch, and put it back into his pocket with a
smile.

"Snappy work, that!" he called out. "Just thirty-three minutes. I
didn't believe it could be done."

Samson's face was mask-like, but, as he surveyed the foreigner, only
the ingrained dictates of the country's hospitable code kept out of his
eyes a gleam of scorn for this frail member of a sex which should be
stalwart.

"Howdy?" he said. Then he added suspiciously: "What mout yer business
be in these parts, stranger?"

Lescott gave the odyssey of his wanderings, since he had rented a mule
at Hixon and ridden through the country, sketching where the mood
prompted and sleeping wherever he found a hospitable roof at the coming
of the evening.

"Ye come from over on Crippleshin?" The boy flashed the question with
a sudden hardening of the voice, and, when he was affirmatively
answered, his eyes contracted and bored searchingly into the stranger's
face.

"Where'd ye put up last night?"

"Red Bill Hollman's house, at the mouth of Meeting House Fork; do you
know the place?"

Samson's reply was curt.

"I knows hit all right."

There was a moment's pause--rather an awkward pause. Lescott's mind
began piecing together fragments of conversation he had heard, until he
had assembled a sort of mental jig-saw puzzle.

The South-Hollman feud had been mentioned by the more talkative of his
informers, and carefully tabooed by others--notable among them his host
of last night. It now dawned on him that he was crossing the boundary
and coming as the late guest of a Hollman to ask the hospitality of a
South.

"I didn't know whose house it was," he hastened to explain, "until I
was benighted, and asked for lodging. They were very kind to me. I'd
never seen them before. I'm a stranger hereabouts."

Samson only nodded. If the explanation failed to satisfy him, it at
least seemed to do so.

"I reckon ye'd better let me holp ye up on thet old mule," he said;
"hit's a-comin' on ter be night."

With the mountaineer's aid, Lescott clambered astride the mount, then
he turned dubiously.

"I'm sorry to trouble you," he ventured, "but I have a paint box and
some materials up there. If you'll bring them down here, I'll show you
how to pack the easel, and, by the way," he anxiously added, "please
handle that fresh canvas carefully--by the edge--it's not dry yet."

He had anticipated impatient contempt for his artist's impedimenta,
but to his surprise the mountain boy climbed the rock, and halted
before the sketch with a face that slowly softened to an expression of
amazed admiration. Finally, he took up the square of academy board with
a tender care of which his rough hands would have seemed incapable, and
stood stock still, presenting an anomalous figure in his rough clothes
as his eyes grew almost idolatrous. Then, he brought the landscape over
to its creator, and, though no word was spoken, there flashed between
the eyes of the artist, whose signature gave to a canvas the value of a
precious stone and the jeans-clad boy whose destiny was that of the
vendetta, a subtle, wordless message. It was the countersign of
brothers-in-blood who recognize in each other the bond of a mutual
passion.

The boy and the girl, under Lescott's direction, packed the outfit,
and stored the canvas in the protecting top of the box. Then, while
Sally turned and strode down creek in search of Lescott's lost mount,
the two men rode up stream in silence. Finally. Samson spoke slowly and
diffidently.

"Stranger," he ventured, "ef hit hain't askin' too much, will ye let
me see ye paint one of them things?"

"Gladly," was the prompt reply.

Then, the boy added covertly:

"Don't say nothin' erbout hit ter none of these folks. They'd devil me."

The dusk was falling now, and the hollows choking with murk. Over the
ridge, the evening star showed in a lonely point of pallor. The peaks,
which in a broader light had held their majestic distances, seemed with
the falling of night to draw in and huddle close in crowding herds of
black masses. The distant tinkling of a cow-bell came drifting down the
breeze with a weird and fanciful softness.

"We're nigh home now," said Samson at the end of some minutes' silent
plodding. "Hit's right beyond thet thar bend."

Then, they rounded a point of timber, and came upon a small party of
men whose attitudes even in the dimming light conveyed a subtle
suggestion of portent. Some sat their horses, with one leg thrown
across the pommel. Others stood in the road, and a bottle of white
liquor was passing in and out among them. At the distance they
recognized the gray mule, though even the fact that it carried a double
burden was not yet manifest.

"Thet you, Samson?" called an old man's voice, which was still very
deep and powerful.

"Hello, Unc' Spicer!" replied the boy.

Then, followed a silence unbroken until the mule reached the group,
revealing that besides the boy another man--and a strange man--had
joined their number.

"Evenin', stranger," they greeted him, gravely; then again they fell
silent, and in their silence was evident constraint.

"This hyar man's a furriner," announced Samson, briefly. "He fell
offen a rock, an' got hurt. I 'lowed I'd fotch him home ter stay all
night."

The elderly man who had hailed the boy nodded, but with an evident
annoyance. It seemed that to him the others deferred as to a commanding
officer. The cortege remounted and rode slowly toward the house. At
last, the elderly man came alongside the mule, and inquired:

"Samson, where was ye last night?"

"Thet's my business."

"Mebbe hit hain't." The old mountaineer spoke with no resentment, but
deep gravity. "We've been powerful oneasy erbout ye. Hev ye heered the
news?"

"What news?" The boy put the question non-committally.

"Jesse Purvy was shot soon this morning."

The boy vouchsafed no reply.

"The mail-rider done told hit.... Somebody shot five shoots from the
laurel.... Purvy hain't died yit.... Some says as how his folks has
sent ter Lexington fer bloodhounds."

The boy's eyes began to smolder hatefully.

"I reckon," he spoke slowly, "he didn't git shot none too soon."

"Samson!" The old man's voice had the ring of determined authority.
"When I dies, ye'll be the head of the Souths, but so long es I'm
a-runnin' this hyar fam'ly, I keeps my word ter friend an' foe alike.
I reckon Jesse Purvy knows who got yore pap, but up till now no South
hain't never busted no truce."

The boy's voice dropped its softness, and took on a shrill crescendo
of excitement as he flashed out his retort.

"Who said a South has done busted the truce this time?"

Old Spencer South gazed searchingly at his nephew.

"I hain't a-wantin' ter suspicion ye, Samson, but I know how ye feels
about yore pap. I heered thet Bud Spicer come by hyar yistiddy plumb
full of liquor, an' 'lowed he'd seed Jesse an' Jim Asberry a-talkin'
tergether jest afore yore pap was kilt." He broke off abruptly, then
added: "Ye went away from hyar last night, an' didn't git in twell
atter sun-up--I just heered the news, an' come ter look fer ye."

"Air you-all 'lowin' thet I shot them shoots from the laurel?"
inquired Samson, quietly.

"Ef we-all hain't 'lowin' hit, Samson, we're plumb shore thet Jesse
Purvy's folks will 'low hit. They're jest a-holdin' yore life like a
hostage fer Purvy's, anyhow. Ef he dies, they'll try ter git ye."

The boy flashed a challenge about the group, which was now drawing
rein at Spicer South's yard fence. His eyes were sullen, but he made no
answer.

One of the men who had listened in silence now spoke:

"In the fust place, Samson, we hain't a-sayin' ye done hit. In the
nex' place, ef ye did do hit, we hain't a-blamin' ye--much. But I
reckon them dawgs don't lie, an', ef they trails in hyar, ye'll need
us. Thet's why we've done come."

The boy slipped down from his mule, and helped Lescott to dismount. He
deliberately unloaded the saddlebags and kit, and laid them on the top
step of the stile, and, while he held his peace, neither denying nor
affirming, his kinsmen sat their horses and waited.

Even to Lescott, it was palpable that some of them believed the young
heir to clan leadership responsible for the shooting of Jesse Purvy,
and that others believed him innocent, yet none the less in danger of
the enemy's vengeance. But, regardless of divided opinion, all were
alike ready to stand at his back, and all alike awaited his final
utterance.

Then, in the thickening gloom, Samson turned at the foot of the stile,
and faced the gathering. He stood rigid, and his eyes flashed with deep
passion. His hands, hanging at the seams of his jeans breeches,
clenched, and his voice came in a slow utterance through which throbbed
the tensity of a soul-absorbing bitterness.

"I knowed all 'bout Jesse Purvy's bein' shot.... When my pap lay a-dyin'
over thar at his house, I was a little shaver ten years old ... Jesse
Purvy hired somebody ter kill him ... an' I promised my pap that I'd
find out who thet man was, an' thet I'd git 'em both--some day. So help
me, God Almighty, I'm a-goin' ter git 'em both--some day!" The boy
paused and lifted one hand as though taking an oath.

"I'm a-tellin' you-all the truth.... But I didn't shoot them shoots
this mornin'. I hain't no truce-buster. I gives ye my hand on hit....
Ef them dawgs comes hyar, they'll find me hyar, an' ef they hain't
liars, they'll go right on by hyar. I don't 'low ter run away, an' I
don't 'low ter hide out. I'm agoin' ter stay right hyar. Thet's all
I've got ter say ter ye."

For a moment, there was no reply. Then, the older man nodded with a
gesture of relieved anxiety.

"Thet's all we wants ter know, Samson," he said, slowly. "Light, men,
an' come in."




CHAPTER IV


In days when the Indian held the Dark and Bloody Grounds a pioneer,
felling oak and poplar logs for the home he meant to establish on the
banks of a purling water-course, let his axe slip, and the cutting edge
gashed his ankle. Since to the discoverer belongs the christening, that
water-course became Cripple-shin, and so it is to-day set down on atlas
pages. A few miles away, as the crow flies, but many weary leagues as a
man must travel, a brother settler, racked with rheumatism, gave to his
creek the name of Misery. The two pioneers had come together from
Virginia, as their ancestors had come before them from Scotland.
Together, they had found one of the two gaps through the mountain wall,
which for more than a hundred miles has no other passable rift.
Together, and as comrades, they had made their homes, and founded their
race. What original grievance had sprung up between their descendants
none of the present generation knew--perhaps it was a farm line or
disputed title to a pig. The primary incident was lost in the limbo of
the past; but for fifty years, with occasional intervals of truce,
lives had been snuffed out in the fiercely burning hate of these men
whose ancestors had been comrades.

Old Spicer South and his nephew Samson were the direct lineal
descendants of the namer of Misery. Their kinsmen dwelt about them: the
Souths, the Jaspers, the Spicers, the Wileys, the Millers and McCagers.
Other families, related only by marriage and close association, were,
in feud alignment, none the less "Souths." And over beyond the ridge,
where the springs and brooks flowed the other way to feed Crippleshin,
dwelt the Hollmans, the Purvies, the Asberries, the Hollises and the
Daltons--men equally strong in their vindictive fealty to the code of
the vendetta.

By mountain standards, old Spicer South was rich. His lands had been
claimed when tracts could be had for the taking, and, though he had to
make his cross mark when there was a contract to be signed, his
instinctive mind was shrewd and far seeing. The tinkle of his cow-bells
was heard for a long distance along the creek bottoms. His hillside
fields were the richest and his coves the most fertile in that country.
His house had several rooms, and, except for those who hated him and
whom he hated, he commanded the respect of his fellows. Some day, when
a railroad should burrow through his section, bringing the development
of coal and timber at the head of the rails, a sleeping fortune would
yawn and awake to enrich him. There were black outcrop-pings along the
cliffs, which he knew ran deep in veins of bituminous wealth. But to
that time he looked with foreboding, for he had been raised to the
standards of his forefathers, and saw in the coming of a new régime a
curtailment of personal liberty. For new-fangled ideas he held only the
aversion of deep-rooted prejudice. He hoped that he might live out his
days, and pass before the foreigner held his land, and the Law became a
power stronger than the individual or the clan. The Law was his enemy,
because it said to him, "Thou shalt not," when he sought to take the
yellow corn which bruising labor had coaxed from scattered rock-strewn
fields to his own mash-vat and still. It meant, also, a tyrannous power
usually seized and administered by enemies, which undertook to forbid
the personal settlement of personal quarrels. But his eyes, which could
not read print, could read the signs of the times He foresaw the
inevitable coming of that day. Already, he had given up the worm and
mash-vat, and no longer sought to make or sell illicit liquor. That was
a concession to the Federal power, which could no longer be
successfully fought. State power was still largely a weapon in
factional hands, and in his country the Hollmans were the
officeholders. To the Hollmans, he could make no concessions. In
Samson, born to be the fighting man, reared to be the fighting man,
equipped by nature with deep hatreds and tigerish courage, there had
cropped out from time to time the restless spirit of the philosopher
and a hunger for knowledge. That was a matter in which the old man
found his bitterest and most secret apprehension.

It was at this house that George Lescott, distinguished landscape
painter of New York and the world-at-large, arrived in the twilight.
His first impression was received in shadowy evening mists that gave a
touch of the weird. The sweep of the stone-guarded well rose in a yard
tramped bare of grass. The house itself, a rambling structure of logs,
with additions of undressed lumber, was without lights. The cabin,
which had been the pioneer nucleus, still stood windowless and with mud
-daubed chimney at the center. About it rose a number of tall poles
surmounted by bird-boxes, and at its back loomed the great hump of the
mountain.

Whatever enemy might have to be met to-morrow, old Spicer South
recognized as a more immediate call upon his attention the wounded
guest of to-day. One of the kinsmen proved to have a rude working
knowledge of bone-setting, and before the half-hour had passed,
Lescott's wrist was in a splint, and his injuries as well tended as
possible, which proved to be quite well enough.

By that time, Sally's voice was heard shouting from the stile, and
Sally herself appeared with the announcement that she had found and
brought in the lost mule.

As Lescott looked at her, standing slight and willowy in the
thickening darkness, among the big-boned and slouching figures of the
clansmen, she seemed to shrink from the stature of a woman into that of
a child, and, as she felt his eyes on her, she timidly slipped farther
back into the shadowy door of the cabin, and dropped down on the sill,
where, with her hands clasped about her knees, she gazed curiously at
himself. She did not speak, but sat immovable with her thick hair
falling over her shoulders. The painter recognized that even the
interest in him as a new type could not for long keep her eyes from
being drawn to the face of Samson, where they lingered, and in that
magnetism he read, not the child, but the woman.

Samson was plainly restive from the moment of her arrival, and, when a
monosyllabic comment from the taciturn group threatened to reveal to
the girl the threatened outbreak of the feud, he went over to her, and
inquired:

"Sally, air ye skeered ter go home by yeself?"

As she met the boy's eyes, it was clear that her own held neither
nervousness nor fear, and yet there was something else in them--the
glint of invitation. She rose from her seat.

"I hain't ter say skeered," she told him, "but, ef ye wants ter walk
as fur as the stile, I hain't a-keerin'."

The youth rose, and, taking his hat and rifle, followed her.

Lescott was happily gifted with the power of facile adaptation, and he
unobtrusively bent his efforts toward convincing his new acquaintances
that, although he was alien to their ways, he was sympathetic and to be
trusted. Once that assurance was given, the family talk went on much as
though he had been absent, and, as he sat with open ears, he learned
the rudiments of the conditions that had brought the kinsmen together
in Samson's defense.

At last, Spicer South's sister, a woman who looked older than himself,
though she was really younger, appeared, smoking a clay pipe, which she
waved toward the kitchen.

"You men kin come in an' eat," she announced; and the mountaineers,
knocking the ashes from their pipes, trailed into the kitchen.

The place was lit by the fire in a cavernous hearth where the cooking
was still going forward with skillet and crane. The food, coarse and
greasy, but not unwholesome, was set on a long table covered with
oilcloth. The roughly clad men sat down with a scraping of chair legs,
and attacked their provender in businesslike silence.

The corners of the room fell into obscurity. Shadows wavered against
the sooty rafters, and, before the meal ended, Samson returned and
dropped without comment into his chair. Afterward, the men trooped
taciturnly out again, and resumed their pipes.

A whippoorwill sent his mournful cry across the tree-tops, and was
answered. Frogs added the booming of their tireless throats. A young
moon slipped across an eastern mountain, and livened the creek into a
soft shimmer wherein long shadows quavered. The more distant line of
mountains showed in a mist of silver, and the nearer heights in blue
-gray silhouette. A wizardry of night and softness settled like a
benediction, and from the dark door of the house stole the quaint
folklore cadence of a rudely thrummed banjo. Lescott strolled over to
the stile with every artist instinct stirred. This nocturne of silver
and gray and blue at once soothed and intoxicated his imagination. His
fingers were itching for a brush.

Then, he heard a movement at his shoulder, and, turning, saw the boy
Samson with the moonlight in his eyes, and, besides the moonlight, that
sparkle which is the essence of the dreamer's vision. Once more, their
glances met and flashed a countersign.

"Hit hain't got many colors in hit," said the boy, slowly, indicating
with a sweep of his hand the symphony about them, "but somehow what
there is is jest about the right ones. Hit whispers ter a feller, the
same as a mammy whispers ter her baby." He paused, then eagerly asked:
"Stranger, kin you look at the sky an' the mountings an' hear 'em
singin'--with yore eyes?"

The painter felt a thrill of astonishment. It seemed incredible that
the boy, whose rude descriptives reflected such poetry of feeling,
could be one with the savage young animal who had, two hours before,
raised his hand heavenward, and reiterated his oath to do murder in
payment of murder.

"Yes," was his slow reply, "every painter must do that. Music and
color are two expressions of the same thing--and the thing is Beauty."

The mountain boy made no reply, but his eyes dwelt on the quivering
shadows in the water; and Lescott asked cautiously, fearing to wake him
from the dreamer to the savage:

"So you are interested in skies and hills and their beauties, too, are
you?"

Samson's laugh was half-ashamed, half-defiant.

"Sometimes, stranger," he said, "I 'lows that I hain't much interested
in nothin' else."

That there dwelt in the lad something which leaped in response to the
clarion call of beauty, Lescott had read in that momentary give and
take of their eyes down there in the hollow earlier in the afternoon.
But, since then, the painter had seen the other and sterner side, and
once more he was puzzled and astonished. Now, he stood anxiously hoping
that the boy would permit himself further expression, yet afraid to
prompt, lest direct questions bring a withdrawal again into the shell
of taciturnity. After a few moments of silence, he slowly turned his
head, and glanced at his companion, to find him standing rigidly with
his elbows resting on the top palings of the fence. He had thrown his
rough hat to the ground, and his face in the pale moonlight was raised.
His eyes under the black mane of hair were glowing deeply with a fire
of something like exaltation, as he gazed away. It was the expression
of one who sees things hidden to the generality; such a light as burns
in the eyes of artists and prophets and fanatics, which, to the
uncomprehending, seems almost a fire of madness. Samson must have felt
Lescott's scrutiny, for he turned with a half-passionate gesture and
clenched fists. His face, as he met the glance of the foreigner was
sullen, and then, as though in recognition of a brother-spirit, his
expression softened, and slowly he began to speak.

