The Call of the Cumberlands by Charles Neville Buck (page 4)

as to right-of-way. But the letters he wished to write were not the sort he cared to have read to the girl by the evangelist-doctor or the district-school teacher, and alone she could have made nothing of them. However, “I love you” are easy words–and those he always included.

The Widow Miller had been ailing for months, and, though the local physician diagnosed the condition as being “right porely,” he knew that the specter of tuberculosis which stalks through these badly lighted and ventilated houses was stretching out its fingers to touch her shrunken chest. This had meant that Sally had to forego the evening hours of study, because of the weariness that followed the day of nursing and household drudgery. Autumn seemed to bring to her mother a slight improvement, and Sally could again sometimes steal away with her slate and book, to sit alone on the big bowlder, and study. But, oftentimes, the print on the page, or the scrawl on the slate, became blurred. Nowadays, the tears came weakly to her eyes, and, instead of hating herself for them and dashing them fiercely away, as she would have done a year ago, she sat listlessly, and gazed across the flaring hills.

Even the tuneful glory of the burgundy and scarlet mountains hurt her into wincing–for was it not the clarion of Beauty that Samson had heard–and in answer to which he had left her? So, she would sit, and let her eyes wander, and try to imagine the sort of picture those same very hungry eyes would see, could she rip away the curtain of purple distance, and look in on him–wherever he was. And, in imagining such a picture, she was hampered by no actual knowledge of the world in which he lived–it was all a fairy-tale world, one which her imagination shaped and colored fantastically. Then, she would take out one of his occasional letters, and her face would grow somewhat rapt, as she spelled out the familiar, “I love you,” which was to her the soul of the message. The rest was unimportant. She would not be able to write that Christmas. letter. There had been too many interruptions in the self-imparted education, but some day she would write. There would probably be time enough. It would take even Samson a long while to become an artist. He had said so, and the morbid mountain pride forbade that she should write at all until she could do it well enough to give him a complete surprise. It must be a finished article, that letter–or nothing at all!

One day, as she was walking homeward from her lonely trysting place, she met the battered-looking man who carried medicines in his saddlebags and the Scriptures in his pocket, and who practised both forms of healing through the hills. The old man drew down his nag, and threw one leg over the pommel.

“Evenin’, Sally,” he greeted.

“Evenin’, Brother Spencer. How air ye?”

“Tol’able, thank ye, Sally.” The body-and-soul mender studied the girl awhile in silence, and then said bluntly:

“Ye’ve done broke right smart, in the last year. Anything the matter with ye?”

She shook her head, and laughed. It was an effort to laugh merrily, but only the ghost of the old instinctive blitheness rippled into it.

“I’ve jest come from old Spicer South’s,” volunteered the doctor. “He’s ailin’ pretty consid’able, these days.”

“What’s the matter with Unc’ Spicer?” demanded the girl, in genuine anxiety. Every one along Misery called the old man Unc’ Spicer.

“I can’t jest make out.” Her informer spoke slowly, and his brow corrugated into something like sullenness. “He hain’t jest to say sick. Thet is, his organs seems all right, but he don’t ‘pear to have no heart fer nothin’, and his victuals don’t tempt him none. He’s jest puny, thet’s all.”

“I’ll go over thar, an’ see him,” announced the girl. “I’ll cook a chicken thet’ll tempt him.”

The physician’s mind was working along some line which did not seem to partake of cheerfulness. Again, he studied the girl, still upright and high-chinned, but, somehow, no longer effervescent with wild, resilient strength.

“Hit sometimes ‘pears to me,” he said, gruffly, “thet this here thing of eddication costs a sight more than hit comes to.”

“What d’ye mean, Brother Spencer?”

“I reckon if Samson South hadn’t a-took this hyar hankerin’ atter larnin’, an’ had stayed home ‘stid of rainbow chasin’, the old man would still be able-bodied, ‘stid of dyin’ of a broken heart–an’ you—-“

The girl’s cheeks flushed. Her violet eyes became deep with a loyal and defensive glow.

“Ye mustn’t say things like them, Brother Spencer.” Her voice was very firm and soft. “Unc’ Spicer’s jest gettin’ old, an’ es fer me, I wasn’t never better ner happier in my life.” It was a lie, but a splendid lie, and she told herself as well as Brother Spencer that she believed it. “Samson would come back in a minit ef we sent fer him. He’s smart, an’ he’s got a right ter l’arnin’! He hain’t like us folks; he’s a–” She paused, and groped for the word that Lescott had added to her vocabulary, which she had half-forgotten. “He’s a genius!”

There rose to the lips of the itinerant preacher a sentiment as to how much more loyalty availeth a man than genius, but, as he looked at the slender and valiant figure standing in the deep dust of the road, he left it unuttered.

The girl spent much time after that at the house of old Spicer South, and her coming seemed to waken him into a fitful return of spirits. His strength, which had been like the strength of an ox, had gone from him, and he spent his hours sitting listlessly in a split-bottomed rocker, which was moved from place to place, following the sunshine.

“I reckon, Unc’ Spicer,” suggested the girl, on one of her first visits, “I’d better send fer Samson. Mebby hit mout do ye good ter see him.”

The old man was weakly leaning back in his chair, and his eyes were vacantly listless; but, at the suggestion, he straightened, and the ancient fire came again to his face.

“Don’t ye do hit,” he exclaimed, almost fiercely. “I knows ye means hit kindly, Sally, but don’t ye meddle in my business.”

“I–I didn’t ‘low ter meddle,” faltered the girl.

“No, little gal.” His voice softened at once into gentleness. “I knows ye didn’t. I didn’t mean ter be short-answered with ye neither, but thar’s jest one thing I won’t ‘low nobody ter do–an’ thet’s ter send fer Samson. He knows the road home, an’, when he wants ter come, he’ll find the door open, but we hain’t a-goin’ ter send atter him.”

The girl said nothing, and, after awhile, the old man wait on:

“I wants ye ter understand me, Sally. Hit hain’t that I’m mad with Samson. God knows, I loves the boy…. I hain’t a-blamin’ him, neither….”

He was silent for awhile, and his words came with the weariness of dead hopes when he began again. “Mebby, I oughtn’t ter talk about sech things with a young gal, but I’m an old man, an’ thar hain’t no harm in hit…. From the time when I used ter watch you two children go a-trapsin’ off in the woods together atter hickory nuts, thar’s been jest one thing thet I’ve looked forward to and dreamed about: I wanted ter see ye married. I ‘lowed–” A mistiness quenched the sternness of his gray eyes. “I ‘lowed thet, ef I could see yore children playin’ round this here yard, everything thet’s ever gone wrong would be paid fer.”

Sally stood silently at his side, and her cheeks flushed as the tears crept into her eyes; but her hand stole through the thick mane of hair, fast turning from iron-gray to snow-white.

Spicer South watched the fattening hog that rubbed its bristling side against the rails stacked outside the fence, and then said, with an imperious tone that did not admit of misconstruction:

“But, Sally, the boy’s done started out on his own row. He’s got ter hoe hit. Mebby he’ll come back–mebby not! Thet’s as the Lord wills. Hit wouldn’t do us no good fer him to come withouten he come willin’ly. The meanest thing ye could do ter me–an’ him–would be ter send fer him. Ye mustn’t do hit. Ye mustn’t!”

“All right, Unc’ Spicer. I hain’t a-goin’ ter do hit–leastways, not yit. But I’m a-goin’ ter come over hyar every day ter see ye.”

“Ye can’t come too often, Sally, gal,” declared the old clansman, heartily.

* * * * *

Wilfred Horton found himself that fall in the position of a man whose course lies through rapids, and for the first time in his life his pleasures were giving precedence to business. He knew that his efficiency would depend on maintaining the physical balance of perfect health and fitness, and early each morning he went for his gallop in the park. At so early an hour, he had the bridle path for the most part to himself. This had its compensations, for, though Wilfred Horton continued to smile with his old-time good humor, he acknowledged to himself that it was not pleasant to have men who had previously sought him out with flatteries avert their faces, and pretend that they had not seen him.

Horton was the most-hated and most-admired man in New York, but the men who hated and snubbed him were his own sort, and the men who admired him were those whom he would never meet, and who knew him only through the columns of penny papers. Their sympathy was too remote to bring him explicit pleasure. He was merely attempting, from within, reforms which the public and the courts had attempted from without. But, since he operated from within the walls, he was denounced as a Judas. Powerful enemies had ceased to laugh, and begun to conspire. He must be silenced! How, was a mooted question. But, in some fashion, he must be silenced. Society had not cast him out, but Society had shown him in many subtle ways that he was no longer her favorite. He had taken a plebeian stand with the masses. Meanwhile, from various sources, Horton had received warnings of actual personal danger. But at these he had laughed, and no hint of them had reached Adrienne’s ears.

One evening, when business had forced the postponement of a dinner engagement with Miss Lescott, he begged her over the telephone to ride with him the following morning.

“I know you are usually asleep when I’m out and galloping,” he laughed, “but you pitched me neck and crop into this hurly-burly, and I shouldn’t have to lose everything. Don’t have your horse brought. I want you to try out a new one of mine.”

“I think,” she answered, “that early morning is the best time to ride. I’ll meet you at seven at the Plaza entrance.”

They had turned the upper end of the reservoir before Horton drew his mount to a walk, and allowed the reins to hang. They had been galloping hard, and conversation had been impracticable.

“I suppose experience should have taught me,” began Horton, slowly, “that the most asinine thing in the world is to try to lecture you, Drennie. But there are times when one must even risk your delight at one’s discomfiture.”

“I’m not going to tease you this morning,” she answered, docilely. “I like the horse too well–and, to be frank, I like you too well!”

“Thank you,” smiled Horton. “As usual, you disarm me on the verge of combat. I had nerved myself for ridicule.”

“What have I done now?” inquired the girl, with an innocence which further disarmed him.

“The Queen can do no wrong. But even the Queen, perhaps more particularly the Queen, must give thought to what people are saying.”

“What are people saying?”

“The usual unjust things that are said about women in society. You are being constantly seen with an uncouth freak who is scarcely a gentleman, however much he may be a man. And malicious tongues are wagging.”

The girl stiffened.

“I won’t spar with you. I know that you are alluding to Samson South, though the description is a slander. I never thought it would be necessary to say such a thing to you, Wilfred, but you are talking like a cad.”

