shuttered window, through which he had since the beginning been watching the conflict.
“That ends it!” he said, with a despairing shrug of his shoulders. He picked up a magazine pistol which lay on his table, and, carefully counting down his chest to the fifth rib, placed the muzzle against his breast.
CHAPTER XXX
Before the mountain roads were mired with the coming of the rains, and while the air held its sparkle of autumnal zestfulness, Samson South wrote to Wilfred Horton that, if he still meant to come to the hills for his inspection of coal and timber, the time was ripe. Soon, men would appear bearing transit and chain, drawing a line which a railroad was to follow to Misery and across it to the heart of untouched forests and coal-fields. With that wave of innovation would come the speculators. Besides, Samson’s fingers were itching to be out in the hills with a palette and a sheaf of brushes in the society of George Lescott.
For a while after the battle at Hixon, the county had lain in a torpid paralysis of dread. Many illiterate feudists on each side remembered the directing and exposed figure of Samson South seen through eddies of gun smoke, and believed him immune from death. With Purvy dead and Hollman the victim of his own hand, the backbone of the murder syndicate was broken. Its heart had ceased to beat. Those Hollman survivors who bore the potentialities for leadership had not only signed pledges of peace, but were afraid to break them; and the triumphant Souths, instead of vaunting their victory, had subscribed to the doctrine of order, and declared the war over. Souths who broke the law were as speedily arrested as Hollmans. Their boys were drilling as militiamen, and–wonder of wonders!–inviting the sons of the enemy to join them. Of course, these things changed gradually, but the beginnings of them were most noticeable in the first few months, just as a newly painted and renovated house is more conspicuous than one that has been long respectable.
Hollman’s Mammoth Department Store passed into new hands, and trafficked only in merchandise, and the town was open to the men and women of Misery as well as those of Crippleshin.
These things Samson had explained in his letters to the Lescotts and Horton. Men from down below could still find trouble in the wink of an eye, by seeking it, for under all transformation the nature of the individual remained much the same; but, without seeking to give offense, they could ride as securely through the hills as through the streets of a policed city–and meet a readier hospitality.
And, when these things were discussed and the two men prepared to cross the Mason-and-Dixon line and visit the Cumberlands, Adrienne promptly and definitely announced that she would accompany her brother. No argument was effective to dissuade her, and after all Lescott, who had been there, saw no good reason why she should not go with him. He had brought Samson North. He had made a hazardous experiment which subsequent events had more than vindicated, and yet, in one respect, he feared that there had been failure. He had promised Sally that her lover would return to her with undeflected loyalty. Had he done so? Lescott had been glad that his sister should have undertaken the part of Samson’s molding, which only a woman’s hand could accomplish, and he had been glad of the strong friendship that had grown between them. But, if that friendship had come to mean something more sentimental, his experiment had been successful at the cost of unsuccess. He had said little, but watched much, and he had known that, after receiving a certain letter from Samson South, his sister had seemed strangely quiet and distressed. These four young persons had snarled their lives in perplexity. They could definitely find themselves and permanently adjust themselves, only by meeting on common ground. Perhaps, Samson had shone in an exaggerated high-light of fascination by the strong contrast into which New York had thrown him. Wilfred Horton had the right to be seen also in contrast with mountain life, and then only could the girl decide for all time and irrevocably. The painter learns something of confused values.
Horton himself had seen small reason for a growth of hope in these months, but he, like Lescott, felt that the matter must come to issue, and he was not of that type which shrinks from putting to the touch a question of vital consequence. He knew that her happiness as well as his own was in the balance. He was not embittered or deluded, as a narrower man might have been, into the fallacy that her treatment of him denoted fickleness. Adrienne was merely running the boundary line that separates deep friendship from love, a boundary which is often confusing. When she had finally staked out the disputed frontier, it would never again be questioned. But on which side he would find himself, he did not know.
At Hixon, they found that deceptive air of serenity which made the history of less than three months ago seem paradoxical and fantastically unreal. Only about the court-house square where numerous small holes in frame walls told of fusillades, and in the interior of the building itself where the woodwork was scarred and torn, and the plaster freshly patched, did they find grimly reminiscent evidence.
Samson had not met them at the town, because he wished their first impressions of his people to reach them uninfluenced by his escort. It was a form of the mountain pride–an honest resolve to soften nothing, and make no apologies. But they found arrangements made for horses and saddlebags, and the girl discovered that for her had been provided a mount as evenly gaited as any in her own stables.
When she and her two companions came out to the hotel porch to start, they found a guide waiting, who said he was instructed to take them as far as the ridge, where the Sheriff himself would be waiting, and the cavalcade struck into the hills. Men at whose houses they paused to ask a dipper of water, or to make an inquiry, gravely advised that they “had better light, and stay all night.” In the coloring forests, squirrels scampered and scurried out of sight, and here and there on the tall slopes they saw shy-looking children regarding them with inquisitive eyes.
The guide led them silently, gazing in frank amazement, though deferential politeness, at this girl in corduroys, who rode cross- saddle, and rode so well. Yet, it was evident that he would have preferred talking had not diffidence restrained him. He was a young man and rather handsome in a shaggy, unkempt way. Across one cheek ran a long scar still red, and the girl, looking into his clear, intelligent eyes, wondered what that scar stood for. Adrienne had the power of melting masculine diffidence, and her smile as she rode at his side, and asked, “What is your name?” brought an answering smile to his grim lips.