"These folks 'round hyar sometimes 'lows I hain't much better'n an
idjit because--because I feels that-away. Even Sally"--he caught
himself, then went on doggedly--"even Sally kain't see how a man kin
keer about things like skies and the color of the hills, ner the way
ther sunset splashes the sky clean acrost its aidge, ner how the
sunrise comes outen the dark like a gal a-blushin'. They 'lows thet a
man had ought ter be studyin' 'bout other things."

He paused, and folded his arms, and his strong fingers grasped his
tensed biceps until the knuckles stood out, as he went on:

"I reckon they hain't none of them thet kin hate harder'n me. I reckon
they hain't none of 'em thet is more plumb willin' ter fight them
thet's rightful enemies, an' yit hit 'pears ter me as thet hain't no
reason why a man kain't feel somethin' singin' inside him when Almighty
God builds hills like them"--he swept both hands out in a wide circle--
"an' makes 'em green in summer, an' lets 'em blaze in red an' yaller in
ther fall, an' hangs blue skies over 'em an' makes ther sun shine, an'
at night sprinkles 'em with stars an' a moon like thet!" Again, he
paused, and his eyes seemed to ask the corroboration which they read in
the expression and nod of the stranger from the mysterious outside
world. Then, Samson South spread his hands in a swift gesture of
protest, and his voice hardened in timbre as he went on:

"But these folks hyarabouts kain't understand thet. All they sees in
the laurel on the hillside, an' the big gray rocks an' the green trees,
is breshwood an' timber thet may be hidin' their enemies, or places ter
hide out an' lay-way some other feller. I hain't never seen no other
country. I don't know whether all places is like these hyar mountings
er not, but I knows thet the Lord didn't 'low fer men ter live blind,
not seein' no beauty in nothin'; ner not feelin' nothin' but hate an'
meanness--ner studyin' 'bout nothin' but deviltry. There hain't no
better folks nowhar then my folks, an' thar hain't no meaner folks
nowhar then them damned Hollmans, but thar's times when hit 'pears ter
me thet the Lord Almighty hain't plumb tickled ter death with ther way
things goes hyar along these creeks and coves."

Samson paused, and suddenly the glow died out of his eyes. His
features instantly reshaped themselves into their customary mold of
stoical hardness. It occurred to him that his outburst had been a long
one and strangely out of keeping with his usual taciturnity, and he
wondered what this stranger would think of him.

The stranger was marveling. He was seeing in the crude lad at his side
warring elements that might build into a unique and strangely
interesting edifice of character, and his own speech as he talked there
by the palings of the fence in the moonlight was swiftly establishing
the foundations of a comradeship between the two.

"Thar's something mighty quare about ye, stranger," said the boy at
last, half-shyly. "I been wonderin' why I've talked ter ye like this. I
hain't never talked that-away with no other man. Ye jest seemed ter
kind of compel me ter do hit. When I says things like thet ter Sally,
she gits skeered of me like ef I was plumb crazy, an', ef I talked that-
away to the menfolks 'round hyar they'd be sartain I was an idjit."

"That," said Lescott, gravely, "is because they don't understand. I do."

"I kin lay awake nights," said Samson, "an' see them hills and mists
an' colors the same es ef they was thar in front of my eyes--an' I kin
seem ter hear 'em as well as see 'em."

The painter nodded, and his voice fell into low quotation:

  "'The scarlet of the maple can shake me like the cry
  "Of bugles going by.'"

The boy's eyes deepened. To Lescott, the thought of bugles conjured up
a dozen pictures of marching soldiery under a dozen flags. To Samson
South, it suggested only one: militia guarding a battered courthouse,
but to both the simile brought a stirring of pulses.

Even in June, the night mists bring a touch of chill to the mountains,
and the clansmen shortly carried their chairs indoors. The old woman
fetched a pan of red coals from the kitchen, and kindled the logs on
the deep hearth. There was no other light, and, until the flames
climbed to roaring volume, spreading their zone of yellow brightness,
only the circle about the fireplace emerged from the sooty shadows. In
the four dark corners of the room were four large beds, vaguely seen,
and from one of them still came the haunting monotony of the banjo.

Suddenly, out of the silence, rose Samson's voice, keyed to a stubborn
note, as though anticipating and challenging contradiction.

"Times is changin' mighty fast. A feller thet grows up plumb ign'rant
ain't a-goin' ter have much show."

Old Spicer South drew a contemplative puff at his pipe.

"Ye went ter school twell ye was ten year old, Samson. Thet's a heap
more schoolin' then I ever had, an' I've done got along all right."

"Ef my pap had lived"--the boy's voice was almost accusing--"I'd hev
lamed more then jest ter read an' write en figger a little."

"I hain't got no use fer these newfangled notions." Spicer spoke with
careful curbing of his impatience. "Yore pap stood out fer eddycation.
He had ideas about law an' all that, an' he talked 'em. He got shot ter
death. Yore Uncle John South went down below, an' got ter be a lawyer.
He come home hyar, an' ondertook ter penitentiary Jesse Purvy, when
Jesse was High Sheriff. I reckon ye knows what happened ter him."

Samson said nothing and the older man went on:

"They aimed ter run him outen the mountings."

"They didn't run him none," blazed the boy. "He didn't never leave the
mountings."

"No." The family head spoke with the force of a logical climax. "He'd
done rented a house down below though, an' was a-fixin' ter move. He
staid one day too late. Jesse Purvy hired him shot."

"What of hit?" demanded Samson.

"Yore cousin, Bud Spicer, was eddicated. He 'lowed in public thet
Micah Hollman an' Jesse Purvy was runnin' a murder partnership.
Somebody called him ter the door of his house in the night-time ter
borry a lantern--an' shot him ter death."

"What of hit?"

"Thar's jist this much of hit. Hit don't seem ter pay the South family
ter go a-runnin' attar newfangled idees. They gets too much notion of
goin' ter law--an' thet's plumb fatal. Ye'd better stay where ye
b'longs, Samson, an' let good enough be."

"Why hain't ye done told about all the rest of the Souths thet didn't
hev no eddication," suggested the youngest South, "thet got killed off
jest as quick as them as had hit?"




CHAPTER V


While Spicer South and his cousins had been sustaining themselves or
building up competences by tilling their soil, the leaders of the other
faction were basing larger fortunes on the profits of merchandise and
trade. So, although Spicer South could neither read nor write, his
chief enemy, Micah Hollman, was to outward seeming an urbane and fairly
equipped man of affairs. Judged by their heads, the clansmen were
rougher and more illiterate on Misery, and in closer touch with
civilization on Crippleshin. A deeper scrutiny showed this seeming to
be one of the strange anomalies of the mountains.

Micah Hollman had established himself at Hixon, that shack town which
had passed of late years from feudal county seat to the section's one
point of contact with the outside world; a town where the ancient and
modern orders brushed shoulders; where the new was tolerated, but dared
not become aggressive. Directly across the street from the court-house
stood an ample frame building, on whose side wall was emblazoned the
legend: "Hollman's Mammoth Department Store." That was the secret
stronghold of Hollman power. He had always spoken deploringly of that
spirit of lawlessness which had given the mountains a bad name. He
himself, he declared, believed that the best assets of any community
were tenets of peace and brotherhood. Any mountain man or foreigner who
came to town was sure of a welcome from Judge Micah Hollman, who added
to his title of storekeeper that of magistrate.

As the years went on, the proprietor of the "Mammoth Department Store"
found that he had money to lend and, as a natural sequence, mortgages
stored away in his strong box. To the cry of distress, he turned a
sympathetic ear. His infectious smile and suave manner won him fame as
"the best-hearted man in the mountains." Steadily and unostentatiously,
his fortune fattened.

When the railroad came to Hixon, it found in Judge Hollman a "public-
spirited citizen." Incidentally, the timber that it hauled and the coal
that its flat cars carried down to the Bluegrass went largely to his
consignees. He had so astutely anticipated coming events that, when the
first scouts of capital sought options, they found themselves
constantly referred to Judge Hollman. No wheel, it seemed, could turn
without his nod. It was natural that the genial storekeeper should
become the big man of the community and inevitable that the one big man
should become the dictator. His inherited place as leader of the
Hollmans in the feud he had seemingly passed on as an obsolete
prerogative.

Yet, in business matters, he was found to drive a hard bargain, and
men came to regard it the part of good policy to meet rather than
combat his requirements. It was essential to his purposes that the
officers of the law in his county should be in sympathy with him.
Sympathy soon became abject subservience. When a South had opposed
Jesse Purvy in the primary as candidate for High Sheriff, he was found
one day lying on his face with a bullet-riddled body. It may have been
a coincidence which pointed to Jim Asberry, the judge's nephew, as the
assassin. At all events, the judge's nephew was a poor boy, and a
charitable Grand Jury declined to indict him.

In the course of five years, several South adherents, who had crossed
Hollman's path, became victims of the laurel ambuscade. The theory of
coincidence was strained. Slowly, the rumor grew and persistently
spread, though no man would admit having fathered it, that before each
of these executions star-chamber conferences had been held in the rooms
above Micah Hollman's "Mammoth Department Store." It was said that
these exclusive sessions were attended by Judge Hollman, Sheriff Purvy
and certain other gentlemen selected by reason of their marksmanship.
When one of these victims fell, John South had just returned from a law
school "down below," wearing "fotched-on" clothing and thinking
"fotched-on" thoughts. He had amazed the community by demanding the
right to assist in probing and prosecuting the affair. He had then
shocked the community into complete paralysis by requesting the Grand
Jury to indict not alone the alleged assassin, but also his employers,
whom he named as Judge Hollman and Sheriff Purvy. Then, he, too, fell
under a bolt from the laurel.

That was the first public accusation against the bland capitalist, and
it carried its own prompt warning against repetition. The Judge's High
Sheriff and chief ally retired from office, and went abroad only with a
bodyguard. Jesse Purvy had built his store at a cross roads twenty-five
miles from the railroad. Like Hollman, he had won a reputation for open
-handed charity, and was liked--and hated. His friends were legion. His
enemies were so numerous that he apprehended violence not only from the
Souths, but also from others who nursed grudges in no way related to
the line of feud cleavage. The Hollman-Purvy combination had retained
enough of its old power to escape the law's retribution and to hold its
dictatorship, but the efforts of John South had not been altogether
bootless. He had ripped away two masks, and their erstwhile wearers
could no longer hold their old semblance of law-abiding
philanthropists. Jesse Purvy's home was the show place of the country
side. To the traveler's eye, which had grown accustomed to hovel life
and squalor, it offered a reminder of the richer Bluegrass. Its walls
were weather-boarded and painted, and its roof two stories high.
Commodious verandahs looked out over pleasant orchards, and in the same
enclosure stood the two frame buildings of his store--for he, too,
combined merchandise with baronial powers. But back of the place rose
the mountainside, on which Purvy never looked without dread. Twice, its
impenetrable thickets had spat at him. Twice, he had recovered from
wounds that would have taken a less-charmed life. And in grisly
reminder of the terror which clouded the peace of his days stood the
eight-foot log stockade at the rear of the place which the proprietor
had built to shield his daily journeys between house and store. But
Jesse Purvy was not deluded by his escapes. He knew that he was "marked
down." For years, he had seen men die by his own plotting, and he
himself must in the end follow by a similar road. Rumor had it that he
wore a shirt of mail, certain it is that he walked in the expectancy of
death.

"Why don't you leave the mountains?" strangers had asked; and to each
of them Purvy had replied with a shrug of his shoulders and a short
laugh: "This is where I belong."

But the years of strain were telling on Jesse Purvy. The robust, full-
blooded face was showing deep lines; his flesh was growing flaccid; his
glance tinged with quick apprehension. He told his intimates that he
realized "they'd get him," yet he sought to prolong his term of escape.

The creek purled peacefully by the stile; the apple and peach trees
blossomed and bore fruit at their appointed time, but the householder,
when he walked between his back door and the back door of the store,
hugged his stockade, and hurried his steps.

Yesterday morning, Jesse Purvy had risen early as usual, and, after a
satisfying breakfast, had gone to his store to arrange for the day's
business. One or two of his henchmen, seeming loafers, but in reality a
bodyguard, were lounging within call. A married daughter was chatting
with her father while her young baby played among the barrels and
cracker boxes.

The daughter went to a rear window, and gazed up at the mountain. The
cloudless skies were still in hiding behind a curtain of mist. The
woman was idly watching the vanishing fog wraiths, and her father came
over to her side. Then, the baby cried, and she stepped back. Purvy
himself remained at the window. It was a thing he did not often do. It
left him exposed, but the most cautiously guarded life has its moments
of relaxed vigilance. He stood there possibly thirty seconds, then a
sharp fusillade of clear reports barked out and was shattered by the
hills into a long reverberation. With a hand clasped to his chest,
Purvy turned, walked to the middle of the floor, and fell.

The henchmen rushed to the open sash. They leaped out, and plunged up
the mountain, tempting the assassin's fire, but the assassin was
satisfied. The mountain was again as quiet as it had been at dawn. Its
impenetrable mask of green was blank and unresponsive. Somewhere in the
cool of the dewy treetops a squirrel barked. Here and there, the birds
saluted the sparkle and freshness of June. Inside, at the middle of the
store, Jesse Purvy shifted his head against his daughter's knee, and
said, as one stating an expected event:

"Well, they've got me."

An ordinary mountaineer would have been carried home to die in the
darkness of a dirty and windowless shack. The long-suffering star of
Jesse Purvy ordained otherwise. He might go under or he might once more
beat his way back and out of the quicksands of death. At all events, he
would fight for life to the last gasp.

Twenty miles away in the core of the wilderness, removed from a
railroad by a score of semi-perpendicular miles, a fanatic had once
decided to found a school. The fact that the establishment in this
place of such a school as his mind pictured was sheer madness and
impossibility did not in the least deter him. It was a thing that could
not be done, and it was a thing that he had done none the less.

Now a faculty of ten men, like himself holding degrees of Masters of
Dreams, taught such as cared to come such things as they cared to
learn. Substantial two-and three-storied buildings of square-hewn logs
lay grouped in a sort of Arts and Crafts village around a clean-clipped
campus. The Stagbone College property stretched twenty acres square at
the foot of a hill. The drone of its own saw-mill came across the
valley. In a book-lined library, wainscoted in natural woods of three
colors, the original fanatic often sat reflecting pleasurably on his
folly. Higher up the hillside stood a small, but model, hospital, with
a modern operating table and a case of surgical instruments, which, it
was said, the State could not surpass. These things had been the gifts
of friends who liked such a type of God-inspired madness. A "fotched-on"
trained nurse was in attendance. From time to time, eminent Bluegrass
surgeons came to Hixon by rail, rode twenty miles on mules, and held
clinics on the mountainside.

To this haven, Jesse Purvy, the murder lord, was borne in a litter
carried on the shoulders of his dependents. Here, as his steadfast
guardian star decreed, he found two prominent medical visitors, who
hurried him to the operating table. Later, he was removed to a white
bed, with the June sparkle in his eyes, pleasantly modulated through
drawn blinds, and the June rustle and bird chorus in his ears--and his
own thoughts in his brain.

Conscious, but in great pain, Purvy beckoned Jim Asberry and Aaron
Hollis, his chiefs of bodyguard, to his bedside, and waved the nurse
back out of hearing.

"If I don't get well," he said, feebly, "there's a job for you two
boys. I reckon you know what it is?"

They nodded, and Asberry whispered a name:

"Samson South?"

"Yes," Purvy spoke in a weak whisper; but the old vindictiveness was
not smothered. "You got the old man, I reckon you can manage the cub.
If you don't, he'll get you both one day."

The two henchmen scowled.

"I'll git him to-morrer," growled Asberry. "Thar hain't no sort of use
in a-waitin'."

"No!" For an instant Purvy's voice rose out of its weakness to its old
staccato tone of command, a tone which brought obedience. "If I get
well, I have other plans. Never mind what they are. That's my business.
If I don't die, leave him alone, until I give other orders." He lay
back and fought for breath. The nurse came over with gentle insistence,
ordering quiet, but the man, whose violent life might be closing, had
business yet to discuss with his confidential vassals. Again, he waved
her back.

"If I get well," he went on, "and Samson South is killed meanwhile, I
won't live long either. It would be my life for his. Keep close to him.
The minute you hear of my death--get him." He paused again, then
supplemented, "You two will find something mighty interestin' in my
will."

It was afternoon when Purvy reached the hospital, and, at nightfall of
the same day, there arrived at his store's entrance, on stumbling, hard
-ridden mules, several men, followed by two tawny hounds whose long ears
flapped over their lean jaws, and whose eyes were listless and tired,
but whose black muzzles wrinkled and sniffed with that sensitive
instinct which follows the man-scent. The ex-sheriff's family were
instituting proceedings independent of the Chief's orders. The next
morning, this party plunged into the mountain tangle, and beat the
cover with the bloodhounds in leash.

The two gentle-faced dogs picked their way between the flowering
rhododendrons, the glistening laurels, the feathery pine sprouts and
the moss-covered rocks. They went gingerly and alertly on ungainly,
cushioned feet. Just as their masters were despairing, they came to a
place directly over the store, where a branch had been bent back and
hitched to clear the outlook, and where a boot heel had crushed the
moss. There one of them raised his nose high into the air, opened his
mouth, and let out a long, deep-chested bay of discovery.




CHAPTER VI


George Lescott had known hospitality of many brands and degrees. He
had been the lionized celebrity in places of fashion. He had been the
guest of equally famous brother artists in the cities of two
hemispheres, and, since sincere painting had been his pole-star, he had
gone where his art's wanderlust beckoned. His most famous canvas,
perhaps, was his "Prayer Toward Mecca," which hangs in the
Metropolitan. It shows, with a power that holds the observer in a
compelling grip, the wonderful colors of a sunset across the desert.
One seems to feel the renewed life that comes to the caravan with the
welcome of the oasis. One seems to hear the grunting of the kneeling
camels and the stirring of the date palms. The Bedouins have spread
their prayer-rugs, and behind them burns the west. Lescott caught in
that, as he had caught in his mountain sketches, the broad spirit of
the thing. To paint that canvas, he had endured days of racking camel
-travel and burning heat and thirst. He had followed the lure of
transitory beauty to remote sections of the world. The present trip was
only one of many like it, which had brought him into touch with varying
peoples and distinctive types of life. He told himself that never had
he found men at once so crude and so courteous as these hosts, who,
facing personal perils, had still time and willingness to regard his
comfort.