The young man flushed.

“I laid myself open to that,” he said, slowly, “and I suppose I should have expected it.”

He knew her well enough to dread the calmness of her more serious anger, and just now the tilt of her chin, the ominous light of her deep eyes and the quality of her voice told him that he had incurred it.

“May I ask,” Adrienne inquired, “what you fancy constitutes your right to assume this censorship of my conduct?”

“I have no censorship, of course. I have only the interest of loving you, and meaning to marry you.”

“And I may remark in passing, that you are making no progress to that end by slandering my friends.”

“Adrienne, I’m not slandering. God knows I hate cads and snobs. Mr. South is simply, as yet, uncivilized. Otherwise, he would hardly take you, unchaperoned, to–well, let us say to ultra-bohemian resorts, where you are seen by such gossip-mongers as William Farbish.”

“So, that’s the specific charge, is it?”

“Yes, that’s the specific charge. Mr. South may be a man of unusual talent and strength. But–he has done what no other man has done–with you. He has caused club gossip, which may easily be twisted and misconstrued.”

“Do you fancy that Samson South could have taken me to the Wigwam Road- house if I had not cared to go with him?”

The man shook his head.

“Certainly not! But the fact that you did care to go with him indicates an influence over you which is new. You have not sought the bohemian and unconventional phases of life with your other friends.”

Adrienne glanced at the athletic figure riding at her side, just now rather rigid with restraint and indignation, as though his vertebrae were threaded on a ramrod, and her eyes darkened a little.

“Now, let it be thoroughly understood between us, Wilfred,” she said very quietly, “that if you see any danger in my unconventionalities, I don’t care to discuss this, or any other matter, with you now or at any time.” She paused, then added in a more friendly voice: “It would be rather a pity for us to quarrel about a thing like this.”

The young man was still looking into her eyes, and he read there an ultimatum.

“God knows I was not questioning you,” he replied, slowly. “There is no price under heaven I would not pay for your regard. None the less, I repeat that, at the present moment, I can see only two definitions for this mountaineer. Either he is a bounder, or else he is so densely ignorant and churlish that he is unfit to associate with you.”

“I make no apologies for Mr. South,” she said, “because none are needed. He is a stranger in New York, who knows nothing, and cares nothing about the conventionalities. If I chose to waive them, I think it was my right and my responsibility.”

Horton said nothing, and, in a moment, Adrienne Lescott’s manner changed. She spoke more gently:

“Wilfred, I’m sorry you choose to take this prejudice against the boy. You could have done a great deal to help him. I wanted you to be friends.”

“Thank you!” His manner was stiff. “I hardly think we’d hit it off together.”

“I don’t think you quite understand,” she argued. “Samson South is running a clean, creditable race, weighted down with a burdensome handicap. As a straight-thinking sportsman, if for no better reason, I should fancy you’d be glad to help him. He has the stamina and endurance.”

“Those,” said Horton, who at heart was the fairest and most generous of men, “are very admirable qualities. Perhaps, I should be more enthusiastic, Drennie, if you were a little less so.”

For the first time since the talk had so narrowly skirted a quarrel, her eyes twinkled.

“I believe you are jealous!” she announced.

“Of course, I’m jealous,” he replied, without evasion. “Possibly, I might have saved time in the first place by avowing my jealousy. I hasten now to make amends. I’m green-eyed.”

She laid her gloved fingers lightly on his bridle hand.

“Don’t be,” she advised; “I’m not in love with him. If I were, it wouldn’t matter. He has,

“‘A neater, sweeter maiden,
“‘In a greener, cleaner land.’

“He’s told me all about her.”

Horton shook his head, dubiously.

“I wish to the good Lord, he’d go back to her,” he said. “This Platonic proposition is the doormat over-which two persons walk to other things. They end by wiping their feet on the Platonic doormat.”

“We’ll cross that–that imaginary doormat, when we get to it,” laughed the girl. “Meantime, you ought to help me with Samson.”

“Thank you, no! I won’t help educate my successor. And I won’t abdicate”–his manner of speech grew suddenly tense–“while I can fight for my foothold.”

“I haven’t asked you to abdicate. This boy has been here less than a year. He came absolutely raw–“

“And lit all spraddled out in the police court!” Wilfred prompted.

“And, in less than a year, he has made wonderful advancement; such advancement as he could not have made but for one thing.”

“Which was–that you took him in hand.”

“No–which is, that he springs from stock that, despite its hundred years of lapse into illiteracy, is good stock. Samson South was a gentleman, Wilfred, two hundred years before he was born.”

“That,” observed her companion, curtly, “was some time ago.”

She tossed her head, impatiently.

“Come,” she said, “let’s gallop.”

“No,” protested Wilfred, his face becoming penitent. “Just a moment! I retract. It is I who am the cad. Please, tell Mr. South just what we have both said, and make my apologies if he’ll accept them. Of course, if you insist, I’ll meet him. I suppose I’ll have to meet him some day, anyhow. But, frankly, Drennie, I hate the man. It will take a Herculean effort to be decent to him. Still, if you say so–“

“No, Wilfred,” she declined, “if you can’t do it willingly, I don’t want you to do it at all. It doesn’t matter in the least. Let’s drop the subject.”

CHAPTER XX

One afternoon, swinging along Fifth Avenue in his down-town walk, Samson met Mr. Farbish, who fell into step with him, and began to make conversation.

“By the way, South,” he suggested after the commonplaces had been disposed of, “you’ll pardon my little prevarication the other evening about having met you at the Manhattan Club?”

“Why was it necessary?” inquired Samson, with a glance of disquieting directness.

“Possibly, it was not necessary, merely politic. Of course,” he laughed, “every man knows two kinds of women. It’s just as well not to discuss the nectarines with the orchids, or the orchids with the nectarines.”

Samson made no response. But Farbish, meeting his eyes, felt as though he had been contemptuously rebuked. His own eyes clouded with an impulse of resentment. But it passed, as he remembered that his plans involved the necessity of winning this boy’s confidence. An assumption of superior virtue, he thought, came rather illogically from Samson, who had brought to the inn a young woman whom he should not have exposed to comment. He, himself, could afford to be diplomatic. Accordingly, he laughed.

“You mustn’t take me too literally, South,” he explained. “The life here has a tendency to make us cynical in our speech, even though we may be quite the reverse in our practices. In point of fact, I fancy we were both rather out of our element at Collasso’s studio.”

At the steps of a Fifth Avenue club, Farbish halted.

“Won’t you turn in here,” he suggested, “and assuage your thirst?”

Samson declined, and walked on. But when, a day or two later, he dropped into the same club with George Lescott, Farbish joined them in the grill–without invitation.

“By the way, Lescott,” said the interloper, with an easy assurance upon which the coolness of his reception had no seeming effect, “it won’t be long now until ducks are flying south. Will you get off for your customary shooting?”

“I’m afraid not.” Lescott’s voice became more cordial, as a man’s will whose hobby has been touched. “There are several canvases to be finished for approaching exhibitions. I wish I could go. When the first cold winds begin to sweep down, I get the fever. The prospects are good, too, I understand.”

“The best in years! Protection in the Canadian breeding fields is bearing fruit. Do you shoot ducks, Mr. South?” The speaker included Samson as though merely out of deference to his physical presence.

Samson shook his head. But he was listening eagerly. He, too, knew that note of the migratory “honk” from high overhead.

“Samson,” said Lescott slowly, as he caught the gleam in his friend’s eyes, “you’ve been working too hard. You’ll have to take a week off, and try your hand. After you’ve changed your method from rifle to shotgun, you’ll bag your share, and you’ll come back fitter for work. I must arrange it.”

“As to that,” suggested Farbish, in the manner of one regarding the civilities, “Mr. South can run down to the Kenmore. I’ll have a card made out for him.”

“Don’t trouble,” demurred Lescott, coolly, “I can fix that up.”

“It would be a pleasure,” smiled the other. “I sincerely wish I could be there at the same time, but I’m afraid that, like you, Lescott, I shall have to give business the right of way. However, when I hear that the flights are beginning, I’ll call Mr. South up, and pass the news to him.”

Samson had thought it rather singular that he had never met Horton at the Lescott house, though Adrienne spoke of him almost as of a member of the family. However, Samson’s visits were usually in his intervals between relays of work and Horton was probably at such times in Wall Street. It did not occur to the mountaineer that the other was intentionally avoiding him. He knew of Wilfred only through Adrienne’s eulogistic descriptions, and, from hearsay, liked him.

The months of close application to easel and books had begun to tell on the outdoor man in a softening of muscles and a slight, though noticeable, pallor. The enthusiasm with which he attacked his daily schedule carried him far, and made his progress phenomenal, but he was spending capital of nerve and health, and George Lescott began to fear a break-down for his protege. Lescott did not want to advise a visit to the mountains, because he had secured from the boy a promise that, unless he was called home, he would give the experiment an unbroken trial of eighteen months.

If Samson went back, he feared his return would reawaken the sleeping volcano of the feud–and he could not easily come away again. He discussed the matter with Adrienne, and the girl began to promote in the boy an interest in the duck-shooting trip–an interest which had already awakened, despite the rifleman’s inherent contempt for shotguns.

“You will be in your blind,” she enthusiastically told him, “before daybreak, and after a while the wedges will come flying into view, cutting the fog in hundreds and dropping into the decoys. You’ll love it! I wish I were going myself.”

“Do you shoot?” he asked, in some surprise.

She nodded, and added modestly;

“But I don’t kill many ducks.”

“Is there anything you can’t do?” he questioned in admiration, then demanded, with the touch of homesickness in his voice, “Are there any mountains down there?”

“I’m afraid we can’t provide any mountains,” laughed Adrienne. “Just salt marshes–and beyond them, the sea. But there’s moonshine–of the natural variety–and a tonic in the wind that buffets you.”

“I reckon I’d like it, all right,” he said, “and I’ll bring you back some ducks, if I’m lucky.”

So, Lescott arranged the outfit, and Samson awaited the news of the coming flights.

That same evening, Farbish dropped into the studio, explaining that he had been buying a picture at Collasso’s, and had taken the opportunity to stop by and hand Samson a visitor’s card to the Kenmore Club.