They could not speak grammatically; they could hardly offer him the
necessities of life, yet they gave all they had, with a touch of
courtliness.

In a fabric soiled and threadbare, one may sometimes trace the
tarnished design that erstwhile ran in gold through a rich pattern.
Lescott could not but think of some fine old growth gone to seed and
decay, but still bearing at its crest a single beautiful blossom while
it held in its veins a poison.

Such a blossom was Sally. Her scarlet lips and sweet, grave eyes might
have been the inheritance gift of some remote ancestress whose feet,
instead of being bare and brown, had trod in high-heeled, satin
slippers. When Lord Fairfax governed the Province of Virginia, that
first Sally, in the stateliness of panniered brocades and powdered
hair, may have tripped a measure to the harpsichord or spinet. Certain
it is she trod with no more untrammeled grace than her wild descendant.
For the nation's most untamed and untaught fragment is, after all, an
unamalgamated stock of British and Scottish bronze, which now and then
strikes back to its beginning and sends forth a pure peal from its
corroded bell-metal. In all America is no other element whose blood is
so purely what the Nation's was at birth.

The coming of the kinsmen, who would stay until the present danger
passed, had filled the house. The four beds in the cabin proper were
full, and some slept on floor mattresses. Lescott, because a guest and
wounded, was given a small room aside. Samson, however, shared his
quarters in order to perform any service that an injured man might
require. It had been a full and unusual day for the painter, and its
incidents crowded in on him in retrospect and drove off the possibility
of sleep. Samson, too, seemed wakeful, and in the isolation of the dark
room the two men fell into conversation, which almost lasted out the
night. Samson went into the confessional. This was the first human
being he had ever met to whom he could unburden his soul.

The thirst to taste what knowledge lay beyond the hills; the unnamed
wanderlust that had at times brought him a restiveness so poignant as
to be agonizing; the undefined attuning of his heart to the beauty of
sky and hill; these matters he had hitherto kept locked in guilty
silence. To the men of his clan these were eccentricities bordering on
the abnormal; frailties to be passed over with charity, as one would
pass over the infirmities of an afflicted child. To Samson they looked
as to a sort of feud Messiah. His destiny was stern, and held no place
for dreams. For him, they could see only danger in an insatiable hunger
for learning. In a weak man, a school-teacher or parson sort of a man,
that might be natural, but this young cock of their walk was being
reared for the pit--for conflict. What was important in him was
stamina, and sharp strength of spur. These qualities he had proven from
infancy. Weakening proclivities must be eliminated.

So, the boy had been forced to keep throttled impulses that, for being
throttled, had smoldered and set on fire the inner depths of his soul.
During long nights, he had secretly digested every available book. Yet,
in order to vindicate himself from the unspoken accusation of growing
weak, of forgetting his destiny, he had courted trouble, and sought
combat. He was too close to his people's point of view for perspective.
He shared their idea that the thinking man weakens himself as a
fighting man. He had never heard of a Cyrano de Bergerac, or an Aramis.
Now had come some one with whom he could talk: a man who had traveled
and followed, without shame, the beckoning of Learning and Beauty. At
once, the silent boy found himself talking intimately, and the artist
found himself studying one of the strangest human paradoxes he had yet
seen.

In a cove, or lowland pocket, stretching into the mountainside, lay
the small and meager farm of the Widow Miller. The Widow Miller was a
"South"; that is to say she fell, by tie of marriage, under the
protection of the clan-head. She lived alone with her fourteen-year-old
son and her sixteen-year-old daughter. The daughter was Sally. At
sixteen, the woman's figure had been as pliantly slim, her step as
light as was her daughter's now. At forty, she was withered. Her face
was hard, and her lips had forgotten how to smile. Her shoulders
sagged, and she was an old woman, who smoked her pipe, and taught her
children that rudimentary code of virtue to which the mountains
subscribe. She believed in a brimstone hell and a personal devil. She
believed that the whale had swallowed Jonah, but she thought that "Thou
shalt not kill" was an edict enunciated by the Almighty with mental
reservations.

The sun rose on the morning after Lescott arrived, the mists lifted,
and the cabin of the Widow Miller stood revealed. Against its corners
several hogs scraped their bristled backs with satisfied grunts. A
noisy rooster cocked his head inquiringly sidewise before the open
door, and, hopping up to the sill, invaded the main room. A towsled
-headed boy made his way to the barn to feed the cattle, and a red patch
of color, as bright and tuneful as a Kentucky cardinal, appeared at the
door between the morning-glory vines. The red patch of color was Sally.

She made her way, carrying a bucket, to the spring, where she knelt
down and gazed at her own image in the water. Her grave lips broke into
a smile, as the reflected face, framed in its mass of reflected red
hair, gazed back at her. Then, the smile broke into a laugh.

"Hello, Sally Miller!" she gaily accosted her picture-self. "How air
ye this mornin', Sally Miller?"

She plunged her face deep in the cool spring, and raised it to shake
back her hair, until the water flew from its masses. She laughed again,
because it was another day, and because she was alive. She waded about
for a while where the spring joined the creek, and delightedly watched
the schools of tiny, almost transparent, minnows that darted away at
her coming. Then, standing on a rock, she paused with her head bent,
and listened until her ears caught the faint tinkle of a cowbell, which
she recognized. Nodding her head joyously, she went off into the woods,
to emerge at the end of a half-hour later, carrying a pail of milk, and
smiling joyously again--because it was almost breakfast time.

But, before going home, she set down her bucket by the stream, and,
with a quick glance toward the house to make sure that she was not
observed, climbed through the brush, and was lost to view. She followed
a path that her own feet had made, and after a steep course upward,
came upon a bald face of rock, which stood out storm-battered where a
rift went through the backbone of the ridge. This point of vantage
commanded the other valley. From its edge, a white oak, dwarfed, but
patriarchal, leaned out over an abrupt drop. No more sweeping or
splendid view could be had within miles, but it was not for any reason
so general that Sally had made her pilgrimage. Down below, across the
treetops, were a roof and a chimney from which a thread of smoke rose
in an attenuated shaft. That was Spicer South's house, and Samson's
home. The girl leaned against the gnarled bowl of the white oak, and
waved toward the roof and chimney. She cupped her hands, and raised
them to her lips like one who means to shout across a great distance,
then she whispered so low that only she herself could hear:

"Hello, Samson South!"

She stood for a space looking down, and forgot to laugh, while her
eyes grew religiously and softly deep, then, turning, she ran down the
slope. She had performed her morning devotions.

That day at the house of Spicer South was an off day. The kinsmen who
had stopped for the night stayed on through the morning. Nothing was
said of the possibility of trouble. The men talked crops, and tossed
horseshoes in the yard; but no one went to work in the fields, and all
remained within easy call. Only young Tamarack Spicer, a raw-boned
nephew, wore a sullen face, and made a great show of cleaning his rifle
and pistol. He even went out in the morning, and practised at target
-shooting, and Lescott, who was still very pale and weak, but able to
wander about at will, gained the impression that in young Tamarack he
was seeing the true type of the mountain "bad-man." Tamarack seemed
willing to feed that idea, and admitted apart to Lescott that, while he
obeyed the dictates of the truce, he found them galling, and was
straining at his leash.

"I don't take nothin' offen nobody," he sullenly confided. "The
Hollmans gives me my half the road."

Shortly after dinner, he disappeared, and, when the afternoon was well
advanced, Samson, too, with his rifle on his arm, strolled toward the
stile. Old Spicer South glanced up, and removed his pipe from his mouth
to inquire:

"Whar be ye a-goin'?"

"I hain't a-goin' fur," was the non-committal response.

"Meybe hit mout be a good idea ter stay round clost fer a spell." The
old man made the suggestion casually, and the boy replied in the same
fashion.

"I hain't a-goin' ter be outen sight."

He sauntered down the road, but, when he had passed out of vision, he
turned sharply into the woods, and began climbing. His steps carried
him to the rift in the ridge where the white oak stood sentinel over
the watch-tower of rock. As he came over the edge from one side, his
bare feet making no sound, he saw Sally sitting there, with her hands
resting on the moss and her eyes deeply troubled. She was gazing
fixedly ahead, and her lips were trembling. At once Samson's face grew
black. Some one had been making Sally unhappy. Then, he saw beyond her
a standing figure, which the tree trunk had hitherto concealed. It was
the loose-knitted figure of young Tamarack Spicer.

"In course," Spicer was saying, "we don't 'low Samson shot Jesse
Purvy, but them Hollmans'll 'spicion him, an' I heered just now, thet
them dawgs was trackin' straight up hyar from the mouth of Misery.
They'll git hyar against sundown."

Samson leaped violently forward. With one hand, he roughly seized his
cousin's shoulder, and wheeled him about.

"Shet up!" he commanded. "What damn fool stuff hev ye been tellin'
Sally?"

For an instant, the two clansmen stood fronting each other. Samson's
face was set and wrathful. Tamarack's was surly and snarling. "Hain't I
got a license ter tell Sally the news?" he demanded.

"Nobody hain't got no license," retorted the younger man in the quiet
of cold anger, "ter tell Sally nothin' thet'll fret her."

"She air bound ter know, hit all pretty soon. Them dawgs----"

"Didn't I tell ye ter shet up?" Samson clenched his fists, and took a
step forward. "Ef ye opens yore mouth again, I'm a-goin' ter smash hit.
Now, git!"

Tamarack Spicer's face blackened, and his teeth showed. His right hand
swept to his left arm-pit. Outwardly he seemed weaponless, but Samson
knew that concealed beneath the hickory shirt was a holster, worn
mountain fashion.

"What air ye a-reachin' atter, Tam'rack?" he inquired, his lips
twisting in amusement.

"Thet's my business."

"Well, get hit out--or git out yeself, afore I throws ye offen the
clift."

Sally showed no symptoms of alarm. Her confidence in her hero was
absolute. The boy lifted his hand, and pointed off down the path.
Slowly and with incoherent muttering, Spicer took himself away. Then
only did Sally rise. She came over, and laid a hand on Samson's
shoulder. In her blue eyes, the tears were welling.

"Samson," she whispered, "ef they're atter ye, come ter my house. I
kin hide ye out. Why didn't ye tell me Jesse Purvy'd done been shot?"

"Hit tain't nothin' ter fret about, Sally," he assured her. He spoke
awkwardly, for he had been trained to regard emotion as unmanly. "Thar
hain't no danger."

She gazed searchingly into his eyes, and then, with a short sob, threw
her arms around him, and buried her face on his shoulder.

"Ef anything happens ter ye, Samson," she said, brokenly, "hit'll jest
kill me. I couldn't live withouten ye, Samson. I jest couldn't do hit!"

The boy took her in his arms, and pressed her close. His eyes were
gazing off over her bent head, and his lips twitched. He drew his
features into a scowl, because that was the only expression with which
he could safeguard his feelings. His voice was husky.

"I reckon, Sally," he said, "I couldn't live withouten you, neither."

The party of men who had started at morning from Jesse Purvy's store
had spent a hard day. The roads followed creek-beds, crossing and
recrossing waterways in a fashion that gave the bloodhounds a hundred
baffling difficulties. Often, their noses lost the trail, which had at
first been so surely taken. Often, they circled and whined, and halted
in perplexity, but each time they came to a point where, at the end,
one of them again raised his muzzle skyward, and gave voice.

Toward evening, they were working up Misery along a course less
broken. The party halted for a moment's rest, and, as the bottle was
passed, the man from Lexington, who had brought the dogs and stayed to
conduct the chase, put a question:

"What do you call this creek?"

"Hit's Misery."

"Does anybody live on Misery that--er--that you might suspect?"

The Hollmans laughed.

"This creek is settled with Souths thicker'n hops."

The Lexington man looked up. He knew what the name of South meant to a
Hollman.

"Is there any special South, who might have a particular grudge?"

"The Souths don't need no partic'lar grudge, but thar's young Samson
South. He's a wildcat."

"He lives this way?"

"These dogs air a-makin' a bee-line fer his house." Jim Hollman was
speaking. Then he added: "I've done been told that Samson denies doin'
the shootin', an' claims he kin prove an alibi."

The Lexington man lighted his pipe, and poured a drink of red whiskey
into a flask cup.

"He'd be apt to say that," he commented, coolly. "These dogs haven't
any prejudice in the matter. I'll stake my life on their telling the
truth."

An hour later, the group halted again. The master of hounds mopped his
forehead.

"Are we still going toward Samson South's house?" he inquired.

"We're about a quarter from hit now, an' we hain't never varied from
the straight road."

"Will they be apt to give us trouble?"

Jim Hollman smiled.

"I hain't never heered of no South submittin' ter arrest by a Hollman."

The trailers examined their firearms, and loosened their holster-
flaps. The dogs went forward at a trot.




CHAPTER VII


From time to time that day, neighbors had ridden up to Spicer South's
stile, and drawn rein for gossip. These men brought bulletins as to the
progress of the hounds, and near sundown, as a postscript to their
information, a volley of gunshot signals sounded from a mountain top.
No word was spoken, but in common accord the kinsmen rose from their
chairs, and drifted toward their leaning rifles.

"They're a-comin' hyar," said the head of the house, curtly. "Samson
ought ter be home. Whar's Tam'-rack?"

No one had noticed his absence until that moment, nor was he to be
found. A few minutes later, Samson's figure swung into sight, and his
uncle met him at the fence.

"Samson, I've done asked ye all the questions I'm a-goin' ter ask ye,"
he said, "but them dawgs is makin' fer this house. They've jest been
sighted a mile below."

Samson nodded.

"Now"--Spicer South's face hardened--"I owns down thar ter the road.
No man kin cross that fence withouten I choose ter give him leave. Ef
ye wants ter go indoors an' stay thar, ye kin do hit--an' no dawg ner
no man hain't a-goin' ter ask ye no questions. But, ef ye sees fit ter
face hit out, I'd love ter prove ter these hyar men thet us Souths
don't break our word. We done agreed ter this truce. I'd like ter
invite 'em in, an' let them damn dawgs sniff round the feet of every
man in my house--an' then, when they're plumb teetotally damn
satisfied, I'd like ter tell 'em all ter go ter hell. Thet's the way I
feels, but I'm a-goin' ter do jest what ye says."

Lescott did not overhear the conversation in full, but he saw the old
man's face work with suppressed passion, and he caught Samson's louder
reply.

"When them folks gets hyar, Uncle Spicer, I'm a-goin' ter be a-settin'
right out thar in front. I'm plumb willin' ter invite 'em in." Then,
the two men turned toward the house.

Already the other clansmen had disappeared noiselessly through the
door or around the angles of the walls. The painter found himself alone
in a scene of utter quiet, unmarred by any note that was not peaceful.
He had seen many situations charged with suspense and danger, and he
now realized how thoroughly freighted was the atmosphere about Spicer
South's cabin with the possibilities of bloodshed. The moments seemed
to drag interminably. In the expressionless faces that so quietly
vanished; in the absolutely calm and businesslike fashion in which,
with no spoken order, every man fell immediately into his place of
readiness and concealment, he read an ominous portent that sent a
current of apprehension through his arteries. Into his mind flashed all
the historical stories he had heard of the vendetta life of these
wooded slopes, and he wondered if he was to see another chapter enacted
in the next few minutes, while the June sun and soft shadows drowsed so
quietly across the valley.

While he waited, Spicer South's sister, the prematurely aged crone,
appeared in the kitchen door with the clay pipe between her teeth, and
raised a shading hand to gaze off up the road. She, too, understood the
tenseness of the situation as her grim, but unflinching, features
showed; yet even in her feminine eyes was no shrinking and on her face,
inured to fear, was no tell-tale signal beyond a heightened pallor.

Spicer South looked up at her, and jerked his head toward the house.

"Git inside, M'lindy," he ordered, curtly, and without a word she,
too, turned and disappeared.

But there was another figure, unseen, its very presence unsuspected,
watching from near by with a pounding heart and small fingers clutching
in wild terror at a palpitant breast. In this country, where human
creatures seemed to share with the "varmints" the faculty of moving
unseen and unheard, the figure had come stealthily to watch--and pray.

When Samson had heard that signal of the gunshots from a distant peak,
he had risen from the rock where he sat with Sally. He had said nothing
of the issue he must go to meet; nothing of the enemies who had brought
dogs, confident that they would make their run straight to his lair.
That subject had not been mentioned between them since he had driven
Tamarack away that afternoon, and reassured her. He had only risen
casually, as though his action had no connection with the signal of the
rifles, and said:

"Reckon I'll be a-goin'."

And Sally had said nothing either, except good-by, and had turned her
face toward her own side of the ridge, but, as soon as he had passed
out of sight, she had wheeled and followed noiselessly, slipping from
rhododendron clump to laurel thicket as stealthily as though she were
herself the object of an enemy's attack. She knew that Samson would
have sent her back, and she knew that a crisis was at hand, and that
she could not support the suspense of awaiting the news. She must see
for herself.

And now, while the stage was setting itself, the girl crouched
trembling a little way up the hillside, at the foot of a titanic
poplar. About her rose gray, moss-covered rocks and the fronds of
clinging ferns. At her feet bloomed wild flowers for which she knew no
names except those with which she had herself christened them,
"sunsetty flowers" whose yellow petals suggested to her imagination the
western skies, and "fairy cups and saucers."

She was not trembling for herself, though, if a fusillade broke out
below, the masking screen of leafage would not protect her from the
pelting of stray bullets. Her small face was pallid, and her blue eyes
wide-stretched and terrified. With a catch in her throat, she shifted
from her crouching attitude to a kneeling posture, and clasped her
hands desperately, and raised her face, while her lips moved in prayer.
She did not pray aloud, for even in her torment of fear for the boy she
loved, her mountain caution made her noiseless--and the God to whom she
prayed could hear her equally well in silence.

"Oh, God," pleaded the girl, brokenly, "I reckon ye knows thet them
Hollmans is atter Samson, an' I reckons ye knows he hain't committed no
sin. I reckon ye knows, since ye knows all things, thet hit'll kill me
ef I loses him, an' though I hain't nobody but jest Sally Miller, an'
ye air Almighty God, I wants ye ter hear my prayin', an' pertect him."

Fifteen minutes later, Lescott, standing at the fence, saw a strange
cavalcade round the bend of the road. Several travel-stained men were
leading mules, and holding two tawny and impatient dogs in leash. In
their number, the artist recognized his host of two nights ago.