He found the ground of interest fallow, and artfully sowed it with well-chosen anecdotes calculated to stimulate enthusiasm.

On leaving the studio, he paused to say:

“I’ll let you know when conditions are just right.” Then, he added, as though in afterthought: “And I’ll arrange so that you won’t run up on Wilfred Horton.”

“What’s the matter with Wilfred Horton?” demanded Samson, a shade curtly.

“Nothing at all,” replied Farbish, with entire gravity. “Personally, I like Horton immensely. I simply thought you might find things more congenial when he wasn’t among those present.”

Samson was puzzled, but he did not fancy hearing from this man’s lips criticisms upon friends of his friends.

“Well, I reckon,” he said, coolly, “I’d like him, too.”

“I beg your pardon,” said the other. “I supposed you knew, or I shouldn’t have broached the topic.”

“Knew what?”

“You must excuse me,” demurred the visitor with dignity. “I shouldn’t have mentioned the subject. I seem to have said too much.”

“See here, Mr. Farbish,” Samson spoke quietly, but imperatively; “if you know any reason why I shouldn’t meet Mr. Wilfred Horton, I want you to tell me what it is. He is a friend of my friends. You say you’ve said too much. I reckon you’ve either said too much, or too little.”

Then, very insidiously and artistically, seeming all the while reluctant and apologetic, the visitor proceeded to plant in Samson’s mind an exaggerated and untrue picture of Horton’s contempt for him and of Horton’s resentment at the favor shown him by the Lescotts.

Samson heard him out with a face enigmatically set, and his voice was soft, as he said simply at the end:

“I’m obliged to you.”

Farbish had hoped for more stress of feeling, but, as he walked home, he told himself that the sphinx-like features had been a mask, and that, when these two met, their coming together held potentially for a clash. He was judge enough of character to know that Samson’s morbid pride would seal his lips as to the interview–until he met Horton.

In point of fact, Samson was at first only deeply wounded. That through her kindness to him Adrienne was having to fight his battles with a close friend he had never suspected. Then, slowly, a bitterness began to rankle, quite distinct from the hurt to his sensitiveness. His birthright of suspicion and tendency to foster hatreds had gradually been falling asleep under the disarming kindness of these persons. Now, they began to stir in him again vaguely, but forcibly, and to trouble him.

Samson did not appear at the Lescott house for two weeks after that. He had begun to think that, if his going there gave embarrassment to the girl who had been kind to him, it were better to remain away.

“I don’t belong here,” he told himself, bitterly. “I reckon everybody that knows me in New York, except the Lescotts, is laughing at me behind my back.”

He worked fiercely, and threw into his work such fire and energy that it came out again converted into a boldness of stroke and an almost savage vigor of drawing. The instructor nodded his head over the easel, and passed on to the next student without having left the defacing mark of his relentless crayon. To the next pupil, he said:

“Watch the way that man South draws. He’s not clever. He’s elementally sincere, and, if he goes on, the first thing you know he will be a portrait painter. He won’t merely draw eyes and lips and noses, but character and virtues and vices showing out through them.”

And Samson met every gaze with smoldering savagery, searching for some one who might be laughing at him openly, or even covertly; instead of behind his back. The long-suffering fighting lust in him craved opportunity to break out and relieve the pressure on his soul. But no one laughed.

One afternoon late in November, a hint of blizzards swept snarling down the Atlantic seaboard from the polar floes, with wet flurries of snow and rain. Off on the marshes where the Kenmore Club had its lodge, the live decoys stretched their clipped wings, and raised their green necks restively into the salt wind, and listened. With dawn, they had heard, faint and far away, the first notes of that wild chorus with which the skies would ring until the southerly migrations ended–the horizon-distant honking of high-flying water fowl.

Then it was that Farbish dropped in with marching orders, and Samson, yearning to be away where there were open skies, packed George Lescott’s borrowed paraphernalia, and prepared to leave that same night.

While he was packing, the telephone rang, and Samson heard Adrienne’s voice at the other end of the wire.

“Where have you been hiding?” she demanded. “I’ll have to send a truant officer after you.”

“I’ve been very busy,” said the man, “and I reckon, after all, you can’t civilize a wolf. I’m afraid I’ve been wasting your time.”

Possibly, the miserable tone of the voice told the girl more than the words.

“You are having a season with the blue devils,” she announced. “You’ve been cooped up too much. This wind ought to bring the ducks, and—-“

“I’m leaving to-night,” Samson told her.

“It would have been very nice of you to have run up to say good-bye,” she reproved. “But I’ll forgive you, if you call me up by long distance. You will get there early in the morning. To-morrow, I’m going to Philadelphia over night. The next night, I shall be at the theater. Call me up after the theater, and tell me how you like it.”

It was the same old frankness and friendliness of voice, and the same old note like the music of a reed instrument. Samson felt so comforted and reassured that he laughed through the telephone.

“I’ve been keeping away from you,” he volunteered, “because I’ve had a relapse into savagery, and haven’t been fit to talk to you. When I get back, I’m coming up to explain. And, in the meantime, I’ll telephone.”

On the train Samson was surprised to discover that, after all, he had Mr. William Farbish for a traveling companion. That gentleman explained that he had found an opportunity to play truant from business for a day or two, and wished to see Samson comfortably ensconced and introduced.

The first day Farbish and Samson had the place to themselves, but the next morning would bring others. Samson’s ideas of a millionaires’ shooting-box had been vague, but he had looked forward to getting into the wilds. The marshes were certainly desolate enough, and the pine woods through which the buckboard brought them. But, inside the club itself, the Kentuckian found himself in such luxurious comfort as he could not, in his own mind, reconcile with the idea of “going hunting.” He would be glad when the cushioned chairs of the raftered lounging- room and the tinkle of high-ball ice and gossip were exchanged for the salt air and the blinds.

CHAPTER XXI

But, when he went out for his initiation, in the raw blackness before daybreak, and lay in the blind, with only his guide for a companion, he felt far away from artificial luxuries. The first pale streamers of dawn soon streaked the east, and the wind charged cuttingly like drawn sabers of galloping cavalry. The wooden decoys had been anchored with the live ducks swimming among them, and the world began to awake. He drew a long breath of contentment, and waited. Then came the trailing of gray and blue and green mists, and, following the finger of the silent boatman, he made out in the northern sky a slender wedge of black dots, against the spreading rosiness of the horizon. Soon after, he heard the clear clangor of throats high in the sky, answered by the nearer honking of the live decoys, and he felt a throbbing of his pulses as he huddled low against the damp bottom of the blind and waited.

The lines and wedges grew until the sky was stippled with them, and their strong-throated cries were a strident music. For a time, they passed in seeming thousands, growing from scarcely visible dots into speeding shapes with slender outstretched necks and bills, pointed like reversed compass needles to the south. As yet, they were all flying high, ignoring with lordly indifference the clamor of their renegade brothers, who shrieked to them through the morning mists to drop down, and feed on death.

But, as the day grew older, Samson heard the popping of guns off to the side, where other gunners lay in other blinds, and presently a drake veered from his line of flight, far off to the right, harkened to the voice of temptation, and led his flock circling toward the blind. Then, with a whir and drumming of dark-tipped wings, they came down, and struck the water, and the boy from Misery rose up, shooting as he came. He heard the popping of his guide’s gun at his side, and saw the dead and crippled birds falling about him, amid the noisy clamor of their started flight.

That day, while the mountaineer was out on the flats, the party of men at the club had been swelled to a total of six, for in pursuance of the carefully arranged plans of Mr. Farbish, Mr. Bradburn had succeeded in inducing Wilfred Horton to run down for a day or two of the sport he loved. To outward seeming, the trip which the two men had made together had been quite casual, and the outgrowth of coincidence; yet, in point of fact, not only the drive from Baltimore in Horton’s car, but the conversation by the way had been in pursuance of a plan, and the result was that, when Horton arrived that afternoon, he found his usually even temper ruffled by bits of maliciously broached gossip, until his resentment against Samson South had been fanned into danger heat. He did not know that South also was at the club, and he did not that afternoon go out to the blinds, but so far departed from his usual custom as to permit himself to sit for hours in the club grill.

And yet, as is often the case in carefully designed affairs, the one element that made most powerfully for the success of Farbish’s scheme was pure accident. The carefully arranged meeting between the two men, the adroitly incited passions of each, would still have brought no clash, had not Wilfred Horton been affected by the flushing effect of alcohol. Since his college days, he had been invariably abstemious. To-night marked an exception.

He was rather surprised at the cordiality of the welcome accorded him, for, as chance would have it, except for Samson South, whom he had not yet seen, all the other sportsmen were men closely allied to the political and financial elements upon which he had been making war. Still, since they seemed willing to forget for the time that there had been a breach, he was equally so. Just now, he was feeling such bitterness for the Kentuckian that the foes of a less-personal sort seemed unimportant.

In point of fact, Wilfred Horton had spent a very bad day. The final straw had broken the back of his usually unruffled temper, when he had found in his room on reaching the Kenmore a copy of a certain New York weekly paper, and had read a page, which chanced to be lying face up (a chance carefully prearranged). It was an item of which Farbish had known, in advance of publication, but Wilfred would never have seen that sheet, had it not been so carefully brought to his attention. There were hints of the strange infatuation which a certain young woman seemed to entertain for a partially civilized stranger who had made his entree to New York _via_ the Police Court, and who wore his hair long in imitation of a Biblical character of the same name. The supper at the Wigwam Inn was mentioned, and the character of the place intimated. Horton felt this objectionable innuendo was directly traceable to Adrienne’s ill-judged friendship for the mountaineer, and he bitterly blamed the mountaineer. And, while he had been brooding on these matters, a man acting as Farbish’s ambassador had dropped into his room, since Farbish himself knew that Horton would not listen to his confidences. The delegated spokesman warned Wilfred that Samson South had spoken pointedly of him, and advised cautious conduct, in a fashion calculated to inflame.

Samson, it was falsely alleged, had accused him of saying derogatory things in his absence, which he would hardly venture to repeat in his presence. In short, it was put up to Horton to announce his opinion openly, or eat the crow of cowardice.

That evening, when Samson went to his room, Farbish joined him.

“I’ve been greatly annoyed to find,” he said, seating himself on Samson’s bed, “that Horton arrived to-day.”

“I reckon that’s all right,” said Samson. “He’s a member, isn’t he?”

Farbish appeared dubious.

“I don’t want to appear in the guise of a prophet of trouble,” he said, “but you are my guest here, and I must warn you. Horton thinks of you as a ‘gun-fighter’ and a dangerous man. He won’t take chances with you. If there is a clash, it will be serious. He doesn’t often drink, but to-day he’s doing it, and may be ugly. Avoid an altercation if you can, but if it comes–” He broke off and added seriously: “You will have to get him, or he will get you. Are you armed?”

The Kentuckian laughed.

“I reckon I don’t need to be armed amongst gentlemen.”

Farbish drew from his pocket a magazine pistol.

“It won’t hurt you to slip that into your clothes,” he insisted.

For an instant, the mountaineer stood looking at his host and with eyes that bored deep, but whatever was in his mind as he made that scrutiny he kept to himself. At last, he took the magazine pistol, turned it over in his hand, and put it into his pocket.

“Mr. Farbish,” he said, “I’ve been in places before now where men were drinking who had made threats against me. I think you are excited about this thing. If anything starts, he will start it.”

At the dinner table, Samson South and Wilfred Horton were introduced, and acknowledged their introductions with the briefest and most formal of nods. During the course of the meal, though seated side by side, each ignored the presence of the other. Samson was, perhaps, no more silent than usual. Always, he was the listener except when a question was put to him direct, but the silence which sat upon Wilfred Horton was a departure from his ordinary custom.

He had discovered in his college days that liquor, instead of exhilarating him, was an influence under which he grew morose and sullen, and that discovery had made him almost a total abstainer. To-night, his glass was constantly filled and emptied, and, as he ate, he gazed ahead, and thought resentfully of the man at his side.

When the coffee had been brought, and the cigars lighted, and the servants had withdrawn, Horton, with the manner of one who had been awaiting an opportunity, turned slightly in his chair, and gazed insolently at the Kentuckian.

Samson South still seemed entirely unconscious of the other’s existence, though in reality no detail of the brewing storm had escaped him. He was studying the other faces around the table, and what he saw in them appeared to occupy him. Wilfred Horton’s cheeks were burning with a dull flush, and his eyes were narrowing with an unveiled dislike. Suddenly, a silence fell on the party, and, as the men sat puffing their cigars, Horton turned toward the Kentuckian. For a moment, he glared in silence, then with an impetuous exclamation of disgust he announced:

“See here, South, I want you to know that if I’d understood you were to be here, I wouldn’t have come. It has pleased me to express my opinion of you to a number of people, and now I mean to express it to you in person.”

Samson looked around, and his features indicated neither surprise nor interest. He caught Farbish’s eye at the same instant, and, though the plotter said nothing, the glance was subtle and expressive. It seemed to prompt and goad him on, as though the man had said:

“You mustn’t stand that. Go after him.”

“I reckon”–Samson’s voice was a pleasant drawl–“it doesn’t make any particular difference, Mr. Horton.”

“Even if what I said didn’t happen to be particularly commendatory?” inquired Horton, his eyes narrowing.

“So long,” replied the Kentuckian, “as what you said was your own opinion, I don’t reckon it would interest me much.”

“In point of fact”—Horton was gazing with steady hostility into Samson’s eyes–“I prefer to tell you. I have rather generally expressed the belief that you are a damned savage, unfit for decent society.”

Samson’s face grew rigid and a trifle pale. His mouth set itself in a straight line, but, as Wilfred Horton came to his feet with the last words, the mountaineer remained seated.

“And,” went on the New Yorker, flushing with suddenly augmenting passion, “what I said I still believe to be true, and repeat in your presence. At another time and place, I shall be even more explicit. I shall ask you to explain–certain things.”

“Mr. Horton,” suggested Samson in an ominously quiet voice, “I reckon you’re a little drunk. If I were you, I’d sit down.”

Wilfred’s face went from red to white, and his shoulders stiffened. He leaned forward, and for the instant no one moved. The tick of a hall clock was plainly audible.

“South,” he said, his breath coming in labored excitement, “defend yourself!”

Samson still sat motionless.

“Against what?” he inquired.

“Against that!” Horton struck the mountain man across the face with his open hand. Instantly, there was a commotion of scraping chairs and shuffling feet, mingled with a chorus of inarticulate protest. Samson had risen, and, for a second, his face had become a thing of unspeakable passion. His hand instinctively swept toward his pocket– and stopped half-way. He stood by his overturned chair, gazing into the eyes of his assailant, with an effort at self-mastery which gave his chest and arms the appearance of a man writhing and stiffening under electrocution. Then, he forced both hands to his back and gripped them there. For a moment, the tableau was held, then the man from the mountains began speaking, slowly and in a tone of dead-level monotony. Each syllable was portentously distinct and clear clipped.

“Maybe you know why I don’t kill you…. Maybe you don’t…. I don’t give a damn whether you do or not…. That’s the first blow I’ve ever passed…. I ain’t going to hit back…. You need a friend pretty bad just now…. For certain reasons, I’m going to be that friend…. Don’t you see that this thing is a damned frame-up? … Don’t you see that I was brought here to murder you?” He turned suddenly to Farbish.

“Why did you insist on my putting that in my pocket”–Samson took out the pistol, and threw it down on the table-cloth in front of Wilfred, where it struck and shivered a half-filled wine-glass–“and why did you warn me that this man meant to kill me, unless I killed him first? I was meant to be your catspaw to put Wilfred Horton out of your way. I may be a barbarian and a savage, but I can smell a rat–if it’s dead enough!”

For an instant, there was absolute and hushed calm. Wilfred Horton picked up the discarded weapon and looked at it in bewildered stupefaction, then slowly his face flamed with distressing mortification.

“Any time you want to fight me”–Samson had turned again to face him, and was still talking in his deadly quiet voice–“except to-night, you can find me. I’ve never been hit before without hitting back. That blow has got to be paid for–but the man that’s really responsible has got to pay first. When I fight you, I’ll fight for myself, not for a bunch of damned murderers…. Just now, I’ve got other business. That man framed this up!” He pointed a lean finger across the table into the startled countenance of Mr. Farbish. “He knew! He has been working on this job for a month. I’m going to attend to his case now.”

As Samson started toward Farbish, the conspirator rose, and, with an excellent counterfeit of insulted virtue, pushed back his chair.

“By God,” he indignantly exclaimed, “you mustn’t try to embroil me in your quarrels. You must apologize. You are talking wildly, South.”

“Am I?” questioned the Kentuckian, quietly; “I’m going to act wildly in a minute.”

He halted a short distance from Farbish, and drew from his pocket a crumpled scrap of the offending magazine page: the item that had offended Horton.

“I may not have good manners, Mister Farbish, but where I come from we know how to handle varmints.” He dropped his voice and added for the plotter’s ear only: “Here’s a little matter on the side that concerns only us. It wouldn’t interest these other gentlemen.” He opened his hand, and added: “Here, _eat_ that!”

Farbish, with a frightened glance at the set face of the man who was advancing upon him, leaped back, and drew from his pocket a pistol–it was an exact counterpart of the one with which he had supplied Samson.

With a panther-like swiftness, the Kentuckian leaped forward, and struck up the weapon, which spat one ineffective bullet into the rafters. There was a momentary scuffle of swaying bodies and a crash under which the table groaned amid the shattering of glass and china. Then, slowly, the conspirator’s body bent back at the waist, until its shoulders were stretched on the disarranged cloth, and the white face, with purple veins swelling on the forehead, stared up between two brown hands that gripped its throat.

“Swallow that!” ordered the mountaineer.

For just an instant, the company stood dumfounded, then a strained, unnatural voice broke the silence.

“Stop him, he’s going to kill the man!”

The odds were four to two, and with a sudden rally to the support of their chief plotter, the other conspirators rushed the figure that stood throttling his victim. But Samson South was in his element. The dammed-up wrath that had been smoldering during these last days was having a tempestuous outlet. He had found men who, in a gentlemen’s club to which he had come as a guest, sought to use him as a catspaw and murderer.

They had planned to utilize the characteristics upon which they relied in himself. They had thought that, if once angered, he would relapse into the feudist, and forget that his surroundings were those of gentility and civilization. Very well, he would oblige them, but not as a blind dupe. He would be as elementally primitive as they had pictured him, but the victims of his savagery should be of his own choosing. Before his eyes swam a red mist of wrath. Once before, as a boy, he had seen things as through a fog of blood. It was the day when the factions met at Hixon, and he had carried the gun of his father for the first time into action. The only way his eyes could be cleared of that fiery haze was that they should first see men falling.

As they assaulted him, _en masse_, he seized a chair, and swung it flail-like about his head. For a few moments, there was a crashing of glass and china, and a clatter of furniture and a chaos of struggle. At its center, he stood wielding his impromptu weapon, and, when two of his assailants had fallen under its sweeping blows, and Farbish stood weakly supporting himself against the table and gasping for the breath which had been choked out of him, the mountaineer hurled aside his chair, and plunged for the sole remaining man. They closed in a clinch. The last antagonist was a boxer, and when he saw the Kentuckian advance toward him empty-handed, he smiled and accepted the gauge of battle. In weight and reach and practice, he knew that he had the advantage, and, now that it was man to man, he realized that there was no danger of interference from Horton. But Samson knew nothing of boxing. He had learned his fighting tactics in the rough-and-tumble school of the mountains; the school of “fist and skull,” of fighting with hands and head and teeth, and as the Easterner squared off he found himself caught in a flying tackle and went to the floor locked in an embrace that carried down with it chairs and furniture. As he struggled and rolled, pitting his gymnasium training against the unaccustomed assault of cyclonic fury, he felt the strong fingers of two hands close about his throat and lost consciousness.

Samson South rose, and stood for a moment panting in a scene of wreckage and disorder. The table was littered with shivered glasses and decanters and chinaware. The furniture was scattered and overturned. Farbish was weakly leaning to one side in the seat to which he had made his way. The men who had gone down under the heavy blows of the chair lay quietly where they had fallen.