They halted at a distance, and in their faces the artist read dismay,
for, while the dogs were yelping confidently and tugging at their
cords, young Samson South--who should, by their prejudiced convictions,
be hiding out in some secret stronghold--sat at the top step of the
stile, smoking his pipe, and regarded them with a lack-luster absence
of interest. Such a calm reception was uncanny. The trailers felt sure
that in a moment more the dogs would fall into accusing excitement.
Logically, these men should be waiting to receive them behind
barricaded doors. There must be some hidden significance. Possibly, it
was an invitation to walk into ambuscade. No doubt, unseen rifles
covered their approach, and the shooting of Purvy was only the
inaugural step to a bloody and open outbreak of the war. After a
whispered conference, the Lexington man came forward alone. Old Spicer
South had been looking on from the door, and was now strolling out to
meet the envoy, unarmed.

And the envoy, as he came, held his hands unnecessarily far away from
his sides, and walked with an ostentatious show of peace.

"Evenin', stranger," hailed the old man. "Come right in."

"Mr. South," began the dog-owner, with some embarrassment, "I have
been employed to furnish a pair of bloodhounds to the family of Jesse
Purvy, who has been shot."

"I heerd tell thet Purvy was shot," said the head of the Souths in an
affable tone, which betrayed no deeper note of interest than
neighborhood gossip might have elicited.

"I have no personal interest in the matter," went on the stranger,
hastily, as one bent on making his attitude clear, "except to supply
the dogs and manage them. I do not in any way direct their course; I
merely follow."

"Ye can't hardly fo'ce a dawg." Old Spicer sagely nodded his head as
he made the remark. "A dawg jest natcher'ly follers his own nose."

"Exactly--and they have followed their noses here." The Lexington man
found the embarrassment of his position growing as the colloquy
proceeded. "I want to ask you whether, if these dogs want to cross your
fence, I have your permission to let them?"

The cabin in the yard was utterly quiet. There was no hint of the
seven or eight men who rested on their arms behind its half-open door.
The master of the house crossed the stile, the low sun shining on his
shock of gray hair, and stood before the man-hunter. He spoke so that
his voice carried to the waiting group in the road.

"Ye're plumb welcome ter turn them dawgs loose, an' let 'em ramble,
stranger. Nobody hain't a-goin' ter hurt 'em. I sees some fellers out
thar with ye thet mustn't cross my fence. Ef they does"--the voice rang
menacingly--"hit'll mean that they're a-bustin' the truce--an' they
won't never go out ag'in. But you air safe in hyar. I gives yer my hand
on thet. Ye're welcome, an' yore dawgs is welcome. I hain't got nothin'
'gainst dawgs thet comes on four legs, but I shore bars the two-legged
kind."

There was a murmur of astonishment from the road. Disregarding it,
Spicer South turned his face toward the house.

"You boys kin come out," he shouted, "an' leave yore guns inside."

The leashes were slipped from the dogs. They leaped forward, and made
directly for Samson, who sat as unmoving as a lifeless image on the top
step of the stile. Up on the hillside the fingernails of Sally Miller's
clenched hands cut into the flesh, and the breath stopped between her
parted and bloodless lips. There was a half-moment of terrific
suspense, then the beasts clambered by the seated figure, passing on
each side and circled aimlessly about the yard--their quest unended.
They sniffed indifferently about the trouser legs of the men who
sauntered indolently out of the door. They trotted into the house and
out again, and mingled with the mongrel home pack that snarled and
growled hostility for this invasion. Then, they came once more to the
stile. As they climbed out, Samson South reached up and stroked a tawny
head, and the bloodhound paused a moment to wag its tail in friendship,
before it jumped down to the road, and trotted gingerly onward.

"I'm obliged to you, sir," said the man from the Bluegrass, with a
voice of immense relief.

The moment of suspense seemed past, and, in the relief of the averted
clash, the master of hounds forgot that his dogs stood branded as false
trailers. But, when he rejoined the group in the road, he found himself
looking into surly visages, and the features of Jim Hollman in
particular were black in their scowl of smoldering wrath.

"Why didn't ye axe him," growled the kinsman of the man who had been
shot, "whar the other feller's at?"

"What other fellow?" echoed the Lexington man.

Jim Hollman's voice rose truculently, and his words drifted, as he
meant them to, across to the ears of the clansmen who stood in the yard
of Spicer South.

"Them dawgs of your'n come up Misery a-hellin'. They hain't never
turned aside, an', onless they're plumb ornery no-'count curs thet
don't know their business, they come for some reason. They seemed
mighty interested in gittin' hyar. Axe them fellers in thar who's been
hyar thet hain't hyar now? Who is ther feller thet got out afore we
come hyar."

At this veiled charge of deceit, the faces of the Souths again
blackened, and the men near the door of the house drifted in to drift
presently out again, swinging discarded Winchesters at their sides. It
seemed that, after all, the incident was not closed. The man from
Lexington, finding himself face to face with a new difficulty, turned
and argued in a low voice with the Hollman leader. But Jim Hollman,
whose eyes were fixed on Samson, refused to talk in a modulated tone,
and he shouted his reply:

"I hain't got nothin' ter whisper about," he proclaimed. "Go axe 'em
who hit war thet got away from hyar."

Old Spicer South stood leaning on his fence, and his rugged
countenance stiffened. He started to speak, but Samson rose from the
stile, and said, in a composed voice:

"Let me talk ter this feller, Unc' Spicer." The old man nodded, and
Samson beckoned to the owner of the dogs.

"We hain't got nothin' ter say ter them fellers with ye," he
announced, briefly. "We hain't axin' 'em no questions, an' we hain't
answerin' none. Ye done come hyar with dawgs, an' we hain't stopped ye.
We've done answered all the questions them dawgs hes axed. We done
treated you an' yore houn's plumb friendly. Es fer them other men, we
hain't got nothin' ter say ter 'em. They done come hyar because they
hoped they could git me in trouble. They done failed. Thet road belongs
ter the county. They got a license ter travel hit, but this strip right
hyar hain't ther healthiest section they kin find. I reckon ye'd better
advise 'em ter move on."

The Lexington man went back. For a minute or two, Jim Hollman sat
scowling down in indecision from his saddle. Then, he admitted to
himself that he had done all he could do without becoming the
aggressor. For the moment, he was beaten. He looked up, and from the
road one of the hounds raised its voice and gave cry. That baying
afforded an excuse for leaving, and Jim Hollman seized upon it.

"Go on," he growled. "Let's see what them damned curs hes ter say now."

Mounting, they kicked their mules into a jog. From the men inside the
fence came no note of derision; no hint of triumph. They stood looking
out with expressionless, mask-like faces until their enemies had passed
out of sight around the shoulder of the mountain. The Souths had met
and fronted an accusation made after the enemy's own choice and method.
A jury of two hounds had acquitted them. It was not only because the
dogs had refused to recognize in Samson a suspicious character that the
enemy rode on grudgingly convinced, but, also, because the family,
which had invariably met hostility with hostility, had so willingly
courted the acid test of guilt or innocence.

Samson, passing around the corner of the house, caught a flash of red
up among the green clumps of the mountainside, and, pausing to gaze at
it, saw it disappear into the thicket of brush. He knew then that Sally
had followed him, and why she had done it, and, framing a stern rebuke
for the foolhardiness of the venture, he plunged up the acclivity in
pursuit. But, as he made his way cautiously, he heard around the
shoulder of a mass of piled-up sandstone a shaken sobbing, and,
slipping toward it, found the girl bent over with her face in her
hands, her slander body convulsively heaving with the weeping of
reaction, and murmuring half-incoherent prayers of thanksgiving for his
deliverance.

"Sally!" he exclaimed, hurrying over and dropping to his knees beside
her. "Sally, thar hain't nothin' ter fret about, little gal. Hit's all
right."

She started up at the sound of his voice, and then, pillowing her head
on his shoulder, wept tears of happiness. He sought for words, but no
words came, and his lips and eyes, unused to soft expressions, drew
themselves once more into the hard mask with which he screened his
heart's moods.

Days passed uneventfully after that. The kinsmen dispersed to their
scattered coves and cabins. Now and again came a rumor that Jesse Purvy
was dying, but always hard on its heels came another to the effect that
the obdurate fighter had rallied, though the doctors held out small
encouragement of recovery.

One day Lescott, whose bandaged arm gave him much pain, but who was
able to get about, was strolling not far from the house with Samson.
They were following a narrow trail along the mountainside, and, at a
sound no louder than the falling of a walnut, the boy halted and laid a
silencing hand on the painter's shoulder. Then followed an unspoken
command in his companion's eyes. Lescott sank down behind a rock,
cloaked with glistening rhododendron leafage, where Samson had already
crouched, and become immovable and noiseless. They had been there only
a short time when they saw another figure slipping quietly from tree to
tree below them.

For a time, the mountain boy watched the figure, and the painter saw
his lips draw into a straight line, and his eyes narrow with a glint of
tense hate. Yet, a moment later, with a nod to follow, the boy
unexpectedly rose into view, and his features were absolutely
expressionless.

"Mornin', Jim," he called.

The slinking stranger whirled with a start, and an instinctive motion
as though to bring his rifle to his shoulder. But, seeing Samson's
peaceable manner, he smiled, and his own demeanor became friendly.

"Mornin', Samson."

"Kinder stranger in this country, hain't ye, Jim?" drawled the boy who
lived there, and the question brought a sullen flush to the other's
cheekbones.

"Jest a-passin' through," he vouchsafed.

"I reckon ye'd find the wagon road more handy," suggested Samson.
"Some folks might 'spicion ye fer stealin' long through the timber."

The skulking traveler decided to lie plausibly. He laughed
mendaciously. "That's the reason, Samson. I was kinder skeered ter go
through this country in the open."

Samson met his eye steadily, and said slowly:

"I reckon, Jim, hit moughtn't be half es risky fer ye ter walk
upstandin' along Misery, es ter go a-crouchin'. Ye thinks ye've been a
shadderin' me. I knows jest whar ye've been all the time. Ye lies when
ye talks 'bout passin' through. Ye've done been spyin' hyar, ever since
Jesse Purvy got shot, an' all thet time ye've done been watched yeself.
I reckon hit'll be healthier fer ye ter do yore spyin' from t'other
side of the ridge. I reckon yer allowin' ter git me ef Purvy dies, but
we're watchin' ye."

Jim Asberry's face darkened, but he said nothing. There was nothing to
say. He was discovered in the enemy's country, and must accept the
enemy's terms.

"This hyar time, I lets ye go back," said Samson, "fer the reason thet
I'm tryin' like all hell ter keep this truce. But ye must stay on yore
side, or else ride the roads open. How is Purvy terday?"

"He's mighty porely," replied the other, in a sullen voice.

"All right. Thet's another reason why hit hain't healthy fer ye over
hyar."

The spy turned, and made his way over the mountain.

"Damn him!" muttered Samson, his face twitching, as the other was lost
in the undergrowth. "Some day I'm a-goin' ter git him."

Tamarack Spicer did not at once reappear, and, when one of the Souths
met another in the road, the customary dialogue would be: "Heered
anything of Tamarack?" ... "No, hev you?" ... "No, nary a word."

As Lescott wandered through the hills, his unhurt right hand began
crying out for action and a brush to nurse. As he watched, day after
day, the unveiling of the monumental hills, and the transitions from
hazy wraith-like whispers of hues, to strong, flaring riot of color,
this fret of restlessness became actual pain. He was wasting wonderful
opportunity and the creative instinct in him was clamoring.

One morning, when he came out just after sunrise to the tin wash basin
at the well, the desire to paint was on him with compelling force. The
hills ended near their bases like things bitten off. Beyond lay
limitless streamers of mist, but, while he stood at gaze, the filmy
veil began to lift and float higher. Trees and mountains grew taller.
The sun, which showed first as a ghost-like disc of polished aluminum,
struggled through orange and vermilion into a sphere of living flame.
It was as though the Creator were breathing on a formless void to
kindle it into a vital and splendid cosmos, and between the dawn's fog
and the radiance of full day lay a dozen miracles. Through rifts in the
streamers, patches of hillside and sky showed for an ethereal moment or
two in tender and transparent coloration, like spirit-reflections of
emerald and sapphire.... Lescott heard a voice at his side.

"When does ye 'low ter commence paintin'?"

It was Samson. For answer, the artist, with his unhurt hand,
impatiently tapped his bandaged wrist.

"Ye still got yore right hand, hain't ye?" demanded the boy. The other
laughed. It was a typical question. So long as one had the trigger
finger left, one should not admit disqualification.

"You see, Samson," he explained, "this isn't precisely like handling a
gun. One must hold the palette; mix the colors; wipe the brushes and do
half a dozen equally necessary things. It requires at least two
perfectly good hands. Many people don't find two enough."

"But hit only takes one ter do the paintin', don't hit?"

"Yes."

"Well"--the boy spoke diffidently but with enthusiasm--"between the
two of us, we've got three hands. I reckon ye kin larn me how ter do
them other things fer ye."

Lescott's surprise showed in his face, and the lad swept eagerly on.

"Mebby hit hain't none of my business, but, all day yestiddy an' the
day befo', I was a-studyin' 'bout this here thing, an' I hustled up an'
got thet corn weeded, an' now I'm through. Ef I kin help ye out, I
thought mebby--" He paused, and looked appealingly at the artist.

Lescott whistled, and then his face lighted into contentment.

"To-day, Samson," he announced, "Lescott, South and Company get busy."

It was the first time he had seen Samson smile, and, although the
expression was one of sheer delight, inherent somberness loaned it a
touch of the wistful.

When, an hour later, the two set out, the mountain boy carried the
paraphernalia, and the old man standing at the door watched them off
with a half-quizzical, half-disapproving glance. To interfere with any
act of courtesy to a guest was not to be thought of, but already the
influence on Samson of this man from the other world was disquieting
his uncle's thoughts. With his mother's milk, the boy had fed on hatred
of his enemies. With his training, he had been reared to feudal
animosities. Disaffection might ruin his usefulness. Besides the
sketching outfit, Samson carried his rifle. He led the painter by slow
stages, since the climb proved hard for a man still somewhat enfeebled,
to the high rock which Sally visited each morning.

As the boy, with remarkable aptitude, learned how to adjust the easel
and arrange the paraphernalia, Lescott sat drinking in through thirsty
eyes the stretch of landscape he had determined to paint.

It was his custom to look long and studiously through closed lashes
before he took up his brush. After that he began laying in his key
tones and his fundamental sketching with an incredible swiftness,
having already solved his problems of composition and analysis.

Then, while he painted, the boy held the palette, his eyes riveted on
the canvas, which was growing from a blank to a mirror of vistas--and
the boy's pupils became deeply hungry. He was not only looking. He was
seeing. His gaze took in the way the fingers held the brushes; the
manner of mixing the pigments, the detail of method. Sometimes, when he
saw a brush dab into a color whose use he did not at once understand,
he would catch his breath anxiously, then nod silently to himself as
the blending vindicated the choice. He did not know it, but his eye for
color was as instinctively true as that of the master.

As the day wore on, they fell to talking, and the boy again found
himself speaking of his fettered restiveness in the confinement of his
life; of the wanderlust which stirred him, and of which he had been
taught to feel ashamed.

During one of their periods of rest, there was a rustle in the
branches of a hickory, and a gray shape flirted a bushy tail. Samson's
hand slipped silently out, and the rifle came to his shoulder. In a
moment it snapped, and a squirrel dropped through the leaves.

"Jove!" exclaimed Lescott, admiringly. "That was neat work. He was
partly behind the limb--at a hundred yards."

"Hit warn't nothin'," said Samson, modestly. "Hit's a good gun." He
brought back his quarry, and affectionately picked up the rifle. It was
a repeating Winchester, carrying a long steel-jacketed bullet of
special caliber, but it was of a pattern fifteen years old, and fitted
with target sights.

"That gun," Samson explained, in a lowered and reverent voice, "was my
pap's. I reckon there hain't enough money in the world ter buy hit off
en me."

Slowly, in a matter-of-fact tone, he began a story without decoration
of verbiage--straightforward and tense in its simplicity. As the
painter listened, he began to understand; the gall that had crept into
this lad's blood before his weaning became comprehensible.... Killing
Hollmans was not murder.... It was duty. He seemed to see the smoke-
blackened cabin and the mother of the boy sitting, with drawn face, in
dread of the hours. He felt the racking nerve-tension of a life in
which the father went forth each day leaving his family in fear that he
would not return. Then, under the spell of the unvarnished recital, he
seemed to witness the crisis when the man, who had dared repudiate the
lawless law of individual reprisal, paid the price of his insurgency.

A solitary friend had come in advance to break the news. His face,
when he awkwardly commenced to speak, made it unnecessary to put the
story into words. Samson told how his mother had turned pallid, and
stretched out her arm gropingly for support against the door-jamb. Then
the man had found his voice with clumsy directness.

"They've got him."

The small boy had reached her in time to break her fall as she
fainted, but, later, when they brought in the limp, unconscious man,
she was awaiting them with regained composure. An expression came to
her face at that moment, said the lad, which had never left it during
the remaining two years of her life. For some hours, "old" Henry South,
who in a less-wasting life would hardly have been middle-aged, had
lingered. They were hours of conscious suffering, with no power to
speak, but before he died he had beckoned his ten-year-old son to his
bedside, and laid a hand on the dark, rumpled hair. The boy bent
forward, his eyes tortured and tearless, and his little lips tight
pressed. The old man patted the head, and made a feeble gesture toward
the mother who was to be widowed. Samson had nodded.

"I'll take keer of her, pap," he had fervently sworn.

Then, Henry South had lifted a tremulous finger, and pointed to the
wall above the hearth. There, upon a set of buck-antlers, hung the
Winchester rifle. And, again, Samson had nodded, but this time he did
not speak. That moment was to his mind the most sacred of his life; it
had been a dedication to a purpose. The arms of the father had then and
there been bequeathed to the son, and with the arms a mission for their
use. After a brief pause, Samson told of the funeral. He had a
remarkable way of visualizing in rough speech the desolate picture; the
wailing mourners on the bleak hillside, with the November clouds
hanging low and trailing their wet streamers. A "jolt-wagon" had
carried the coffin in lieu of a hearse. Saddled mules stood tethered
against the picket fence. The dogs that had followed their masters
started a rabbit close by the open grave, and split the silence with
their yelps as the first clod fell. He recalled, too, the bitter voice
with which his mother had spoken to a kinsman as she turned from the
ragged burying ground, where only the forlorn cedars were green. She
was leaning on the boy's thin shoulders at the moment. He had felt her
arm stiffen with her words, and, as her arm stiffened, his own positive
nature stiffened with it.

"Henry believed in law and order. I did, too. But they wouldn't let us
have it that way. From this day on, I'm a-goin' to raise my boy to kill
Hollmans."




CHAPTER VIII


With his father's death Samson's schooling had ended. His
responsibility now was farm work and the roughly tender solicitude of a
young stoic for his mother. His evenings before the broad fireplace he
gave up to a devouring sort of study, but his books were few.

When, two years later, he laid the body of the Widow South beside that
of his father in the ragged hillside burying-ground, he turned his
nag's head away from the cabin where he had been born, and rode over to
make his home at his Uncle Spicer's place. He had, in mountain
parlance, "heired" a farm of four hundred acres, but a boy of twelve
can hardly operate a farm, even if he be so stalwart a boy as Samson.
His Uncle Spicer wanted him, and he went, and the head of the family
took charge of his property as guardian; placed a kinsman there to till
it, on shares, and faithfully set aside for the boy what revenue came
from the stony acres. He knew that they would be rich acres when men
began to dig deeper than the hoe could scratch, and opened the veins
where the coal slept its unstirring sleep. The old man had not set such
store by learning as had Samson's father, and the little shaver's
education ended, except for what he could wrest from stinted sources
and without aid. His mission of "killing Hollmans" was not forgotten.
There had years ago been one general battle at a primary, when the two
factions fought for the control that would insure the victors safety
against "law trouble," and put into their hands the weapons of the
courts.

Samson was far too young to vote, but he was old enough to fight, and
the account he had given of himself, with the inherited rifle smoking,
gave augury of fighting effectiveness. So sanguinary had been this
fight, and so dangerously had it focused upon the warring clans the
attention of the outside world, that after its indecisive termination,
they made the compact of the present truce. By its terms, the Hollmans
held their civil authority, and the Souths were to be undisturbed
dictators beyond Misery. For some years now, the peace had been
unbroken save by sporadic assassinations, none of which could be
specifically enough charged to the feud account to warrant either side
in regarding the contract as broken. Samson, being a child, had been
forced to accept the terms of this peace bondage. The day would come
when the Souths could agree to no truce without his consent. Such was,
in brief, the story that the artist heard while he painted and rested
that day on the rock. Had he heard it in New York, he would have
discounted it as improbable and melodramatic. Now, he knew that it was
only one of many such chapters in the history of the Cumberlands. The
native point of view even became in a degree acceptable. In a system of
trial by juries from the vicinage, fair and bold prosecutions for crime
were impossible, and such as pretended to be so were bitterly tragic
farces. He understood why the families of murdered fathers and brothers
preferred to leave the punishment to their kinsmen in the laurel,
rather than to their enemies in the jury-box.

The day of painting was followed by others like it. The disabling of
Lescott's left hand made the constant companionship of the boy a matter
that needed no explanation or apology, though not a matter of approval
to his uncle.

Another week had passed without the reappearance of Tamarack Spicer.

One afternoon, Lescott and Samson were alone on a cliff-protected
shelf, and the painter had just blocked in with umber and neutral tint
the crude sketch of his next picture. In the foreground was a steep
wall, rising palisade-like from the water below. A kingly spruce-pine
gave the near note for a perspective which went away across a valley of
cornfields to heaping and distant mountains. Beyond that range, in a
slender ribbon of pale purple, one saw the ridge of a more remote and
mightier chain.

The two men had lost an hour huddled under a canopy beneath the
cannonading of a sudden storm. They had silently watched titanic
battallions of thunder-clouds riding the skies in gusty puffs of gale,
and raking the earth with lightning and hail and water. The crags had
roared back echoing defiance, and the great trees had lashed and bent
and tossed like weeds in the buffeting. Every gully had become a
stream, and every gulch-rock a waterfall. Here and there had been a
crashing of spent timber, and now the sun had burst through a rift in
the west, and flooded a segment of the horizon with a strange, luminous
field of lesson. About this zone of clarity were heaped masses of gold-
rimmed and rose-edged clouds, still inky at their centers.

"My God!" exclaimed the mountain boy abruptly. "I'd give 'most
anything ef I could paint that."

Lescott rose smilingly from his seat before the easel, and surrendered
his palette and sheaf of brushes.

"Try it," he invited.

For a moment, Samson stood hesitant and overcome with diffidence;
then, with set lips, he took his place, and experimentally fitted his
fingers about a brush, as he had seen Lescott do. He asked no advice.
He merely gazed for awhile, and then, dipping a brush and experimenting
for his color, went to sweeping in his primary tones.

The painter stood at his back, still smiling. Of course, the brush-
stroke was that of the novice. Of course, the work was clumsy and
heavy. But what Lescott noticed was not so much the things that went on
canvas as the mixing of colors on the palette, for he knew that the
palette is the painter's heart, and its colors are the elements of his
soul. What a man paints on canvas is the sum of his acquirement; but
the colors he mixes are the declarations of what his soul can see, and
no man can paint whose eyes are not touched with the sublime. At that
moment, Lescott knew that Samson had such eyes.

The splashes of lemon yellow that the boy daubed above the hills might
have been painted with a brush dipped in the sunset. The heavy clouds
with their gossamer edgings had truth of tone and color. Then the
experimenter came to the purple rim of mountain tops.

There was no color for that on the palette, and he turned to the paint-
box.

"Here," suggested Lescott, handing him a tube of Payne's Gray: "is
that what you're looking for?"

Samson read the label, and decisively shook his head.

"I'm a-goin' atter them hills," he declared. "There hain't no gray in
them thar mountings."

"Squeeze some out, anyway." The artist suited the action to the word,
and soon Samson was experimenting with a mixture.

"Why, that hain't no gray," he announced, with enthusiasm; "that
thar's sort of ashy purple." Still, he was not satisfied. His first
brush-stroke showed a trifle dead and heavy. It lacked the soft lucid
quality that the hills held, though it was close enough to truth to
have satisfied any eye save one of uncompromising sincerity. Samson,
even though he was hopelessly daubing, and knew it, was sincere, and
the painter at his elbow caught his breath, and looked on with the
absorption of a prophet, who, listening to childish prattle, yet
recognizes the gift of prophecy. The boy dabbled for a perplexed moment
among the pigments, then lightened up his color with a trace of
ultramarine. Unconsciously, the master heaved a sigh of satisfaction.
The boy "laid in" his far hills, and turned.

"Thet's the way hit looks ter me," he said, simply.

"That's the way it is," commended his critic.

For a while more, Samson worked at the nearer hills, then he rose.

"I'm done," he said. "I hain't a-goin' ter fool with them thar trees
an' things. I don't know nothing erbout thet. I can't paint leaves an'
twigs an' birdsnests. What I likes is mountings, an' skies, an' sech-
like things."

Lescott looked at the daub before him. A less-trained eye would have
seen only the daub, just as a poor judge of horse-flesh might see only
awkward joints and long legs in a weanling colt, though it be bred in
the purple.

"Samson," he said, earnestly, "that's all there is to art. It's the
power to feel the poetry of color. The rest can be taught. The genius
must work, of course--work, work, work, and still work, but the Gift is
the power of seeing true--and, by God, boy, you have it."

His words rang exultantly.

"Anybody with eyes kin see," deprecated Samson, wiping his fingers on
his jeans trousers.

"You think so? To the seer who reads the passing shapes in a globe of
crystal, it's plain enough. To any other eye, there is nothing there
but transparency." Lescott halted, conscious that he was falling into
metaphor which his companion could not understand, then more quietly he
went on: "I don't know how you would progress, Samson, in detail and
technique, but I know you've got what many men have struggled a
lifetime for, and failed. I'd like to have you study with me. I'd like
to be your discoverer. Look here."

The painter sat down, and speedily went to work. He painted out
nothing. He simply toned, and, with precisely the right touch here and
there, softened the crudeness, laid stress on the contrast, melted the
harshness, and, when he rose, he had built, upon the rough cornerstone
of Samson's laying, a picture.

"That proves it," he said. "I had only to finish. I didn't have to
undo. Boy, you're wasting yourself. Come with me, and let me make you.
We all pretend there is no such thing, in these days, as sheer genius;
but, deep down, we know that, unless there is, there can be no such
thing as true art. There is genius and you have it." Enthusiasm was
again sweeping him into an unintended outburst.

The boy stood silent. Across his countenance swept a conflict of
emotions. He looked away, as if taking counsel with the hills.

"It's what I'm a-honin' fer," he admitted at last. "Hit's what I'd
give half my life fer.... I mout sell my land, an' raise the money....
I reckon hit would take passels of money, wouldn't hit?" He paused, and
his eyes fell on the rifle leaning against the tree. His lips tightened
in sudden remembrance. He went over and picked up the gun, and, as he
did so, he shook his head.

"No," he stolidly declared; "every man to his own tools. This here's
mine."

Yet, when they were again out sketching, the temptation to play with
brushes once more seized him, and he took his place before the easel.
Neither he nor Lescott noticed a man who crept down through the timber,
and for a time watched them. The man's face wore a surly, contemptuous
grin, and shortly it withdrew.

But, an hour later, while the boy was still working industriously and
the artist was lying on his back, with a pipe between his teeth, and his
half-closed eyes gazing up contentedly through the green of overhead
branches, their peace was broken by a guffaw of derisive laughter. They
looked up, to find at their backs a semi-circle of scoffing humanity.
Lescott's impulse was to laugh, for only the comedy of the situation at
the moment struck him. A stage director, setting a comedy scene with
that most ancient of jests, the gawking of boobs at some new sight,
could hardly have improved on this tableau. At the front stood Tamarack
Spicer, the returned wanderer. His lean wrist was stretched out of a
ragged sleeve all too short, and his tattered "jimmy" was shoved back
over a face all a-grin. His eyes were blood-shot with recent drinking,
but his manner was in exaggerated and cumbersome imitation of a rural
master of ceremonies. At his back were the raw-boned men and women and
children of the hills, to the number of a dozen. To the front shuffled
an old, half-witted hag, with thin gray hair and pendulous lower lip.
Her dress was patched and colorless. Her back was bent with age and
rheumatism. Her feet were incased in a pair of man's brogans. She stared
and snickered, and several children, taking the cue, giggled, but the
men, save Tamarack himself, wore troubled faces, as though recognizing
that their future chieftain had been discovered in some secret shame.
They were looking on their idol's feet of clay.

"Ladies and gentle-_men_," announced Tamarack Spicer, in a
hiccoughy voice, "swing yo' partners an' sashay forward. See the only
son of the late Henry South engaged in his mar-ve-lous an' heretofore
undiscovered occupation of doin' fancy work. Ladies and gentle-_men_,
after this here show is conclooded, keep your seats for the concert
in the main tent. This here famous performer will favor ye with a little
exhibition of plain an' fancy sock-darnin'."

The children snickered again. The old woman shuffled forward.

"Samson," she quavered, "I didn't never low ter see ye doin' no sich
woman's work as thet."

After the first surprise, Samson had turned his back on the group. He
was mixing paint at the time and he proceeded to experiment with a
fleeting cloud effect, which would not outlast the moment. He finished
that, and, reaching for the palette-knife, scraped his fingers and
wiped them on his trousers' legs. Then, he deliberately rose.

Without a word he turned. Tamarack had begun his harangue afresh. The
boy tossed back the long lock from his forehead, and then, with an
unexpectedly swift movement, crouched and leaped. His right fist shot
forward to Tamarack Spicer's chattering lips, and they abruptly ceased
to chatter as the teeth were driven into their flesh. Spicer's head
snapped back, and he staggered against the onlookers, where he stood
rocking on his unsteady legs. His hand swept instinctively to the shirt
-concealed holster, but, before it had connected, both of Samson's fists
were playing a terrific tattoo on his face. The inglorious master of
the show dropped, and lay groggily trying to rise.

The laughter died as suddenly as Tamarack's speech. Samson stepped
back again, and searched the faces of the group for any lingering sign
of mirth or criticism. There was none. Every countenance was sober and
expressionless, but the boy felt a weight of unuttered disapproval, and
he glared defiance. One of the older onlookers spoke up reproachfully.

"Samson, ye hadn't hardly ought ter a-done that. He was jest a funnin'
with ye."

"Git him up on his feet. I've got somethin' ter say ter him." The
boy's voice was dangerously quiet. It was his first word. They lifted
the fallen cousin, whose entertainment had gone astray, and led him
forward grumbling, threatening and sputtering, but evincing no
immediate desire to renew hostilities.

"Whar hev ye been?" demanded Samson.

"Thet's my business," came the familiar mountain phrase.

"Why wasn't yer hyar when them dawgs come by? Why was ye the only
South thet runned away, when they was smellin' round fer Jesse Purvy's
assassin?"

"I didn't run away." Tamarack's blood-shot eyes flared wickedly. "I
knowed thet ef I stayed 'round hyar with them damned Hollmans stickin'
their noses inter our business, I'd hurt somebody. So, I went over
inter the next county fer a spell. You fellers mout be able to take
things offen the Hollmans, but I hain't."

"Thet's a damned lie," said Samson, quietly. "Ye runned away, an' ye
runned in the water so them dawgs couldn't trail ye--ye done hit
because ye shot them shoots at Jesse Purvy from the laurel--because
ye're a truce-bustin', murderin' bully thet shoots off his face, an' is
skeered to fight." Samson paused for breath, and went on with regained
calmness. "I've knowed all along ye was the man, an' I've kept quiet
because ye're 'my kin. If ye've got anything else ter say, say hit.
But, ef I ever ketches yer talkin' about me, or talkin' ter Sally, I'm
a-goin' ter take ye by the scruff of the neck, an' drag ye plumb inter
Hixon, an' stick ye in the jail-house. An' I'm a-goin' ter tell the
High Sheriff that the Souths spits ye outen their mouths. Take him
away." The crowd turned and left the place. When they were gone, Samson
seated himself at his easel again, and picked up his palette.




CHAPTER IX


Lescott had come to the mountains anticipating a visit of two weeks.
His accident had resolved him to shorten it to the nearest day upon
which he felt capable of making the trip out to the railroad. Yet, June
had ended; July had burned the slopes from emerald to russet-green;
August had brought purple tops to the ironweed, and still he found
himself lingering. And this was true although he recognized a growing
sentiment of disapproval for himself. He knew indubitably that he stood
charged with the offense for which Socrates was invited to drink the
hemlock: "corrupting the morals of the youth, and teaching strange
gods." Feeling the virtue of his teaching, he was unwilling as Socrates
to abandon the field. In Samson he thought he recognized twin gifts: a
spark of a genius too rare to be allowed to flicker out, and a
potentiality for constructive work among his own people, which needed
for its perfecting only education and experience. Having aroused a
soul's restiveness in the boy, he felt a direct responsibility for it
and him, to which he added a deep personal regard. Though the kinsmen
looked upon him as an undesirable citizen, bringing teachings which
they despised, the hospitality of old Spicer South continued unbroken
and a guarantee of security on Misery.

"Samson," he suggested one day when they were alone, "I want you to
come East. You say that gun is your tool, and that each man must stick
to his own. You are in part right, in part wrong. A mail uses any tool
better for understanding other tools. You have the right to use your
brains and talents to the full."

The boy's face was somber in the intensity of his mental struggle, and
his answer had that sullen ring which was not really sullenness at all,
but self-repression.

"I reckon a feller's biggest right is to stand by his kinfolks. Unc'
Spicer's gittin' old. He's done been good ter me. He needs me here."

"I appreciate that. He will be older later. You can go now, and come
back to him when he needs you more. If what I urged meant disloyalty to
your people, I would cut out my tongue before I argued for it. You must
believe me in that. I want you to be in the fullest sense your people's
leader. I want you to be not only their Samson--but their Moses."

The boy looked up and nodded. The mountaineer is not given to
demonstration. He rarely shakes hands, and he does not indulge in
superlatives of affection. He loved and admired this man from the
outside world, who seemed to him to epitomize wisdom, but his code did
not permit him to say so.

"I reckon ye aims ter be friendly, all right," was his conservative
response.

The painter went on earnestly:

"I realize that I am urging things of which your people disapprove,
but it is only because they misunderstand that they do disapprove. They
are too close, Samson, to see the purple that mountains have when they
are far away. I want you to go where you can see the purple. If you are
the sort of man I think, you won't be beguiled. You won't lose your
loyalty. You won't be ashamed of your people."

"I reckon I wouldn't be ashamed," said the youth. "I reckon there
hain't no better folks nowhar."

"I'm sure of it. There are going to be sweeping changes in these
mountains. Conditions here have stood as immutably changeless as the
hills themselves for a hundred years. That day is at its twilight. I
tell you, I know what I'm talking about. The State of Kentucky is
looking this way. The State must develop, and it is here alone that it
can develop. In the Bluegrass, the possibilities for change are
exhausted. Their fields lie fallow, their woodlands are being stripped.
Tobacco has tainted the land. It has shouldered out the timber, and is
turning forest to prairie. A land of fertile loam is vying with cheap
soil that can send almost equal crops to market. There is no more
timber to be cut, and when the timber goes the climate changes. In
these hills lie the sleeping sources of wealth. Here are virgin forests
and almost inexhaustible coal veins. Capital is turning from an orange
squeezed dry, and casting about for fresher food. Capital has seen your
hills. Capital is inevitable, relentless, omnipotent. Where it comes,
it makes its laws. Conditions that have existed undisturbed will
vanish. The law of the feud, which militia and courts have not been
able to abate, will vanish before Capital's breath like the mists when
the sun strikes them. Unless you learn to ride the waves which will
presently sweep over your country, you and your people will go under.
You may not realize it, but that is true. It is written."

The boy had listened intently, but at the end he smiled, and in his
expression was something of the soldier who scents battle, not without
welcome.

"I reckon if these here fellers air a-comin' up here ter run things,
an' drownd out my folks, hit's a right good reason fer me ter stay here
--an' holp my folks."

"By staying here, you can't help them. It won't be work for guns, but
for brains. By going away and coming back armed with knowledge, you can
save them. You will know how to play the game."

"I reckon they won't git our land, ner our timber, ner our coal,
without we wants ter sell hit. I reckon ef they tries thet, guns will
come in handy. Things has stood here like they is now, fer a hundred
years. I reckon we kin keep 'em that-away fer a spell longer." But it
was evident that Samson was arguing against his own belief; that he was
trying to bolster up his resolution and impeached loyalty, and that at
heart he was sick to be up and going to a world which did not despise
"eddication." After a little, he waved his hand vaguely toward "down
below."

"Ef I went down thar," he questioned suddenly and irrelevantly, "would
I hev' ter cut my ha'r?"