Wilfred Horton stood waiting. The whole affair had transpired with such celerity and speed that he had hardly understood it, and had taken no part. But, as he met the gaze of the disordered figure across the wreckage of a dinner-table, he realized that now, with the preliminaries settled, he who had struck Samson in the face must give satisfaction for the blow. Horton was sober, as cold sober as though he had jumped into ice-water, and though he was not in the least afraid, he was mortified, and, had apology at such a time been possible, would have made it. He knew that he had misjudged his man; he saw the outlines of the plot as plainly as Samson had seen them, though more tardily.

Samson’s toe touched the pistol which had dropped from Farbish’s hand and he contemptuously kicked it to one side. He came back to his place.

“Now, Mr. Horton,” he said to the man who stood looking about with a dazed expression, “if you’re still of the same mind, I can accommodate you. You lied when you said I was a savage–though just now it sort of looks like I was, and”–he paused, then added–“and I’m ready either to fight or shake hands. Either way suits me.”

For the moment, Horton did not speak, and Samson slowly went on:

“But, whether we fight or not, you’ve got to shake hands with me when we’re finished. You and me ain’t going to start a feud. This is the first time I’ve ever refused to let a man be my enemy if he wanted to. I’ve got my own reasons. I’m going to make you shake hands with me whether you like it or not, but if you want to fight first it’s satisfactory. You said awhile ago you would be glad to be more explicit with me when we were alone–” He paused and looked about the room. “Shall I throw these damned murderers out of here, or will you go into another room and talk?”

“Leave them where they are,” said Horton, quietly. “We’ll go into the reading-room. Have you killed any of them?”

“I don’t know,” said the other, curtly, “and I don’t care.”

When they were alone, Samson went on:

“I know what you want to ask me about, and I don’t mean to answer you. You want to question me about Miss Lescott. Whatever she and I have done doesn’t concern you, I will say this much: if I’ve been ignorant of New York ways, and my ignorance has embarrassed her, I’m sorry.

“I suppose you know that she’s too damned good for you–just like she’s too good for me. But she thinks more of you than she does of me–and she’s yours. As for me, I have nothing to apologize to you for. Maybe, I have something to ask her pardon about, but she hasn’t asked it.

“George Lescott brought me up here, and befriended me. Until a year ago, I had never known any life except that of the Cumberland Mountains. Until I met Miss Lescott, I had never known a woman of your world. She was good to me. She saw that in spite of my roughness and ignorance I wanted to learn, and she taught me. You chose to misunderstand, and dislike me. These men saw that, and believed that, if they could make you insult me, they could make me kill you. As to your part, they succeeded. I didn’t see fit to oblige them, but, now that I’ve settled with them, I’m willing to give you satisfaction. Do we fight now, and shake hands afterward, or do we shake hands without fighting?”

Horton stood silently studying the mountaineer.

“Good God!” he exclaimed at last. “And you are the man I undertook to criticize!”

“You ain’t answered my question,” suggested Samson South.

“South, if you are willing to shake hands with me, I shall be grateful. I may as well admit that, if you had thrashed me before that crowd, you could hardly have succeeded in making me feel smaller. I have played into their hands. I have been a damned fool. I have riddled my own self-respect–and, if you can afford to accept my apologies and my hand, I am offering you both.”

“I’m right glad to hear that,” said the mountain boy, gravely. “I told you I’d just as lief shake hand as fight…. But just now I’ve got to go to the telephone.”

The booth was in the same room, and, as Horton waited, he recognized the number for which Samson was calling. Wilfred’s face once more flushed with the old prejudice. Could it be that Samson meant to tell Adrienne Lescott what had transpired? Was he, after all, the braggart who boasted of his fights? And, if not, was it Samson’s custom to call her up every evening for a good-night message? He turned and went into the hall, but, after a few minutes, returned.

“I’m glad you liked the show….” the mountaineer was saying. “No, nothing special is happening here–except that the ducks are plentiful…. Yes, I like it fine…. Mr. Horton’s here. Wait a minute –I guess maybe he’d like to talk to you.”

The Kentuckian beckoned to Horton, and, as he surrendered the receiver, left the room. He was thinking with a smile of the unconscious humor with which the girl’s voice had just come across the wire:

“I knew that, if you two met each other, you would become friends.”

“I reckon,” said Samson, ruefully, when Horton joined him, “we’d better look around, and see how bad those fellows are hurt in there. They may need a doctor.” And the two went back to find several startled servants assisting to their beds the disabled combatants, and the next morning their inquiries elicited the information that the gentlemen were all “able to be about, but were breakfasting in their rooms.”

Such as looked from their windows that morning saw an unexpected climax, when the car of Mr. Wilfred Horton drove away from the club carrying the man whom they had hoped to see killed, and the man they had hoped to see kill him. The two appeared to be in excellent spirits and thoroughly congenial, as the car rolled out of sight, and the gentlemen who were left behind decided that, in view of the circumstances, the “extraordinary spree” of last night had best go unadvertised into ancient history.

CHAPTER XXII

The second year of a new order brings fewer radical changes than the first. Samson’s work began to forge out of the ranks of the ordinary, and to show symptoms of a quality which would some day give it distinction. Heretofore, his instructors had held him rigidly to the limitations of black and white, but now they took off the bonds, and permitted him the colorful delight of attempting to express himself from the palette. It was like permitting a natural poet to leave prose, and play with prosody.

Sometimes, when his thoughts went back to the life he had left, it seemed immensely far away, as though it were really the life of another incarnation, and old ideas that had seemed axiomatic to his boyhood stood before him in the guise of strangers: strangers tattered and vagabond. He wondered if, after all, the new gods were sapping his loyalty. At such times, he would for days keep morosely to himself, picturing the death-bed of his father, and seeming to hear a small boy’s voice making a promise. Sometimes, that promise seemed monstrous, in the light of his later experience. But it was a promise–and no man can rise in his own esteem by treading on his vows. In these somber moods, there would appear at the edges of his drawing-paper terrible, vividly graphic little heads, not drawn from any present model. They were sketched in a few ferociously powerful strokes, and always showed the same malevolent visage–a face black with murder and hate-endowed, the countenance of Jim Asberry. Sometimes would come a wild, heart- tearing longing for the old places. He wanted to hear the frogs boom, and to see the moon spill a shower of silver over the ragged shoulder of the mountain. He wanted to cross a certain stile, and set out for a certain cabin where a certain girl would be. He told himself that he was still loyal, that above all else he loved his people. When he saw these women, whose youth and beauty lasted long into life, whose manners and clothes spoke of ease and wealth and refinement, he saw Sally again as he had left her, hugging his “rifle-gun” to her breast, and he felt that the only thing he wanted utterly was to take her in his arms. Yes, he would return to Sally, and to his people–some day. The some day he did not fix. He told himself that the hills were only thirty hours away, and therefore he could go any time–which is the other name for no time. He had promised Lescott to remain here for eighteen months, and, when that interval ended, he seemed just on the verge of grasping his work properly. He assured himself often and solemnly that his creed was unchanged; his loyalty untainted; and the fact that it was necessary to tell himself proved that he was being weaned from his traditions. And so, though he often longed for home, he did not return. And then reason would rise up and confound him. Could he paint pictures in the mountains? If he did, what would he do with them? If he went back to that hermit life, would he not vindicate his uncle’s prophecy that he had merely unplaced himself? And, if he went back and discharged his promise, and then returned again to the new fascination, could he bring Sally with him into this life–Sally, whom he had scornfully told that a “gal didn’t need no l’arnin’?” And the answer to all these questions was only that there was no answer.

One day, Adrienne looked up from a sheaf of his very creditable landscape studies to inquire suddenly:

“Samson, are you a rich man, or a poor one?”

He laughed. “So rich,” he told her, “that unless I can turn some of this stuff into money within a year or two, I shall have to go back to hoeing corn.”

She nodded gravely.

“Hasn’t it occurred to you,” she demanded, “that in a way you are wasting your gifts? They were talking about you the other evening –several painters. They all said that you should be doing portraits.”

The Kentuckian smiled. His masters had been telling him the same thing. He had fallen in love with art through the appeal of the skies and hills. He had followed its call at the proselyting of George Lescott, who painted only landscape. Portraiture seemed a less-artistic form of expression. He said so.

“That may all be very true,” she conceded, “but you can go on with your landscapes, and let your portraits pay the way. With your entree, you could soon have a very enviable _clientele_.”

“‘So she showed me the way, to promotion and pay, And I learned about women from her,'”

quoted Samson with a laugh.

“And,” she added, “since I am very vain and moderately rich, I hereby commission you to paint me, just as soon as you learn how.”

Farbish had simply dropped out. Bit by bit, the truth of the conspiracy had leaked, and he knew that his usefulness was ended, and that well-lined pocketbooks would no longer open to his profligate demands. The bravo and plotter whose measure has been taken is a broken reed. Farbish made no farewells. He had come from nowhere and his going was like his coming.

* * * * *

Sally had started to school. She had not announced that she meant to do so, but each day the people of Misery saw her old sorrel mare making its way to and from the general direction of Stagbone College, and they smiled. No one knew how Sally’s cheeks flamed as she sat alone on Saturdays and Sundays on the rock at the backbone’s rift. She was taking her place, morbidly sensitive and a woman of eighteen, among little spindle-shanked girls in short skirts, and the little girls were more advanced than she. But she, too, meant to have “l’arnin'”–as much of it as was necessary to satisfy the lover who might never come. It must be admitted that learning for its own sake did not make a clarion- tongued appeal to the girl’s soul. Had Samson been satisfied with her untutored, she would have been content to remain untutored. He had said that these things were of no importance in her, but that was before he had gone forth into the world. If, she naively told herself, he should come back of that same opinion, she would never “let on” that she had learned things. She would toss overboard her acquirements as ruthlessly as useless ballast from an over-encumbered boat. But, if Samson came demanding these attainments, he must find her possessed of them. So far, her idea of “l’arnin'” embraced the three R’s only. And, yet, the “fotched-on” teachers at the “college” thought her the most voraciously ambitious pupil they had ever had, so unflaggingly did she toil, and the most remarkably acquisitive, so fast did she learn. But her studies had again been interrupted, and Miss Grover, her teacher, riding over one day to find out why her prize scholar had deserted, met in the road an empty “jolt-wagon,” followed by a ragged cortege of mounted men and women, whose faces were still lugubrious with the effort of recent mourning. Her questions elicited the information that they were returning from the “buryin'” of the Widow Miller.