"My dear boy," laughed Lescott, "I can introduce you in New York
studios to many distinguished gentlemen who would feel that their heads
had been shorn if they let their locks get as short as yours. In New
York, you might stroll along Broadway garbed in turban and a
_burnouse_ without greatly exciting anybody. I think my own hair
is as long as yours."

"Because," doggedly declared the mountaineer, "I wouldn't allow nobody
ter make me cut my ha'r."

"Why?" questioned Lescott, amused at the stubborn inflection.

"I don't hardly know why--" He paused, then admitted with a glare as
though defying criticism: "Sally likes hit that-away--an' I won't let
nobody dictate ter me, that's all."

The leaven was working, and one night Samson announced to his Uncle
from the doorstep that he was "studyin' erbout goin' away fer a spell,
an' seein' the world."

The old man laid down his pipe. He cast a reproachful glance at the
painter, which said clearly, though without words:

"I have opened my home to you and offered you what I had, yet in my
old age you take away my mainstay." For a time, he sat silent, but his
shoulders hunched forward with a sag which they had not held a moment
before. His seamed face appeared to age visibly and in the moment. He
ran one bony hand through his gray mane of hair.

"I 'lowed you was a-studyin' erbout thet, Samson," he said, at last.
"I've done ther best fer ye I knowed. I kinder 'lowed thet from now on
ye'd do the same fer me. I'm gittin' along in years right smart...."

"Uncle Spicer," interrupted the boy, "I reckon ye knows thet any time
ye needed me I'd come back."

The old man's face hardened.

"Ef ye goes," he said, almost sharply, "I won't never send fer ye. Any
time ye ever wants ter come back, ye knows ther way. Thar'll be room
an' victuals fer ye hyar."

"I reckon I mout be a heap more useful ef I knowed more."

"I've heered fellers say that afore. Hit hain't never turned out thet
way with them what has left the mountings. Mebby they gets more useful,
but they don't git useful ter us. Either they don't come back at all,
or mebby they comes back full of newfangled notions--an' ashamed of
their kinfoiks. Thet's the way, I've noticed, hit gen'ally turns out."

Samson scorned to deny that such might be the case with him, and was
silent. After a time, the old man went on again in a weary voice, as he
bent down to loosen his brogans and kick them noisily off on to the
floor:

"The Souths hev done looked to ye a good deal, Samson. They 'lowed
they could depend on ye. Ye hain't quite twenty-one yet, an' I reckon I
could refuse ter let ye sell yer prop'ty. But thar hain't no use tryin'
ter hold a feller when he wants ter quit. Ye don't 'low ter go right
away, do ye?"

"I hain't plumb made up my mind ter go at all," said the boy,
shamefacedly. "But, ef I does go, I hain't a-goin' yit. I hain't spoke
ter nobody but you about hit yit."

Lescott felt reluctant to meet his host's eyes at breakfast the next
morning, dreading their reproach, but, if Spicer South harbored
resentment, he meant to conceal it, after the stoic's code. There was
no hinted constraint of cordiality. Lescott felt, however, that in
Samson's mind was working the leaven of that unspoken accusation of
disloyalty. He resolved to make a final play, and seek to enlist Sally
in his cause. If Sally's hero-worship could be made to take the form of
ambition for Samson, she might be brought to relinquish him for a time,
and urge his going that he might return strengthened. Yet, Sally's
devotion was so instinctive and so artless that it would take
compelling argument to convince her of any need of change. It was
Samson as he was whom she adored. Any alteration was to be distrusted.
Still, Lescott set out one afternoon on his doubtful mission. He was
more versed in mountain ways than he had been. His own ears could now
distinguish between the bell that hung at the neck of Sally's brindle
heifer and those of old Spicer's cows. He went down to the creek at the
hour when he knew Sally, also, would be making her way thither with her
milk-pail, and intercepted her coming. As she approached, she was
singing, and the man watched her from the distance. He was a landscape
painter and not a master of _genre_ or portrait. Yet, he wished
that he might, before going, paint Sally. She was really, after all, a
part of the landscape, as much a thing of nature and the hills as the
hollyhocks that had come along the picket-fences. She swayed as
gracefully and thoughtlessly to her movements as do strong and pliant
stems under the breeze's kiss. Artfulness she had not; nor has the
flower: only the joy and fragrance of a brief bloom. It was that
thought which just now struck the painter most forcibly. It was
shameful that this girl and boy should go on to the hard and unlighted
life that inevitably awaited them, if neither had the opportunity of
development. She would be at forty a later edition of the Widow Miller.
He had seen the widow. Sally's charm must be as ephemeral under the
life of illiterate drudgery and perennial child-bearing as her mother's
had been. Her shoulders, now so gloriously straight and strong, would
sag, and her bosom shrink, and her face harden and take on that drawn
misery of constant anxiety. But, if Samson went and came back with some
conception of cherishing his wife--yes, the effort was worth making.
Yet, as the girl came down the slope, gaily singing a very melancholy
song, the painter broke off in his reflections, and his thoughts
veered. If Samson left, would he ever return? Might not the old man
after all be right? When he had seen other women and tasted other
allurements would he, like Ulysses, still hold his barren Ithaca above
the gilded invitation of Calypso? History has only one Ulysses. Sally's
voice was lilting like a bird's as she walked happily. The song was one
of those old ballads that have been held intact since the stock learned
to sing them in the heather of the Scotch highlands before there was an
America.

  "'She's pizened me, mother, make my bed soon,
  Fer I'm sick at my heart and I fain would lay doon.'"

The man rose and went to meet her.

"Miss Sally," he began, uncertainly, "I want to talk to you."

She was always very grave and diffident with Lescott. He was a strange
new type to her, and, though she had begun with a predilection in his
favor, she had since then come to hold him in adverse prejudice. Before
his arrival, Samson had been all hers. She had not missed in her lover
the gallantries that she and her women had never known. At evening,
when the supper dishes were washed and she sat in the honeysuckle
fragrance of the young night with the whippoorwills calling, she had
been accustomed to hear a particular whippoorwill-note call, much like
the real ones, yet distinct to her waiting ears. She was wont to rise
and go to the stile to meet him. She had known that every day she
would, seemingly by chance, meet Samson somewhere along the creek, or
on the big bowlder at the rift, or hoeing on the sloping cornfield.
These things had been enough. But, of late, his interests had been
divided. This painter had claimed many of his hours and many of his
thoughts. There was in her heart an unconfessed jealousy of the
foreigner. Now, she scrutinized him solemnly, and nodded.

"Won't you sit down?" he invited, and the girl dropped cross-legged on
a mossy rock, and waited. To-day, she wore a blue print dress, instead
of the red one. It was always a matter of amazement to the man that in
such an environment she was not only wildly beautiful, but invariably
the pink of neatness. She could climb a tree or a mountain, or emerge
from a sweltering blackberry patch, seemingly as fresh and unruffled as
she had been at the start. The man stood uncomfortably looking at her,
and was momentarily at a loss for words with which to commence.

"What was ye a-goin' ter tell me?" she asked.

"Miss Sally," he began, "I've discovered something about Samson."

Her blue eyes flashed ominously.

"Ye can't tell me nothin' 'bout Samson," she declared, "withouten
hit's somethin' nice."

"It's something very nice," the man reassured her.

"Then, ye needn't tell me, because I already knows hit," came her
prompt and confident announcement.

Lescott shook his head, dubiously.

"Samson is a genius," he said.

"What's thet?"

"He has great gifts--great abilities to become a figure in the world."

She nodded her head, in prompt and full corroboration.

"I reckon Samson'll be the biggest man in the mountings some day."

"He ought to be more than that."

Suspicion at once cast a cloud across the violet serenity of her eyes.

"What does ye mean?" she demanded.

"I mean"--the painter paused a moment, and then said bluntly--"I mean
that I want to take him back with me to New York."

The girl sprang to her feet with her chin defiantly high and her brown
hands clenched into tight little fists. Her bosom heaved convulsively,
and her eyes blazed through tears of anger. Her face was pale.

"Ye hain't!" she cried, in a paroxysm of fear and wrath. "Ye hain't a-
goin' ter do no sich--no sich of a damn thing!" She stamped her foot,
and her whole girlish body, drawn into rigid uprightness, was a-quiver
with the incarnate spirit of the woman defending her home and
institutions. For a moment after that, she could not speak, but her
determined eyes blazed a declaration of war. It was as though he had
posed her as the Spirit of the Cumberlands.

He waited until she should be calmer. It was useless to attempt
stemming her momentary torrent of rage. It was like one of the sudden
and magnificent tempests that often swept these hills, a brief visit of
the furies. One must seek shelter and wait. It would end as suddenly as
it had come. At last, he spoke, very softly.

"You don't understand me, Miss Sally. I'm not trying to take Samson
away from you. If a man should lose a girl like you, he couldn't gain
enough in the world to make up for it. All I want is that he shall have
the chance to make the best of his life."

"I reckon Samson don't need no fotched-on help ter make folks
acknowledge him."

"Every man needs his chance. He can be a great painter--but that's the
least part of it. He can come back equipped for anything that life
offers. Here, he is wasted."

"Ye mean"--she put the question with a hurt quaver in her voice--"ye
mean we all hain't good enough fer Samson?"

"No. I only mean that Samson wants to grow--and he needs space and new
scenes in which to grow. I want to take him where he can see more of
the world--not only a little section of the world. Surely, you are not
distrustful of Samson's loyalty? I want him to go with me for a while,
and see life."

"Don't ye say hit!" The defiance in her voice was being pathetically
tangled up with the tears. She was speaking in a transport of grief.
"Don't ye say hit. Take anybody else--take 'em all down thar, but leave
us Samson. We needs him hyar. We've jest got ter have Samson hyar."

She faced him still with quivering lips, but in another moment, with a
sudden sob, she dropped to the rock, and buried her face in her crossed
arms. Her slender body shook under a harrowing convulsion of
unhappiness. Lescott felt as though he had struck her; as though he had
ruthlessly blighted the irresponsible joyousness which had a few
minutes before sung from her lips with the blitheness of a mocking-
bird. He went over and softly laid a hand on her shoulder.

"Miss Sally--" he began.

She suddenly turned on him a tear-stained, infuriated face, stormy
with blazing eyes and wet cheeks and trembling lips.

"Don't touch me," she cried; "don't ye dare ter touch me! I hain't
nothin' but a gal--but I reckon I could 'most tear ye ter pieces. Ye're
jest a pizen snake, anyhow!" Then, she pointed a tremulous finger off
up the road. "Git away from hyar," she commanded. "I don't never want
ter see ye again. Ye're tryin' ter steal everything I loves. Git away,
I tells ye!--git away--begone!"

"Think it over," urged Lescott, quietly. "See if your heart doesn't
say I am Samson's friend--and yours." He turned, and began making his
way over the rocks; but, before he had gone far, he sat down to reflect
upon the situation. Certainly, he was not augmenting his popularity. A
half-hour later, he heard a rustle, and, turning, saw Sally standing
not far off. She was hesitating at the edge of the underbrush, and
Lescott read in her eyes the effort it was costing her to come forward
and apologize. Her cheeks were still pale and her eyes wet, but the
tempest of her anger had spent itself, and in the girl who stood
penitently, one hand nervously clutching a branch of rhododendron, one
foot twisting in the moss, Lescott was seeing an altogether new Sally.
There was a renunciation in her eyes that in contrast with the child-
like curve of her lips, and slim girlishness of her figure, seemed
entirely pathetic.

As she stood there, trying to come forward with a pitiful effort at
composure and a twisted smile, Lescott wanted to go and meet her. But
he knew her shyness, and realized that the kindest thing would be to
pretend that he had not seen her at all. So, he covertly watched her,
while he assumed to sit in moody unconsciousness of her nearness.

Little by little, and step by step, she edged over to him, halting
often and looking about with the impulse to slip out of sight, but
always bracing herself and drawing a little nearer. Finally, he knew
that she was standing almost directly over him, and yet it was a moment
or two more before her voice, sweetly penitent, announced her arrival.

"I reckon--I reckon I've got ter ask yore pardon," she said, slowly
and with labored utterance. He looked up to see her standing with her
head drooping and her fingers nervously pulling a flower to pieces.

"I reckon I hain't a plumb fool. I knows thet Samson's got a right ter
eddication. Anyhow, I knows he wants hit."

"Education," said the man, "isn't going to change Samson, except to
make him finer than he is--and more capable."

She shook her head. "I hain't got no eddication," she answered. "Hit's
a-goin' ter make him too good fer me. I reckon hit's a-goin' ter jest
about kill me.... Ye hain't never seed these here mountings in the
winter time, when thar hain't nothin' green, an' thar hain't no birds
a-singin', an' thar hain't nothin' but rain an' snow an' fog an' misery.
They're a-goin' ter be like thet all the time fer me, atter Samson's
gone away." She choked back something like a sob before she went on.
"Yes, stranger, hit's a-goin' ter pretty nigh kill me, but--" Her lips
twisted themselves into the pathetic smile again, and her chin came
stiffly up. "But," she added, determinedly, "thet don't make no
difference, nohow."




CHAPTER X


Yet, when Samson that evening gave his whippoorwill call at the Widow
Miller's cabin, he found a dejected and miserable girl sitting on the
stile, with her chin propped in her two hands and her eyes full of
somberness and foreboding.

"What's the matter, Sally?" questioned he, anxiously. "Hes that low-down
Tamarack Spicer been round here tellin' ye some more stories ter pester
ye?"

She shook her head in silence. Usually, she bore the brunt of their
conversations, Samson merely agreeing with, or overruling, her in
lordly brevities. The boy climbed up and sat beside her.

"Thar's a-goin' ter be a dancin' party over ter Wile McCager's mill
come Saturday," he insinuatingly suggested. "I reckon ye'll go over
thar with me, won't ye, Sally?"

He waited for her usual delighted assent, but Sally only told him
absently and without enthusiasm that she would "study about it." At
last, however, her restraint broke, and, looking up, she abruptly
demanded:

"Air ye a-goin' away, Samson?"

"Who's been a-talkin' ter ye?" demanded the boy, angrily.

For a moment, the girl sat silent. Silver mists were softening under a
rising moon. The katydids were prophesying with strident music the six
weeks' warning of frost. Myriads of stars were soft and low-hanging.
Finally, she spoke in a grave voice:

"Hit hain't nothin' ter git mad about, Samson. The artist man 'lowed
as how ye had a right ter go down thar, an' git an eddication." She
made a weary gesture toward the great beyond.

"He hadn't ought to of told ye, Sally. If I'd been plumb sartin in my
mind, I'd a-told ye myself--not but what I knows," he hastily amended,
"thet he meant hit friendly."

"Air ye a-goin'?"

"I'm studyin' about hit."

He awaited objection, but none came. Then, with a piquing of his
masculine vanity, he demanded:

"Hain't ye a-keerin', Sally, whether I goes, or not?"

The girl grew rigid. Her fingers on the crumbling plank of the stile's
top tightened and gripped hard. The moonlit landscape seemed to whirl
in a dizzy circle. Her face did not betray her, nor her voice, though
she had to gulp down a rising lump in her throat before she could
answer calmly.

"I thinks ye had ought ter go, Samson."

The boy was astonished. He had avoided the subject for fear of her
opposition--and tears.

Then, slowly, she went on as though repeating a lesson painstakingly
conned:

"There hain't nothin' in these here hills fer ye, Samson. Down thar,
ye'll see lots of things thet's new--an' civilized an' beautiful! Ye'll
see lots of gals thet kin read an' write, gals dressed up in all kinds
of fancy fixin's." Her glib words ran out and ended in a sort of inward
gasp.

Compliment came hardly and awkwardly to Samson's lips. He reached for
the girl's hand, and whispered:

"I reckon I won't see no gals thet's as purty as you be, Sally. I
reckon ye knows, whether I goes or stays, we're a-goin' ter git married."

She drew her hand away, and laughed, a little bitterly. In the last day,
she had ceased to be a child, and become a woman with all the soul-aching
possibilities of a woman's intuitions.

"Samson," she said, "I hain't askin' ye ter make me no promises. When
ye sees them other gals--gals thet kin read an' write--I reckon mebby
ye'll think diff'rent. I can't hardly spell out printin' in the fust
reader."

Her lover's voice was scornful of the imagined dangers, as a recruit
may be of the battle terrors--before he has been under fire. He slipped
his arm about her and drew her over to him.

"Honey," he said, "ye needn't fret about thet. Readin' an' writin'
can't make no difference fer a woman. Hit's mighty important fer a man,
but you're a gal."

"You're a-goin' ter think diff'rent atter awhile," she insisted. "When
ye goes, I hain't a-goin' ter be expectin' ye ter come back ... But"
--the resolution in her voice for a moment quavered as she added--"but
God knows I'm a-goin' ter be hopin'!"

"Sally!" The boy rose, and paced up and down in the road. "Air ye
goin' ter be ag'inst me, too? Don't ye see that I wants ter have a
chanst? Can't ye trust me? I'm jest a-tryin' to amount to something.
I'm plumb tired of bein' ornery an' no 'count."

She nodded.

"I've done told ye," she said, wearily, "thet I thinks ye ought ter do
hit."

He stood there in the road looking down at her and the twisted smile
that lifted only one corner of her lips, while the other drooped. The
moonlight caught her eyes; eyes that were trying, like the lips, to
smile, but that were really looking away into the future, which she saw
stripped of companionship and love, and gray with the ashiness of
wretched desolation. And, while he was seeing the light of the
simulated cheeriness die out in her face, she was seeing the strange,
exalted glow, of which she was more than half-afraid, kindle in his
pupils. It was as though she were giving up the living fire out of her
own heart to set ablaze the ambition and anticipation in his own.

That glow in Samson's eyes she feared and shrank from, as she might
have flinched before the blaze of insanity. It was a thing which her
mountain superstition could not understand, a thing not wholly normal;
a manifestation that came to the stoic face and transformed it, when
the eyes of the brain and heart were seeing things which she herself
could not see. It was the proclamation of the part of Samson which she
could not comprehend, as though he were looking into a spirit world of
weird and abnormal things. It was the light of an enthusiasm such as
his love for her could not bring to his eyes--and it told her that the
strongest and deepest part of Samson did not belong to her. Now, as the
young man stood there before her, and her little world of hope and
happiness seemed crumbling into ruins, and she was steeling her soul to
sacrifice herself and let him go, he was thinking, not of what it was
costing her in heart-break, but seeing visions of all the great world
held for him beyond the barriers of the mountains. The light in his
eyes seemed to flaunt the victory of the enthusiasms that had nothing
to do with her.

Samson came forward, and held out his arms. But Sally drew away with a
little shudder, and crouched at the end of the stile.

"What's ther matter, Sally?" he demanded in surprise, and, as he bent
toward her, his eyes lost the strange light she feared, and she laughed
a little nervous laugh, and rose from her seat.

"Nothin' hain't ther matter--now," she said, stanchly.

Lescott and Samson discussed the matter frequently. At times, the boy
was obstinate in his determination to remain; at other times, he gave
way to the yearnings for change and opportunity. But the lure of the
palette and brush possessed him beyond resistance and his taciturnity
melted, when in the painter's company, to a roughly poetic form of
expression.

"Thet sunrise," he announced one morning, setting down his milk-pail
to gaze at the east, "is jest like the sparkle in a gal's eyes when
she's tickled at somethin' ye've said about her. An,' when the sun
sets, hit's like the whole world was a woman blushin'."

The dance on Saturday was to be something more portentous than a mere
frolic. It would be a clan gathering to which the South adherents would
come riding up and down Misery and its tributaries from "nigh abouts"
and "over yon." From forenoon until after midnight, shuffle, jig and
fiddling would hold high, if rough, carnival. But, while the younger
folk abandoned themselves to these diversions, the grayer heads would
gather in more serious conclave. Jesse Purvy had once more beaten back
death, and his mind had probably been devising, during those bed-ridden
days and nights, plans of reprisal. According to current report, Purvy
had announced that his would-be assassin dwelt on Misery, and was
"marked down." So, there were obvious exigencies which the Souths must
prepare to meet. In particular, the clan must thrash out to definite
understanding the demoralizing report that Samson South, their logical
leader, meant to abandon them, at a crisis when war-clouds were
thickening.

The painter had finally resolved to cut the Gordian knot, and leave
the mountains. He had trained on Samson to the last piece all his
artillery of argument. The case was now submitted with the suggestion
that the boy take three months to consider, and that, if he decided
affirmatively, he should notify Lescott in advance of his coming. He
proposed sending Samson a small library of carefully picked books,
which the mountaineer eagerly agreed to devour in the interval.

Lescott consented, however, to remain over Saturday, and go to the
dance, since he was curious to observe what pressure was brought to
bear on the boy, and to have himself a final word of argument after the
kinsmen had spoken.

Saturday morning came after a night of torrential rain, which had left
the mountains steaming under a reek of fog and pitching clouds.
Hillside streams ran freshets, and creek-bed roads were foaming and
boiling into waterfalls. Sheep and cattle huddled forlornly under their
shelters of shelving rock, and only the geese seemed happy.

Far down the dripping shoulders of the mountains trailed ragged
streamers of vapor. Here and there along the lower slopes hung puffs of
smoky mist as though silent shells were bursting from unseen artillery
over a vast theater of combat.

But, as the morning wore on, the sun fought its way to view in a scrap
of overhead blue. A freshening breeze plunged into the reek, and sent
it scurrying in broken cloud ranks and shredded tatters. The steamy
heat gave way under a dissipating sweep of coolness, until the skies
smiled down on the hills and the hills smiled back. From log cabins and
plank houses up and down Misery and its tributaries, men and women
began their hegira toward the mill. Some came on foot, carrying their
shoes in their hands, but those were only near-by dwellers. Others made
saddle journeys of ten or fifteen, or even twenty, miles, and the
beasts that carried a single burden were few. Lescott rode in the wake
of Samson, who had Sally on a pillow at his back, and along the seven
miles of journey he studied the strange procession. It was, for the
most part, a solemn cavalcade, for these are folk who "take their
pleasures sadly." Possibly, some of the sun-bonneted, strangely-garbed
women were reflecting on the possibilities which mountain-dances often
develop into tragic actualities. Possibly, others were having their
enjoyment discounted by the necessity of "dressing up" and wearing shoes.

Sometimes, a slowly ambling mule bore an entire family; the father
managing the reins with one hand and holding a baby with the other,
while his rifle lay balanced across his pommel and his wife sat
solemnly behind him on a sheepskin or pillion. Many of the men rode
side-saddles, and sacks bulky at each end hinted of such baggage as is
carried in jugs. Lescott realized from the frank curiosity with which
he was regarded that he had been a topic of discussion, and that he was
now being "sized up." He was the false prophet who was weaving a spell
over Samson! Once, he heard a sneering voice from the wayside comment
as he rode by.

"He looks like a damned parson."

Glancing back, he saw a tow-headed youth glowering at him out of
pinkish albino eyes. The way lay in part along the creek-bed, where
wagons had ground the disintegrating rock into deep ruts as smooth as
walls of concrete. Then, it traversed a country of palisading cliffs
and immensity of forest, park-like and splendid. Strangely picturesque
suspension bridges with rough stairways at their ends spanned waters
too deep for fording. Frame houses showed along the banks of the creek
--grown here to a river--unplaned and unpainted of wall, but brightly
touched with window-and door-frames of bright yellow or green or blue.
This was the territory where the Souths held dominance, and it was
pouring out its people.

They came before noon to the mouth of Dryhole Creek, and the house of
Wile McCager. Already, the picket fence was lined with tethered horses
and mules, and a canvas-covered wagon came creeping in behind its yoke
of oxen. Men stood clustered in the road, and at the entrance a woman,
nursing her baby at her breast, welcomed and gossiped with the arrivals.

The house of Wile McCager loaned itself to entertainment. It was not
of logs, but of undressed lumber, and boasted a front porch and two
front rooms entered by twin doors facing on a triangular alcove. In the
recess between these portals stood a washstand, surmounted by a china
basin and pitcher--a declaration of affluence. From the interior of the
house came the sounds of fiddling, though these strains of "Turkey in
the Straw" were only by way of prelude. Lescott felt, though he could
not say just what concrete thing told him, that under the shallow note
of merry-making brooded the major theme of a troublesome problem. The
seriousness was below the surface, but insistently depressing. He saw,
too, that he himself was mixed up with it in a fashion, which might
become dangerous, when a few jugs of white liquor had been emptied.

It would be some time yet before the crowd warmed up. Now, they only
stood about and talked, and to Lescott they gave a gravely polite
greeting, beneath which was discernible an undercurrent of hostility.

As the day advanced, the painter began picking out the more
influential clansmen, by the fashion in which they fell together into
groups, and took themselves off to the mill by the racing creek for
discussion. While the young persons danced and "sparked" within, and
the more truculent lads escaped to the road to pass the jug, and
forecast with youthful war-fever "cleanin' out the Hollmans," the
elders were deep in ways and means. If the truce could be preserved for
its unexpired period of three years, it was, of course, best. In that
event, crops could be cultivated, and lives saved. But, if Jesse Purvy
chose to regard his shooting as a breach of terms, and struck, he would
strike hard, and, in that event, best defense lay in striking first.
Samson would soon be twenty-one. That he would take his place as head
of the clan had until now never been questioned--and he was talking of
desertion. For that, a pink-skinned foreigner, who wore a woman's bow
of ribbon at his collar, was to blame. The question of loyalty must be
squarely put up to Samson, and it must be done to-day. His answer must
be definite and unequivocal. As a guest of Spicer South, Lescott was
entitled to that consideration which is accorded ambassadors.

None the less, the vital affairs of the clan could not be balked by
consideration for a stranger, who, in the opinion of the majority,
should be driven from the country as an insidious mischief-maker.
Ostensibly, the truce still held, but at no time since its signing had
matters been so freighted with the menace of a gathering storm. The
attitude of each faction was that of several men standing quiet with
guns trained on one another's breasts. Each hesitated to fire, knowing
that to pull the trigger meant to die himself, yet fearing that another
trigger might at any moment be drawn. Purvy dared not have Samson shot
out of hand, because he feared that the Souths would claim his life in
return, yet he feared to let Samson live. On the other hand, if Purvy
fell, no South could balance his death, except Spicer or Samson. Any
situation that might put conditions to a moment of issue would either
prove that the truce was being observed, or open the war--and yet each
faction was guarding against such an event as too fraught with danger.
One thing was certain. By persuasion or force, Lescott must leave, and
Samson must show himself to be the youth he had been thought, or the
confessed and repudiated renegade. Those questions, to-day must answer.
It was a difficult situation, and promised an eventful entertainment.
Whatever conclusion was reached as to the artist's future, he was,
until the verdict came in, a visitor, and, unless liquor inflamed some
reckless trouble-hunter, that fact would not be forgotten. Possibly, it
was as well that Tamarack Spicer had not arrived.

Lescott himself realized the situation in part, as he stood at the
door of the house watching the scene inside.

There was, of course, no round dancing--only the shuffle and jig--with
champions contending for the honor of their sections. A young woman
from Deer Lick and a girl from the head of Dryhill had been matched for
the "hoe-down," and had the floor to themselves. The walls were crowded
with partisan onlookers, who applauded and cheered their favorite.

The bows scraped faster and louder; the clapping hands beat more
tumultuously, until their mad _tempo_ was like the clatter of
musketry; the dancers threw themselves deliriously into the madly
quickening step. It was a riotous saturnalia of flying feet and
twinkling ankles. Onlookers shouted and screamed encouragement. It
seemed that the girls must fall in exhaustion, yet each kept on,
resolved to be still on the floor when the other had abandoned it in
defeat--that being the test of victory. At last, the girl from Dryhill
reeled, and was caught by half-a-dozen arms. Her adversary, holding the
floor undisputed, slowed down, and someone stopped the fiddler. Sally
turned from the crowded wall, and began looking about for Samson. He
was not there. Lescott had seen him leave the house a few moments
before, and started over to intercept the girl, as she came out to the
porch.

In the group about the door, he passed a youth with tow-white hair and
very pink cheeks. The boy was the earliest to succumb to the temptation
of the moonshine jug, a temptation which would later claim others. He
was reeling crazily, and his albino eyes were now red and inflamed.
Lescott remembered him.

"Thet's ther damned furriner thet's done turned Samson inter a gal,"
proclaimed the youth, in a thick voice.

The painter paused, and looked back. The boy was reaching under his
coat with hands that had become clumsy and unresponsive.

"Let me git at him," he shouted, with a wild whoop and a dash toward
the painter.

Lescott said nothing, but Sally had heard, and stepped swiftly between.

"You've got ter git past me fust, Buddy," she said, quietly. "I reckon
ye'd better run on home, an' git yore mammy ter put ye ter bed."




CHAPTER XI


Several soberer men closed around the boy, and, after disarming him,
led him away grumbling and muttering, while Wile McCager made apologies
to the guest.

"Jimmy's jest a peevish child," he explained. "A drop or two of licker
makes him skittish. I hopes ye'll look over hit."

Jimmy's outbreak was interesting to Lescott chiefly as an indication
of what might follow. He noted how the voices were growing louder and
shriller, and how the jug was circulating faster. A boisterous note was
making itself heard through the good humor and laughter, and the
"furriner" remembered that these minds, when inflamed, are more prone
to take the tangent of violence than that of mirth. Unwilling to
introduce discord by his presence, and involve Samson in quarrels on
his account, he suggested riding back to Misery, but the boy's face
clouded at the suggestion.

"Ef they kain't be civil ter my friends," he said, shortly, "they've
got ter account ter me. You stay right hyar, and I'll stay clost to
you. I done come hyar to-day ter tell 'em that they mustn't meddle in
my business."

A short while later, Wile McCager invited Samson to come out to the
mill, and the boy nodded to Lescott an invitation to accompany him. The
host shook his head.

"We kinder 'lowed ter talk over some fam'ly matters with ye, Samson,"
he demurred. "I reckon Mr. Lescott'll excuse ye fer a spell."

"Anything ye've got ter talk ter me about, George Lescott kin hear,"
said the youth, defiantly. "I hain't got no secrets." He was heir to
his father's leadership, and his father had been unquestioned. He meant
to stand uncompromisingly on his prerogatives.

For an instant, the old miller's keen eyes hardened obstinately. After
Spicer and Samson South, he was the most influential and trusted of the
South leaders--and Samson was still a boy. His ruggedly chiseled
features were kindly, but robustly resolute, and, when he was angered,
few men cared to face him. For an instant, a stinging rebuke seemed to
hover on his lips, then he turned with a curt jerk of his large head.

"All right. Suit yourselves. I've done warned ye both. We 'lows ter
talk plain."

The mill, dating back to pioneer days, sat by its race with its shaft
now idle. About it, the white-boled sycamores crowded among the huge
rocks, and the water poured tumultuously over the dam. The walls of
mortised logs were chinked with rock and clay. At its porch, two
discarded millstones served in lieu of steps. Over the door were
fastened a spreading pair of stag-antlers. It looked to Lescott, as he
approached, like a scrap of landscape torn from some medieval picture,
and the men about its door seemed medieval, too; bearded and gaunt,
hard-thewed and sullen.

All of them who stood waiting were men of middle age, or beyond. A
number were gray-haired, but they were all of cadet branches. Many of
them, like Wile McCager himself, did not bear the name of South, and
Samson was the eldest son of the eldest son. They sat on meal-whitened
bins and dusty timbers and piled-up sacks. Several crouched on the
ground, squatting on their heels, and, as the conference proceeded,
they drank moonshine whiskey, and spat solemnly at the floor cracks.

"Hevn't ye noticed a right-smart change in Samson?" inquired old Caleb
Wiley of a neighbor, in his octogenarian quaver. "The boy hes done got
es quiet an' pious es a missionary."

The other nodded under his battered black felt hat, and beat a tattoo
with the end of his long hickory staff.

"He hain't drunk a half-pint of licker to-day," he querulously replied.

"Why in heck don't we run this here pink-faced conjure-doctor outen
the mountings?" demanded Caleb, who had drunk more than a half-pint.
"He's a-castin' spells over the boy. He's a-practisin' of deviltries."

"We're a-goin' ter see about thet right now," was the response. "We
don't 'low to let hit run on no further."

"Samson," began old Wile McCager, clearing his throat and taking up
his duty as spokesman, "we're all your kinfolks here, an' we aimed ter
ask ye about this here report thet yer 'lowin' ter leave the mountings?"

"What of hit?" countered the boy.

"Hit looks mighty like the war's a-goin' ter be on ag'in pretty soon.
Air ye a-goin' ter quit, or air ye a-goin' ter stick? Thet's what we
wants ter know."

"I didn't make this here truce, an' I hain't a-goin' ter bust hit,"
said the boy, quietly. "When the war commences, I'll be hyar. Ef I
hain't hyar in the meantime, hit hain't nobody's business. I hain't
accountable ter no man but my pap, an' I reckon, whar he is, he knows
whether I'm a-goin' ter keep my word."

There was a moment's silence, then Wile McCager put another question:

"Ef ye're plumb sot on gittin' larnin' why don't ye git hit right hyar
in these mountings?"

Samson laughed derisively.

"Who'll I git hit from?" he caustically inquired. "Ef the mountain
won't come ter Mohamet, Mohamet's got ter go ter the mountain, I
reckon." The figure was one they did not understand. It was one Samson
himself had only acquired of late. He was quoting George Lescott. But
one thing there was which did not escape his hearers: the tone of
contempt. Eyes of smoldering hate turned on the visitor at whose door
they laid the blame.

Caleb Wiley rose unsteadily to his feet, his shaggy beard trembling
with wrath and his voice quavering with senile indignation.

"Hev ye done got too damned good fer yore kin-folks, Samson South?" he
shrilly demanded. "Hev ye done been follerin' atter this here puny
witch-doctor twell ye can't keep a civil tongue in yer head fer yore
elders? I'm in favor of runnin' this here furriner outen the country
with tar an' feathers on him. Furthermore, I'm in favor of cleanin' out
the Hollmans. I was jest a-sayin' ter Bill----"

"Never mind what ye war jest a-sayin'," interrupted the boy, flushing
redly to his cheekbones, but controlling his voice. "Ye've done said
enough a'ready. Ye're a right old man, Caleb, an' I reckon thet gives
ye some license ter shoot off yore face, but ef any of them no-'count,
shif'less boys of yores wants ter back up what ye says, I'm ready ter
go out thar an' make 'em eat hit. I hain't a-goin' ter answer no more
questions."

There was a commotion of argument, until "Black Dave" Jasper, a
saturnine giant, whose hair was no blacker than his expression, rose,
and a semblance of quiet greeted him as he spoke.

"Mebby, Samson, ye've got a right ter take the studs this a-way, an'
ter refuse ter answer our questions, but we've got a right ter say who
kin stay in this hyar country. Ef ye 'lows ter quit us, I reckon we kin
quit you--and, if we quits ye, ye hain't nothin' more ter us then no
other boy thet's gettin' too big fer his breeches. This furriner is a
visitor here to-day, an' we don't 'low ter hurt him--but he's got ter
go. We don't want him round hyar no longer." He turned to Lescott.
"We're a-givin' ye fair warnin', stranger. Ye hain't our breed. Atter
this, ye stays on Misery at yore own risk--an' hit's a-goin' ter be
plumb risky. That thar's final."

"This man," blazed the boy, before Lescott could speak, "is a-visitin'
me an' Unc' Spicer. When ye wants him ye kin come up thar an' git him.
Every damned man of ye kin come. I hain't a-sayin' how many of ye'll go
back. He was 'lowin' that he'd leave hyar ter-morrer mornin', but atter
this I'm a-tellin' ye he hain't a-goin' ter do hit. He's a-goin' ter
stay es long es he likes, an' nobody hain't a-goin' ter run him off."
Samson took his stand before the painter, and swept the group with his
eyes. "An' what's more," he added, "I'll tell ye another thing. I
hadn't plumb made up my mind ter leave the mountings, but ye've done
settled hit fer me. I'm a-goin'."

There was a low murmur of anger, and a voice cried out from the rear:

"Let him go. We hain't got no use fer damn cowards."

"Whoever said thet's a liar!" shouted the boy. Lescott, standing at
his side, felt that the situation was more than parlous. But, before
the storm could break, some one rushed in, and whispered to Wile
McCager a message that caused him to raise both hands above his head,
and thunder for attention.

"Men," he roared, "listen ter me! This here hain't no time fer squabblin'
amongst ourselves. We're all Souths. Tamarack Spicer has done gone ter
Hixon, an' got inter trouble. He's locked up in the jail-house."

"We're all hyar," screamed old Caleb's high, broken voice. "Let's go
an' take him out."

Samson's anger had died. He turned, and held a whispered conversation
with McCager, and, at its end, the host of the day announced briefly:

"Samson's got somethin' ter say ter ye. So long as he's willin' ter
stand by us, I reckon we're willin' ter listen ter Henry South's boy."