Sally was not in the procession, and the teacher, riding on, found her lying face down among the briars of the desolate meeting-house yard, her small body convulsively heaving with her weeping, and her slim fingers grasping the thorny briar shoots as though she would still hold to the earth that lay in freshly broken clods over her mother’s grave.

Miss Grover lifted her gently, and at first the girl only stared at her out of wide, unseeing eyes.

“You’ve nothing to keep you here now,” said the older woman, gently. “You can come to us, and live at the college.” She had learned from Sally’s lips that she lived alone with her mother and younger brother. “You can’t go on living there now.”

But the girl drew away, and shook her head with a wild torrent of childish dissent.

“No, I kain’t, neither!” she declared, violently. “I kain’t!”

“Why, dear?” The teacher took the palpitating little figure in her arms and kissed the wet face. She had learned something of this sweet wood-thrush girl, and had seen both sides of life’s coin enough to be able to close her eyes and ears, and visualize the woman that this might be.

“‘Cause I kain’t!” was the obstinate reply.

Being wise, Miss Grover desisted from urging, and went with Sally to the desolated cabin, which she straightway began to overhaul and put to rights. The widow had been dying for a week. It was when she lifted Samson’s gun with the purpose of sweeping the corner that the girl swooped down on her, and rescued the weapon from her grasp.

“Nobody but me mustn’t tech thet rifle-gun,” she exclaimed, and then, little by little, it came out that the reason Sally could not leave this cabin, was because some time there might be a whippoorwill call out by the stile, and, when it came, she must be there to answer. And, when at the next vacation Miss Grover rode over, and announced that she meant to visit Sally for a month or two, and when under her deft hands the cabin began to transform itself, and the girl to transform herself, she discovered that Sally found in the graveyard another magnet. There, she seemed to share something with Samson where their dead lay buried. While the “fotched-on” lady taught the girl, the girl taught the “fotched-on” lady, for the birds were her brothers, and the flowers her cousins, and in the poetry that existed before forms of meter came into being she was deeply versed.

Toward the end of that year, Samson undertook his portrait of Adrienne Lescott. The work was nearing completion, but it had been agreed that the girl herself was not to have a peep at the canvas until the painter was ready to unveil it in a finished condition. Often as she posed, Wilfred Horton idled in the studio with them, and often George Lescott came to criticize, and left without criticizing. The girl was impatient for the day when she, too, was to see the picture, concerning which the three men maintained so profound a secrecy. She knew that Samson was a painter who analyzed with his brush, and that his picture would show her not only features and expression, but the man’s estimate of herself.

“Do you know,” he said one day, coming out from behind his easel and studying her, through half-closed eyes, “I never really began to know you until now? Analyzing you–studying you in this fashion, not by your words, but by your expression, your pose, the very unconscious essence of your personality–these things are illuminating.”

“Can I smile,” she queried obediently, “or do I have to keep my face straight?”

“You may smile for two minutes,” he generously conceded, “and I’m going to come over and sit on the floor at your feet, and watch you do it.”

“And under the X-ray scrutiny of this profound analysis,” she laughed, “do you like me?”

“Wait and see,” was his non-committal rejoinder.

For a few moments, neither of them spoke. He sat there gazing up, and she gazing down. Though neither of them said it, both were thinking of the changes that had taken place since, in this same room, they had first met. The man knew that many of the changes in himself were due to her, and she began to wonder vaguely if he had not also been responsible for certain differences in her.

He felt for her, besides a deep friendship–such a deep friendship that it might perhaps be even more–a measureless gratitude. She had been loyal, and had turned and shaped with her deft hand and brain the rough clay of his crude personality into something that was beginning to show finish and design. Perhaps, she liked him the better because of certain obstinate qualities which, even to her persuasive influence, remained unaltered. But, if she liked him the better for these things, she yet felt that her dominion over him was not complete.

Now, as they sat there alone in the studio, a shaft of sunlight from the skylight fell on his squarely blocked chin, and he tossed his head, throwing back the long lock from his forehead. It was as though he was emphasizing with that characteristic gesture one of the things in which he had not yielded to her modeling. The long hair still fell low around his head. Just now, he was roughly dressed and paint-stained, but usually he presented the inconspicuous appearance of the well-groomed man–except for that long hair. It was not so much as a matter of personal appearance but as a reminder of the old roughness that she resented this. She had often suggested a visit to the barber, but to no avail.

“Although I am not painting you,” she said with a smile, “I have been studying you, too. As you stand there before your canvas, your own personality is revealed–and I have not been entirely unobservant myself.”

“‘And under the X-ray scrutiny of this profound analysis,'” he quoted with a laugh, “do you like me?”

“Wait and see,” she retorted.

“At all events”–he spoke gravely–“you must try to like me a little, because I am not what I was. The person that I am is largely the creature of your own fashioning. Of course, you had very raw material to work with, and you can’t make a silk purse of”–he broke off and smiled–“well, of me, but in time you may at least get me mercerized a little.”

For no visible reason, she flushed, and her next question came a trifle eagerly:

“Do you mean that I have influenced you?”

“Influenced me, Drennie?” he repeated. “You have done more than that. You have painted me out, and painted me over.”

She shook her head, and in her eyes danced a light of subtle coquetry.

“There are things I have tried to do, and failed,” she told him.

His eyes showed surprise.

“Perhaps,” he apologized, “I am dense, and you may have to tell me bluntly what I am to do. But you know that you have only to tell me.”

For a moment, she said nothing, then she shook her head again.

“Issue your orders,” he insisted. “I am waiting to obey.”

She hesitated again, then said, slowly:

“Have your hair cut. It’s the one uncivilized thing about you.”

For an instant, Samson’s face hardened.

“No,” he said; “I don’t care to do that.”

“Oh, very well!” she laughed, lightly. “In that event, of course, you shouldn’t do it.” But her smile faded, and after a moment he explained:

“You see, it wouldn’t do.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I’ve got to keep something as it was to remind me of a prior claim on my life.”

For an instant the girl’s face clouded, and grew deeply troubled.

“You don’t mean,” she asked, with an outburst of interest more vehement than she had meant to show, or realized that she was showing–“you don’t mean that you still adhere to ideas of the vendetta?” Then she broke off with a laugh, a rather nervous laugh. “Of course not,” she answered herself. “That would be too absurd!”

“Would it?” asked Samson, simply. He glanced at his watch. “Two minutes up,” he announced. “The model will please resume the pose. By the way, may I drive with you to-morrow afternoon?”

* * * * *

The next afternoon, Samson ran up the street steps of the Lescott house, and rang the bell, and a few moments later Adrienne appeared. The car was waiting outside, and, as the girl came down the stairs in motor coat and veil, she paused and her fingers on the bannisters tightened in surprise as she looked at the man who stood below holding his hat in his hand, with his face upturned. The well-shaped head was no longer marred by the mane which it had formerly worn, but was close cropped, and under the transforming influence of the change the forehead seemed bolder and higher, and to her thinking the strength of the purposeful features was enhanced, and yet, had she known it, the man felt that he had for the first time surrendered a point which meant an abandonment of something akin to principle.

She said nothing, but as she took his hand in greeting, her fingers pressed his own in handclasp more lingering than usual.

Late that evening, when Samson returned to the studio, he found a missive in his letter-box, and, as he took it out, his eyes fell on the postmark. It was dated from Hixon, Kentucky, and, as the man slowly climbed the stairs, he turned the envelope over in his hand with a strange sense of misgiving and premonition.

CHAPTER XXIII

The letter was written in the cramped hand of Brother Spencer. Through its faulty diction ran a plainly discernible undernote of disapproval for Samson, though there was no word of reproof or criticism. It was plain that it was sent as a matter of courtesy to one who, having proven an apostate, scarcely merited such consideration. It informed him that old Spicer South had been “mighty porely,” but was now better, barring the breaking of age. Every one was “tolerable.” Then came the announcement which the letter had been written to convey.

The term of the South-Hollman truce had ended, and it had been renewed for an indefinite period.

“Some of your folks thought they ought to let you know because they promised to give you a say,” wrote the informant. “But they decided that it couldn’t hardly make no difference to you, since you have left the mountains, and if you cared anything about it, you knew the time, and could of been here. Hoping this finds you well.”

Samson’s face clouded. He threw the soiled and scribbled missive down on the table and sat with unseeing eyes fixed on the studio wall. So, they had cast him out of their councils! They already thought of him as one who had been.

In that passionate rush of feeling, everything that had happened since he had left Misery seemed artificial and dream-like. He longed for the realities that were forfeited. He wanted to press himself close to the great, gray shoulders of rock that broke through the greenery like giants tearing off soft raiment. Those were his people back there. He should be running with the wolf-pack, not coursing with beagles.

He had been telling himself that he was loyal, and now he realized that he was drifting like the lotus-eaters. Things that had gripped his soul were becoming myths. Nothing in his life was honest–he had become as they had prophesied, a derelict. In that thorn-choked graveyard lay the crude man whose knotted hand had rested on his head just before death stiffened it bestowing a mission.

“I hain’t fergot ye, Pap.” The words rang in his ears with the agony of a repudiated vow.

He rose and paced the floor, with teeth and hands clenched, and the sweat standing out on his forehead. His advisers had of late been urging him to go to Paris He had refused, and his unconfessed reason had been that in Paris he could not answer a sudden call. He would go back to them now, and compel them to admit his leadership.

Then, his eyes fell on the unfinished portrait of Adrienne. The face gazed at him with its grave sweetness; its fragrant subtlety and its fine-grained delicacy. Her pictured lips were silently arguing for the life he had found among strangers, and her victory would have been an easy one, but for the fact that just now his conscience seemed to be on the other side. Samson’s civilization was two years old–a thin veneer over a century of feudalism–and now the century was thundering its call of blood bondage. But, as the man struggled over the dilemma, the pendulum swung back. The hundred years had left, also, a heritage of quickness and bitterness to resent injury and injustice. His own people had cast him out. They had branded him as the deserter; they felt no need of him or his counsel. Very well, let them have it so. His problem had been settled for him. His Gordian knot was cut.

Sally and his uncle alone had his address. This letter, casting him out, must have been authorized by them, Brother Spencer acting merely as amanuensis. They, too, had repudiated him–and, if that were true, except for the graves of his parents the hills had no tie to hold him.