"I hain't got no use for Tam'rack Spicer," said the boy, succinctly,
"but I don't 'low ter let him lay in no jail-house, unlessen he's got a
right ter be thar. What's he charged with?"

But no one knew that. A man supposedly close to the Hollmans, but in
reality an informer for the Souths, had seen him led into the jail-yard
by a posse of a half-dozen men, and had seen the iron-barred doors
close on him. That was all, except that the Hollman forces were
gathering in Hixon, and, if the Souths went there _en masse_, a
pitched battle must be the inevitable result. The first step was to
gain accurate information and an answer to one vital question. Was
Tamarack held as a feud victim, or was his arrest legitimate? How to
learn that was the problem. To send a body of men was to invite
bloodshed. To send a single inquirer was to deliver him over to the
enemy.

"Air you men willin' ter take my word about Tamarack?" inquired
Samson. But for the scene of a few minutes ago, it would have been an
unnecessary question. There was a clamorous assent, and the boy turned
to Lescott.

"I wants ye ter take Sally home with ye. Ye'd better start right away,
afore she heers any of this talk. Hit would fret her. Tell her I've had
ter go 'cross ther country a piece, ter see a sick man. Don't tell her
whar I'm a-goin'." He turned to the others. "I reckon I've got yore
promise thet Mr. Lescott hain't a-goin' ter be bothered afore I gits
back?"

Wile McCager promptly gave the assurance.

"I gives ye my hand on hit."

"I seed Jim Asberry loafin' round jest beyond ther ridge, es I rid
over hyar," volunteered the man who had brought the message.

"Go slow now, Samson. Don't be no blame fool," dissuaded Wile McCager.
"Hixon's plumb full of them Hollmans, an' they're likely ter be full of
licker--hit's Saturday. Hit's apt ter be shore death fer ye ter try ter
ride through Main Street--ef ye gits thet fur. Ye dassent do hit."

"I dast do anything!" asserted the boy, with a flash of sudden anger.
"Some liar 'lowed awhile ago thet I was a coward. All right, mebby I
be. Unc' Wile, keep the boys hyar tell ye hears from me--an' keep 'em
sober." He turned and made his way to the fence where his mule stood
hitched.

When Samson crossed the ridge, and entered the Hollman country, Jim
Asberry, watching from a hilltop point of vantage, rose and mounted the
horse that stood hitched behind a near-by screen of rhododendron bushes
and young cedars. Sometimes, he rode just one bend of the road in
Samson's rear. Sometimes, he took short cuts, and watched his enemy
pass. But always he held him under a vigilant eye. Finally, he reached
a wayside store where a local telephone gave communication with
Hollman's Mammoth Department Store.

"Jedge," he informed, "Samson South's done left the party et ther
mill, an' he's a-ridin' towards town. Shall I git him?"

"Is he comin' by hisself?" inquired the storekeeper.

"Yes."

"Well, jest let him come on. We can tend ter him hyar, ef necessary."
So, Jim withheld his hand, and merely shadowed, sending bulletins, from
time to time.

It was three o'clock when Samson started. It was near six when he
reached the ribbon of road that loops down into town over the mountain.
His mule was in a lather of sweat. He knew that he was being spied
upon, and that word of his coming was traveling ahead of him. What he
did not know was whether or not it suited Jesse Purvy's purpose that he
should slide from his mule, dead, before he turned homeward. If
Tamarack had been seized as a declaration of war, the chief South would
certainly not be allowed to return. If the arrest had not been for feud
reasons, he might escape. That was the question which would be answered
with his life or death.

The boy kept his eyes straight to the front, fixed on the
philosophical wagging of his mule's brown ears. Finally, he crossed the
bridge that gave entrance to the town, as yet unharmed, and clattered
at a trot between the shacks of the environs. He was entering the
fortified stronghold of the enemy, and he was expected. As he rode
along, doors closed to slits, and once or twice he caught the flash of
sunlight on a steel barrel, but his eyes held to the front. Several
traveling men, sitting on the porch of the hotel opposite the court-
house, rose when they saw his mule, and went inside, closing the door
behind them.

The "jail-house" was a small building of home-made brick, squatting at
the rear of the court-house yard. Its barred windows were narrow with
sills breast-high.

The court-house itself was shaded by large oaks and sycamores, and, as
Samson drew near, he saw that some ten or twelve men, armed with
rifles, separated from groups and disposed themselves behind the tree
trunks and the stone coping of the well. None of them spoke, and Samson
pretended that he had not seen them. He rode his mule at a walk,
knowing that he was rifle-covered from a half-dozen windows. At the
hitching rack directly beneath the county building, he flung his reins
over a post, and, swinging his rifle at his side, passed casually along
the brick walk to the jail. The men behind the trees edged around their
covers as he went, keeping themselves protected, as squirrels creep
around a trunk when a hunter is lurking below. Samson halted at the
jail wall, and called the prisoner's name. A towsled head and surly
face appeared at the barred window, and the boy went over and held
converse from the outside.

"How in hell did ye git into town?" demanded the prisoner.

"I rid in," was the short reply. "How'd ye git in the jail-house?"

The captive was shamefaced.

"I got a leetle too much licker, an' I was shootin' out the lights
last night," he confessed.

"What business did ye have hyar in Hixon?"

"I jest slipped in ter see a gal."

Samson leaned closer, and lowered his voice.

"Does they know thet ye shot them shoots at Jesse Purvy?"

Tamarack turned pale.

"No," he stammered, "they believe you done hit."

Samson laughed. He was thinking of the rifles trained on him from a
dozen invisible rests.

"How long air they a-goin' ter keep ye hyar?" he demanded.

"I kin git out to-morrer ef I pays the fine. Hit's ten dollars."

"An' ef ye don't pay the fine?"

"Hit's a dollar a day."

"I reckon ye don't 'low ter pay hit, do ye?"

"I 'lowed mebby ye mout pay hit fer me, Samson."

"Ye done 'lowed plumb wrong. I come hyar ter see ef ye needed help,
but hit 'pears ter me they're lettin' ye off easy."

He turned on his heel, and went back to his mule. The men behind the
trees began circling again. Samson mounted, and, with his chin well up,
trotted back along the main street. It was over. The question was
answered. The Hollmans regarded the truce as still effective. The fact
that they were permitting him to ride out alive was a wordless
assurance of that. Incidentally, he stood vindicated in the eyes of his
own people.

When Samson reached the mill it was ten o'clock. The men were soberer
than they had been in the afternoon. McCager had seen to that. The boy
replaced his exhausted mule with a borrowed mount. At midnight, as he
drew near the cabin of the Widow Miller, he gave a long, low
whippoorwill call, and promptly, from the shadow of the stile, a small
tired figure rose up to greet him. For hours that little figure had
been sitting there, silent, wide-eyed and terrified, nursing her knees
in locked fingers that pressed tightly into the flesh. She had not
spoken. She had hardly moved. She had only gazed out, keeping the vigil
with a white face that was beginning to wear the drawn, heart-eating
anxiety of the mountain woman; the woman whose code demands that she
stand loyally to her clan's hatreds; the woman who has none of the
man's excitement in stalking human game, which is also stalking him;
the woman who must only stay at home and imagine a thousand terrors
--and wait.

A rooster was crowing, and the moon had set. Only the stars were left.

"Sally," the boy reproved, "hit's most mornin', an' ye must be plumb
fagged out. Why hain't you in bed?"

"I 'lowed ye'd come by hyar," she told him simply, "and I waited fer
ye. I knowed whar ye had went," she added, "an' I was skeered."

"How did ye know?"

"I heered thet Tam'rack was in the jail-house, an' somebody hed ter go
ter Hixon. So, of course, I knowed hit would be you."




CHAPTER XII


Lescott stayed on a week after that simply in deference to Samson's
insistence. To leave at once might savor of flight under fire, but when
the week was out the painter turned his horse's head toward town, and
his train swept him back to the Bluegrass and the East. As he gazed out
of his car windows at great shoulders of rock and giant trees, things
he was leaving behind, he felt a sudden twinge of something akin to
homesickness. He knew that he should miss these great humps of
mountains and the ragged grandeur of the scenery. With the rich
smoothness of the Bluegrass, a sense of flatness and heaviness came to
his lungs. Level metal roads and loamy fields invited his eye. The
tobacco stalks rose in profuse heaviness of sticky green; the hemp
waved its feathery tops; and woodlands were clear of underbrush--the
pauper counties were behind him.

A quiet of unbroken and deadly routine settled down on Misery. The
conduct of the Souths in keeping hands off, and acknowledging the
justice of Tamarack Spicer's jail sentence, had been their answer to
the declaration of the Hollmans in letting Samson ride into and out of
Hixon. The truce was established. When, a short time later, Tamarack
left the country to become a railroad brakeman, Jesse Purvy passed the
word that his men must, until further orders, desist from violence. The
word had crept about that Samson, too, was going away, and, if this
were true, Jesse felt that his future would be more secure than his
past. Purvy believed Samson guilty, despite the exoneration of the
hounds. Their use had been the idea of over-fervent relatives. He
himself scoffed at their reliability.

"I wouldn't believe no dog on oath," he declared. Besides, he
preferred to blame Samson, since he was the head of the tribe and
because he himself knew what cause Samson had to hate him. Perhaps,
even now, Samson meant to have vengeance before leaving. Possibly,
even, this ostentatious care to regard the truce was simply a shrewdly
planned sham meant to disarm his suspicion.

Until Samson went, if he did go, Jesse Purvy would redouble his
caution. It would be a simple matter to have the boy shot to death, and
end all question. Samson took no precautions to safeguard his life, but
he had a safeguard none the less. Purvy felt sure that within a week
after Samson fell, despite every care he might take, he, too, would
fall. He was tired of being shot down. Purvy was growing old, and the
fires of war were burning to embers in his veins. He was becoming more
and more interested in other things. It dawned upon him that to be
known as a friend of the poor held more allurement for gray-haired age
than to be known as a master of assassins. It would be pleasant to sit
undisturbed, and see his grandchildren grow up, and he recognized, with
a sudden ferocity of repugnance, that he did not wish them to grow up
as feud fighters. Purvy had not reformed, but, other things being
equal, he would prefer to live and let live. He had reached that stage
to which all successful villains come at some time, when he envied the
placid contentment of respected virtues. Ordering Samson shot down was
a last resort--one to be held in reserve until the end.

So, along Misery and Crippleshin, the men of the factions held their
fire while the summer spent itself, and over the mountain slopes the
leaves began to turn, and the mast to ripen.

Lescott had sent a box of books, and Samson had taken a team over to
Hixon, and brought them back. It was a hard journey, attended with much
plunging against the yokes and much straining of trace chains. Sally
had gone with him. Samson was spending as much time as possible in her
society now. The girl was saying little about his departure, but her
eyes were reading, and without asking she knew that his going was
inevitable. Many nights she cried herself to sleep, but, when he saw
her, she was always the same blithe, bird-like creature that she had
been before. She was philosophically sipping her honey while the sun
shone.

Samson read some of the books aloud to Sally, who had a child's
passion for stories, and who could not have spelled them out for
herself. He read badly, but to her it was the flower of scholastic
accomplishment, and her untrained brain, sponge-like in its
acquisitiveness, soaked up many new words and phrases which fell again
quaintly from her lips in talk. Lescott had spent a week picking out
those books. He had wanted them to argue for him; to feed the boy's
hunger for education, and give him some forecast of the life that
awaited him. His choice had been an effort to achieve _multum in
parvo_, but Samson devoured them all from title page to _finis_
line, and many of them he went back to, and digested again.

He wrestled long and gently with his uncle, struggling to win the old
man's consent to his departure. But Spicer South's brain was no longer
plastic. What had been good enough for the past was good enough for the
future. He sought to take the most tolerant view, and to believe that
Samson was acting on conviction and not on an ingrate's impulse, but
that was the best he could do, and he added to himself that Samson's
was an abnormal and perverted conviction. Nevertheless, he arranged
affairs so that his nephew should be able to meet financial needs, and
to go where he chose in a fashion befitting a South. The old man was
intensely proud, and, if the boy were bent on wasting himself, he
should waste like a family head, and not appear a pauper among strangers.

The autumn came, and the hills blazed out in their fanfare of splendid
color. The broken skyline took on a wistful sweetness under the haze of
"the Great Spirit's peace-pipe."

The sugar trees flamed their fullest crimson that fall. The poplars
were clear amber and the hickories russet and the oaks a deep burgundy.
Lean hogs began to fill and fatten with their banqueting on beechnuts
and acorns. Scattered quail came together in the conclave of the covey,
and changed their summer call for the "hover" whistle. Shortly, the
rains would strip the trees, and leave them naked. Then, Misery would
vindicate its christener. But, now, as if to compensate in a few
carnival days of champagne sparkle and color, the mountain world was
burning out its summer life on a pyre of transient splendor.

November came in bleakly, with a raw and devastating breath of
fatality. The smile died from horizon to horizon, and for days cold
rains beat and lashed the forests. And, toward the end of that month,
came the day which Samson had set for his departure. He had harvested
the corn, and put the farm in order. He had packed into his battered
saddlebags what things were to go with him into his new life. The sun
had set in a sickly bank of murky, red-lined clouds. His mule, which
knew the road, and could make a night trip, stood saddled by the stile.
A kinsman was to lead it back from Hixon when Samson had gone. The boy
slowly put on his patched and mud-stained overcoat. His face was sullen
and glowering. There was a lump in his throat, like the lump that had
been there when he stood with his mother's arm about his shoulders, and
watched the dogs chase a rabbit by his father's grave. Supper had been
eaten in silence. Now that the hour of departure had come, he felt the
guilt of the deserter. He realized how aged his uncle seemed, and how
the old man hunched forward over the plate as they ate the last meal
they should, for a long while, have together. It was only by sullen
taciturnity that he could retain his composure.

At the threshold, with the saddlebags over his left forearm and the
rifle in his hand, he paused. His uncle stood at his elbow and the boy
put out his hand.

"Good-by, Unc' Spicer," was all he said. The old man, who had been his
second father, shook hands. His face, too, was expressionless, but he
felt that he was saying farewell to a soldier of genius who was
abandoning the field. And he loved the boy with all the centered power
of an isolated heart.

"Hadn't ye better take a lantern?" he questioned.

"No, I reckon I won't need none." And Samson went out, and mounted his
mule.

A half-mile along the road, he halted and dismounted. There, in a
small cove, surrounded by a tangle of briars and blackberry bushes,
stood a small and dilapidated "meeting house" and churchyard, which he
must visit. He made his way through the rough undergrowth to the
unkempt half-acre, and halted before the leaning headstones which
marked two graves. With a sudden emotion, he swept the back of his hand
across his eyes. He did not remove his hat, but he stood in the drizzle
of cold rain for a moment of silence, and then he said:

"Pap, I hain't fergot. I don't want ye ter think thet I've fergot."

Before he arrived at the Widow Miller's, the rain had stopped and the
clouds had broken. Back of them was a discouraged moon, which sometimes
showed its face for a fitful moment, only to disappear. The wind was
noisily floundering through the treetops. Near the stile, Samson gave
his whippoorwill call. It was, perhaps, not quite so clear or true as
usual, but that did not matter. There were no other whippoorwills
calling at this season to confuse signals. He crossed the stile, and
with a word quieted Sally's dog as it rose to challenge him, and then
went with him, licking his hand.

Sally opened the door, and smiled. She had spent the day nerving
herself for this farewell, and at least until the moment of leave-
taking she would be safe from tears. The Widow Miller and her son soon
left them alone, and the boy and girl sat before the blazing logs.

For a time, an awkward silence fell between them. Sally had donned her
best dress, and braided her red-brown hair. She sat with her chin in
her palms, and the fire kissed her cheeks and temples into color. That
picture and the look in her eyes remained with Samson for a long while,
and there were times of doubt and perplexity when he closed his eyes
and steadied himself by visualizing it all again in his heart. At last,
the boy rose, and went over to the corner where he had placed his gun.
He took it up, and laid it on the hearth between them.

"Sally," he said, "I wants ter tell ye some things thet I hain't never
said ter nobody else. In the fust place, I wants ye ter keep this hyar
gun fer me."

The girl's eyes widened with surprise.

"Hain't ye a-goin' ter take hit with ye, Samson?"

He shook his head.

"I hain't a-goin' ter need hit down below. Nobody don't use 'em down
thar. I've got my pistol, an' I reckon thet will be enough."

"I'll take good keer of hit," she promised.

The boy took out of his pockets a box of cartridges and a small
package tied in a greasy rag.

"Hit's loaded, Sally, an' hit's cleaned an' hit's greased. Hit's ready
fer use."

Again, she nodded in silent assent, and the boy began speaking in a
slow, careful voice, which gradually mounted into tense emotion.

"Sally, thet thar gun was my pap's. When he lay a-dyin', he gave hit
ter me, an' he gave me a job ter do with hit. When I was a little
feller, I used ter set up 'most all day, polishin' thet gun an' gittin'
hit ready. I used ter go out in the woods, an' practise shootin' hit at
things, tell I larned how ter handle hit. I reckon thar hain't many
fellers round here thet kin beat me now." He paused, and the girl
hastened to corroborate.

"Thar hain't none, Samson."

"There hain't nothin' in the world, Sally, thet I prizes like I does
thet gun. Hit's got a job ter do ... Thar hain't but one person in the
world I'd trust hit with. Thet's you.... I wants ye ter keep hit fer
me, an' ter keep hit ready.... They thinks round hyar I'm quittin', but
I hain't. I'm a-comin' back, an', when I comes, I'll need this hyar
thing--an' I'll need hit bad." He took up the rifle, and ran his hand
caressingly along its lock and barrel.

"I don't know when I'm a-comin'," he said, slowly, "but, when I calls
fer this, I'm shore a-goin' ter need hit quick. I wants hit ter be
ready fer me, day er night. Maybe, nobody won't know I'm hyar....
Maybe, I won't want nobody ter know.... But, when I whistles out thar
like a whippoorwill, I wants ye ter slip out--an' fotch me thet gun!"

He stopped, and bent forward. His face was tense, and his eyes were
glinting with purpose. His lips were tight set and fanatical.

"Samson," said the girl, reaching out and taking the weapon from his
hands, "ef I'm alive when ye comes, I'll do hit. I promises ye. An',"
she added, "ef I hain't alive, hit'll be standin' thar in thet corner.
I'll grease hit, an' keep hit loaded, an' when ye calls, I'll fotch hit
out thar to ye."

The youth nodded. "I mout come anytime, but likely as not I'll hev ter
come a-fightin' when I comes."

Next, he produced an envelope.

"This here is a letter I've

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