“Sally, Sally!” he groaned, dropping his face on his crossed arms, while his shoulders heaved in an agony of heart-break, and his words came in the old crude syllables: “I ‘lowed you’d believe in me ef hell froze!” He rose after that, and made a fierce gesture with his clenched fists. “All right,” he said, bitterly, “I’m shet of the lot of ye. I’m done!”

But it was easier to say the words of repudiation than to cut the ties that were knotted about his heart. Again, he saw Sally standing by the old stile in the starlight with sweet, loyal eyes lifted to his own, and again he heard her vow that, if he came back, she would be waiting. Now, that picture lay beyond a sea which he could not recross. Sally and his uncle had authorized his excommunication. There was, after all, in the entire world no faith which could stand unalterable, and in all the world no reward that could be a better thing than Dead-Sea fruit, without the love of that barefooted girl back there in the log cabin, whose sweet tongue could not fashion phrases except in illiteracy. He would have gambled his soul on her steadfastness without fear–and he bitterly told himself he would have lost. And yet–some voice sounded to him as he stood there alone in the studio with the arteries knotted on his temples and the blood running cold and bitter in his veins–and yet what right had he, the deserter, to demand faith? One hand went up and clasped his forehead–and the hand fell on the head that had been shorn because a foreign woman had asked it. What tradition had he kept inviolate? And, in his mood, that small matter of shortened hair meant as great and bitter surrender as it had meant to the Samson before him, whose mighty strength had gone out under the snipping of shears. What course was open to him now, except that of following the precedent of the other Samson, of pulling down the whole temple of his past? He was disowned, and could not return. He would go ahead with the other life, though at the moment he hated it.

With a rankling soul, the mountaineer left New York. He wrote Sally a brief note, telling her that he was going to cross the ocean, but his hurt pride forbade his pleading for her confidence, or adding, “I love you.” He plunged into the art life of the “other side of the Seine,” and worked voraciously. He was trying to learn much–and to forget much.

One sunny afternoon, when Samson had been in the _Quartier Latin_ for eight or nine months, the _concierge_ of his lodgings handed him, as he passed through the cour, an envelope addressed in the hand of Adrienne Lescott. He thrust it into his pocket for a later reading and hurried on to the _atelier_ where he was to have a criticism that day. When the day’s work was over, he was leaning on the embankment wall at the _Quai de Grand St. Augustin_, gazing idly at the fruit and flower stands that patched the pavement with color and at the gray walls of the Louvre across the Seine, His hand went into his pocket, and came out with the note. As he read it, he felt a glow of pleasurable surprise, and, wheeling, he retraced his steps briskly to his lodgings, where he began to pack. Adrienne had written that she and her mother and Wilfred Horton were sailing for Naples, and commanded him, unless he were too busy, to meet their steamer. Within two hours, he was bound for Lucerne to cross the Italian frontier by the slate-blue waters of Lake Maggiore.

A few weeks later Samson and Adrienne were standing together by moonlight in the ruins of the Coliseum. The junketing about Italy had been charming, and now, in that circle of sepia softness and broken columns, he looked at her, and suddenly asked himself:

“Just what does she mean to you?”

If he had never asked himself that question before, he knew now that it must some day be answered. Friendship had been a good and seemingly a sufficient definition. Now, he was not so sure that it could remain so.

Then, his thoughts went back to a cabin in the hills and a girl in calico. He heard a voice like the voice of a song-bird saying through tears:

“I couldn’t live without ye, Samson…. I jest couldn’t do hit!”

For a moment, he was sick of his life. It seemed that there stood before him, in that place of historic wraiths and memories, a girl, her eyes sad, but loyal and without reproof. For an instant, he could see a scene of centuries ago. A barbarian and captive girl stood in the arena, looking up with ignorant, but unflinching, eyes; and a man sat in the marble tiers looking down. The benches were draped with embroidered rugs and gold and scarlet hangings; the air was heavy with incense–and blood. About him sat men and women of Rome’s culture, freshly perfumed from the baths. The slender figure in the dust of the circus alone was a creature without artifice. And, as she looked up, she recognized the man in the box, the man who had once been a barbarian, too, and she turned her eyes to the iron gates of the cages whence came the roar of the beasts, and waited the ordeal. And the face was the face of Sally.

“You look,” said Adrienne, studying his countenance in the pallor of the moonlight, “as though you were seeing ghosts.”

“I am,” said Samson. “Let’s go.”

Adrienne had not yet seen her portrait. Samson had needed a few hours of finishing when he left New York, though it was work which could be done away from the model. So, it was natural that, when the party reached Paris, Adrienne should soon insist on crossing the _Pont d’ Alexandre III_. to his studio near the “_Boule Mich’_” for an inspection of her commissioned canvas. For a while, she wandered about the business-like place, littered with the gear of the painter’s craft. It was, in a way, a form of mind-reading, for Samson’s brush was the tongue of his soul.

The girl’s eyes grew thoughtful, as she saw that he still drew the leering, saturnine face of Jim Asberry. He had not outgrown hate, then? But she said nothing, until he brought out and set on an easel her own portrait. For a moment, she gasped with sheer delight for the colorful mastery of the technique, and she would have been hard to please had she not been delighted with the conception of herself mirrored in the canvas. It was a face through which the soul showed, and the soul was strong and flawless. The girl’s personality radiated from the canvas –and yet–A disappointed little look crossed and clouded her eyes. She was conscious of an indefinable catch of pain at her heart.

Samson stepped forward, and his waiting eyes, too, were disappointed.

“You don’t like it, Drennie?” he anxiously questioned. But she smiled in answer, and declared:

“I love it.”

He went out a few minutes later to telephone for her to Mrs. Lescott, and gave Adrienne _carte blanche_ to browse among his portfolios and stacked canvases until his return. In a few minutes, she discovered one of those efforts which she called his “rebellious pictures.”

These were such things as he painted, using no model except memory perhaps, not for the making of finished pictures, but merely to give outlet to his feelings; an outlet which some men might have found in talk.

This particular canvas was roughly blocked in, and it was elementally simple, but each brush stroke had been thrown against the surface with the concentrated fire and energy of a blow, except the strokes that had painted the face, and there the brush had seemed to kiss the canvas. The picture showed a barefooted girl, standing, in barbaric simplicity of dress, in the glare of the arena, while a gaunt lion crouched eying her. Her head was lifted as though she were listening to faraway music. In the eyes was indomitable courage. That canvas was at once a declaration of love, and a _miserere_. Adrienne set it up beside her own portrait, and, as she studied the two with her chin resting on her gloved hand, her eyes cleared of questioning. Now, she knew what she missed in her own more beautiful likeness. It had been painted with all the admiration of the mind. This other had been dashed off straight from the heart–and this other was Sally! She replaced the sketch where she had found it, and Samson, returning, found her busy with little sketches of the Seine.

* * * * *

“Drennie,” pleaded Wilfred Horton, as the two leaned on the deck rail of the _Mauretania_, returning from Europe, “are you going to hold me off indefinitely? I’ve served my seven years for Rachel, and thrown in some extra time. Am I no nearer the goal?”

The girl looked at the oily heave of the leaden and cheerless Atlantic, and its somber tones found reflection in her eyes. She shook her head.

“I wish I knew,” she said, wearily. Then, she added, vehemently: “I’m not worth it, Wilfred. Let me go. Chuck me out of your life as a little pig who can’t read her own heart; who is too utterly selfish to decide upon her own life.”

“Is it”–he put the question with foreboding–“that, after all, I was a prophet? Have you–and South–wiped your feet on the doormat marked ‘Platonic friendship’? Have you done that, Drennie?”

She looked up into his eyes. Her own were wide and honest and very full of pain.

“No,” she said; “we haven’t done that, yet. I guess we won’t…. I think he’d rather stay outside, Wilfred. If I was sure I loved him, and that he loved me, I’d feel like a cheat–there is the other girl to think of…. And, besides, I’m not sure what I want myself…. But I’m horribly afraid I’m going to end by losing you both.”

Horton stood silent. It was tea-time, and from below came the strains of the ship’s orchestra. A few ulster-muffled passengers gloomily paced the deck.

“You won’t lose us both, Drennie,” he said, steadily. “You may lose your choice–but, if you find yourself able to fall back on substitutes, I’ll still be there, waiting.”

For once, he did not meet her scrutiny, or know of it. His own eyes were fixed on the slow swing of heavy, gray-green waters. He was smiling, but it is as a man smiles when he confronts despair, and pretends that everything is quite all right. The girl looked at him with a choke in her throat.

“Wilfred,” she said, laying her hand on his arm, “I’m not worth worrying over. Really, I’m not. If Samson South proposed to me to-day, I know that I should refuse him. I am not at all sure that I am the least little bit in love with him. Only, don’t you see I can’t be quite sure I’m not? It would be horrible if we all made a mistake. May I have till Christmas to make up my mind for all time? I’ll tell you then, dear, if you care to wait.”

* * * * *

Tamarack Spicer sat on the top of a box car, swinging his legs over the side. He was clad in overalls, and in the pockets of his breeches reposed a bulging flask of red liquor, and an unbulging pay envelope. Tamarack had been “railroading” for several months this time. He had made a new record for sustained effort and industry, but now June was beckoning him to the mountains with vagabond yearnings for freedom and leisure. Many things invited his soul. Almost four years had passed since Samson had left the mountains, and in four years a woman can change her mind. Sally might, when they met on the road, greet him once more as a kinsman, and agree to forget his faulty method of courtship. This time, he would be more diplomatic. Yesterday, he had gone to the boss, and “called for his time.” To-day, he was paid off, and a free lance.

As he reflected on these matters, a fellow trainman came along the top of the car, and sat down at Tamarack’s side. This brakeman had also been recruited from the mountains, though from another section–over toward the Virginia line.

“So yer quittin’?” observed the new-comer.

Spicer nodded.

“Goin’ back thar on Misery?”

Again, Tamarack answered with a jerk of his head.

“I’ve been layin’ off ter tell ye somethin’, Tam’rack.”

“Cut her loose.”

“I laid over in Hixon last week, an’ some fellers that used ter know my mother’s folks took me down in the cellar of Hollman’s store, an’ give me some licker.”

“What of hit?”

“They was talkin’ ’bout you.”

“What did they say?”

“I seen that they was enemies of yours, an’ they wasn’t in no good humor, so, when they axed me ef I knowed ye, I ‘lowed I didn’t know nothin’ good about ye. I had ter cuss ye out, or git in trouble myself.”

Tamarack cursed the whole Hollman tribe, and his companion went on:

“Jim Asberry was thar. He ‘lowed they’d found out thet you’d done shot Purvy thet time, an’ he said”–the brakeman paused to add emphasis to his conclusion–“thet the next time ye come home, he ‘lowed ter git ye plumb shore.”

Tamarack scowled.

“Much obleeged,” he replied.

At Hixon, Tamarack Spicer strolled along the street toward the court- house. He wished to be seen. So long as it was broad daylight, and he displayed no hostility, he knew he was safe–and he had plans.

Standing before the Hollman store were Jim Asberry and several companions. They greeted Tamarack affably, and he paused to talk.

“Ridin’ over ter Misery?” inquired Asberry.

“‘Lowed I mout as well.”

“Mind ef I rides with ye es fur es Jesse’s place?”

“Plumb glad ter have company,” drawled Tamarack,

They chatted of many things, and traveled slowly, but, when they came to those narrows where they could not ride stirrup to stirrup, each jockeyed for the rear position, and the man who found himself forced into the lead turned in his saddle and talked back over his shoulder, with wary, though seemingly careless, eyes. Each knew the other was bent on his murder.

At Purvy’s gate, Asberry waved farewell, and turned in. Tamarack rode on, but shortly he hitched his horse in the concealment of a hollow, walled with huge rocks, and disappeared into the laurel.

He began climbing, in a crouched position, bringing each foot down noiselessly, and pausing often to listen. Jim Asberry had not been outwardly armed when he left Spicer. But, soon, the brakeman’s delicately attuned ears caught a sound that made him lie flat in the lee of a great log, where he was masked in clumps of flowering rhododendron. Presently, Asberry passed him, also walking cautiously, but hurriedly, and cradling a Winchester rifle in the hollow of his arm. Then, Tamarack knew that Asberry was taking this cut to head him off, and waylay him in the gorge a mile away by road but a short distance only over the hill. Spicer held his heavy revolver cocked in his hand, but it was too near the Purvy house to risk a shot. He waited a moment, and then, rising, went on noiselessly with a snarling grin, stalking the man who was stalking him.

Asberry found a place at the foot of a huge pine where the undergrowth would cloak him. Twenty yards below ran the creek-bed road, returning from its long horseshoe deviation. When he had taken his position, his faded butternut clothing matched the earth as inconspicuously as a quail matches dead leaves, and he settled himself to wait. Slowly and with infinite caution, his intended victim stole down, guarding each step, until he was in short and certain range, but, instead of being at the front, he came from the back. He, also, lay flat on his stomach, and raised the already cocked pistol. He steadied it in a two-handed grip against a tree trunk, and trained it with deliberate care on a point to the left of the other man’s spine just below the shoulder blades.

Then, he pulled the trigger! He did not go down to inspect his work. It was not necessary. The instantaneous fashion with which the head of the ambuscader settled forward on its face told him all he wanted to know. He slipped back to his horse, mounted and rode fast to the house of Spicer South, demanding asylum.

The next day came word that, if Tamarack Spicer would surrender and stand trial, in a court dominated by the Hollmans, the truce would continue. Otherwise, the “war was on.”

The Souths flung back this message:

“Come and git him.”

But Hollman and Purvy, hypocritically clamoring for the sanctity of the law, made no effort to come and “git him.” They knew that Spicer South’s house was now a fortress, prepared for siege. They knew that every trail thither was picketed. Also, they knew a better way. This time, they had the color of the law on their side. The Circuit Judge, through the Sheriff, asked for troops, and troops came. Their tents dotted the river bank below the Hixon Bridge. A detail under a white flag went out after Tamarack Spicer. The militia Captain in command, who feared neither feudist nor death, was courteously received. He had brains, and he assured them that he acted under orders which could not be disobeyed. Unless they surrendered the prisoner, gatling guns would follow. If necessary they would be dragged behind ox-teams. Many militiamen might be killed, but for each of them the State had another. If Spicer would surrender, the officer would guarantee him personal protection, and, if it seemed necessary, a change of venue would secure him trial in another circuit. For hours, the clan deliberated. For the soldiers they felt no enmity. For the young Captain they felt an instinctive liking. He was a man.

Old Spicer South, restored to an echo of his former robustness by the call of action, gave the clan’s verdict.

“Hit hain’t the co’te we’re skeered of. Ef this boy goes ter town, he won’t never git inter no co’te. He’ll be murdered.”

The officer held out his hand.

“As man to man,” he said, “I pledge you my word that no one shall take him except by process of law. I’m not working for the Hollmans, or the Purvys. I know their breed,”

For a space, old South looked into the soldier’s eyes, and the soldier looked back.

“I’ll take yore handshake on thet bargain,” said the mountaineer, gravely. “Tam’rack,” he added, in a voice of finality, “ye’ve got ter go.”

The officer had meant what he said. He marched his prisoner into Hixon at the center of a hollow square, with muskets at the ready. And yet, as the boy passed into the court-house yard, with a soldier rubbing elbows on each side, a cleanly aimed shot sounded from somewhere. The smokeless powder told no tale and with blue shirts and army hats circling him, Tamarack fell and died.

That afternoon, one of Hollman’s henchmen was found lying in the road with his lifeless face in the water of the creek. The next day, as old Spicer South stood at the door of his cabin, a rifle barked from the hillside, and he fell, shot through the left shoulder by a bullet intended for his heart. All this while, the troops were helplessly camped at Hixon. They had power and inclination to go out and get men, but there was no man to get.

The Hollmans had used the soldiers as far as they wished; they had made them pull the chestnuts out of the fire and Tamarack Spicer out of his stronghold. They now refused to swear out additional warrants.

A detail had rushed into Hollman’s store an instant after the shot which killed Tamarack was fired. Except for a woman buying a card of buttons, and a fair-haired clerk waiting on her, they found the building empty.

Back beyond, the hills were impenetrable, and answered no questions.

CHAPTER XXIV

Old Spicer South would ten years ago have put a bandage on his wound and gone about his business, but now he tossed under his patchwork quilt, and Brother Spencer expressed grave doubts for his recovery. With his counsel unavailable Wile McCager, by common consent, assumed something like the powers of a regent and took upon himself the duties to which Samson should have succeeded.

That a Hollman should have been able to elude the pickets and penetrate the heart of South territory to Spicer South’s cabin, was both astounding and alarming. The war was on without question now, and there must be council. Wile McCager had sent out a summons for the family heads to meet that afternoon at his mill. It was Saturday–“mill day”–and in accordance with ancient custom the lanes would be more traveled than usual.

Those men who came by the wagon road afforded no unusual spectacle, for behind each saddle sagged a sack of grain. Their faces bore no stamp of unwonted excitement, but every man balanced a rifle across his pommel. None the less, their purpose was grim, and their talk when they had gathered was to the point.

Old McCager, himself sorely perplexed, voiced the sentiment that the others had been too courteous to express. With Spicer South bed-ridden and Samson a renegade, they had no adequate leader. McCager was a solid man of intrepid courage and honesty, but grinding grist was his avocation, not strategy and tactics. The enemy had such masters of intrigue as Purvy and Judge Hollman.

Then, a lean sorrel mare came jogging into view, switching her fly- bitten tail, and on the mare’s back, urging him with a long, leafy switch, sat a woman. Behind her sagged the two loaded ends of a corn- sack. She rode like the mountain women, facing much to the side, yet unlike them. Her arms did not flap. She did not bump gawkily up and down in her saddle. Her blue calico dress caught the sun at a distance, but her blue sunbonnet shaded and masked her face. She was lithe and slim, and her violet eyes were profoundly serious, and her lips were as resolutely set as Joan of Arc’s might have been, for Sally Miller had come only ostensibly to have her corn ground to meal. She had really come to speak for the absent chief, and she knew that she would be met with derision. The years had sobered the girl, but her beauty had increased, though it was now of a chastened type, which gave her a strange and rather exalted refinement of expression.

Wile McCager came to the mill door, as she rode up, and lifted the sack from her horse.

“Howdy, Sally?” he greeted.

“Tol’able, thank ye,” said Sally. “I’m goin’ ter get off.”

As she entered the great half-lighted room, where the mill stones creaked on their cumbersome shafts, the hum of discussion sank to silence. The place was brown with age and dirt, and powdered with a coarse dusting of meal. The girl nodded to the mountaineers gathered in conclave, then, turning to the miller she announced:

“I’m going to send for Samson.”

The statement was at first met with dead silence, then came a rumble of indignant dissent, but for that the girl was prepared, as she was prepared for the contemptuous laughter which followed.

“I reckon if Samson was here,” she said, dryly, “you all wouldn’t think it was quite so funny.”

Old Caleb Wiley spat through his bristling beard, and his voice was a quavering rumble.

“What we wants is a man. We hain’t got no use fer no traitors thet’s too almighty damn busy doin’ fancy work ter stand by their kith an’ kin.”

“That’s a lie!” said the girl, scornfully. “There’s just one man living that’s smart enough to match Jesse Purvy–an’ that one man is Samson. Samson’s got the right to lead the Souths, and he’s going to do it–ef he wants to.”

“Sally,” Wile McCager spoke, soothingly, “don’t go gittin’ mad. Caleb talks hasty. We knows ye used ter be Samson’s gal, an’ we hain’t aimin’ ter hurt yore feelin’s. But Samson’s done left the mountings. I reckon ef he wanted ter come back, he’d a-come afore now. Let him stay whar he’s at.”

“Whar is he at?” demanded old Caleb Wiley, in a truculent voice.

“That’s his business,” Sally flashed back, “but I know. All I want to tell you is this. Don’t you make a move till I have time to get word to him. I tell you, he’s got to have his say.”

“I reckon we hain’t a-goin’ ter wait,” sneered Caleb, “fer a feller thet won’t let hit be known whar he’s a-sojournin’ at. Ef ye air so shore of him, why won’t ye tell us whar he is now?”

“That’s my business, too.” Sally’s voice was resolute. “I’ve got a