“Joe Hollman, ma’am,” he answered; and the girl gave an involuntary start. The two men who caught the name closed up the gap between the horses, with suddenly piqued interest.
“Hollman!” exclaimed the girl. “Then, you–” She stopped and flushed. “I beg your pardon,” she said, quickly.
“That’s all right,” reassured the man. “I know what ye’re a-thinkin’, but I hain’t takin’ no offense. The High Sheriff sent me over. I’m one of his deputies.”
“Were you”–she paused, and added rather timidly–“were you in the court-house?”
He nodded, and with a brown forefinger traced the scar on his cheek.
“Samson South done that thar with his rifle-gun,” he enlightened. “He’s a funny sort of feller, is Samson South.”
“How?” she asked.
“Wall, he licked us, an’ he licked us so plumb damn hard we was skeered ter fight ag’in, an’ then, ‘stid of tramplin’ on us, he turned right ’round, an’ made me a deputy. My brother’s a corporal in this hyar newfangled milishy. I reckon this time the peace is goin’ ter last. Hit’s a mighty funny way ter act, but ‘pears like it works all right.”
Then, at the ridge, the girl’s heart gave a sudden bound, for there at the highest point, where the road went up and dipped again, waited the mounted figure of Samson South, and, as they came into sight, he waved his felt hat, and rode down to meet them.
“Greetings!” he shouted. Then, as he leaned over and took Adrienne’s hand, he added: “The Goops send you their welcome.” His smile was unchanged, but the girl noted that his hair had again grown long.
Finally, as the sun was setting, they reached a roadside cabin, and the mountaineer said briefly to the other men:
“You fellows ride on. I want Drennie to stop with me a moment. We’ll join you later.”
Lescott nodded. He remembered the cabin of the Widow Miller, and Horton rode with him, albeit grudgingly.
Adrienne sprang lightly to the ground, laughingly rejecting Samson’s assistance, and came with him to the top of a stile, from which he pointed to the log cabin, set back in its small yard, wherein geese and chickens picked industriously about in the sandy earth.
A huge poplar and a great oak nodded to each other at either side of the door, and over the walls a clambering profusion of honeysuckle vine contended with a mass of wild grape, in joint effort to hide the white chinking between the dark logs. From the crude milk-benches to the sweep of the well, every note was one of neatness and rustic charm. Slowly, he said, looking straight into her eyes:
“This is Sally’s cabin, Drennie.”
He watched her expression, and her lips curved up in the same sweetness of smile that had first captivated and helped to mold him.
“It’s lovely!” she cried, with frank delight. “It’s a picture.”
“Wait!” he commanded. Then, turning toward the house, he sent out the long, peculiarly mournful call of the whippoorwill, and, at the signal, the door opened, and on the threshold Adrienne saw a slender figure. She had called the cabin with its shaded dooryard a picture, but now she knew she had been wrong. It was only a background. It was the girl herself who made and completed the picture. She stood there in the wild simplicity that artists seek vainly to reproduce in posed figures. Her red calico dress was patched, but fell in graceful lines to her slim bare ankles, though the first faint frosts had already fallen.
Her red-brown hair hung loose and in masses about the oval of a face in which the half-parted lips were dashes of scarlet, and the eyes large violet pools. She stood with her little chin tilted in a half- wild attitude of reconnoiter, as a fawn might have stood. One brown arm and hand rested on the door frame, and, as she saw the other woman, she colored adorably.
Adrienne thought she had never seen so instinctively and unaffectedly lovely a face or figure. Then the girl came down the steps and ran toward them.
“Drennie,” said the man, “this is Sally. I want you two to love each other.” For an instant, Adrienne Lescott stood looking at the mountain girl, and then she opened both her arms.
“Sally,” she cried, “you adorable child, I do love you!”
The girl in the calico dress raised her face, and her eyes were glistening.
“I’m obleeged ter ye,” she faltered. Then, with open and wondering admiration she stood gazing at the first “fine lady” upon whom her glance had ever fallen.
Samson went over and took Sally’s hand.
“Drennie,” he said, softly, “is there anything the matter with her?”
Adrienne Lescott shook her head.
“I understand,” she said.
“I sent the others on,” he went on quietly, “because I wanted that first we three should meet alone. George and Wilfred are going to stop at my uncle’s house, but, unless you’d rather have it otherwise, Sally wants you here.”
“Do I stop now?” the girl asked.
But the man shook his head.
“I want you to meet my other people first.”
As they rode at a walk along the little shred of road left to them, the man turned gravely.
“Drennie,” he began, “she waited for me, all those years. What I was helped to do by such splendid friends as you and your brother and Wilfred, she was back here trying to do for herself. I told you back there the night before I left that I was afraid to let myself question my feelings toward you. Do you remember?”
She met his eyes, and her own eyes were frankly smiling.
“You were very complimentary, Samson,” she told him. “I warned you then that it was the moon talking.”
“No,” he said firmly, “it was not the moon. I have since then met that fear, and analyzed it. My feeling for you is the best that a man can have, the honest worship of friendship. And,” he added, “I have analyzed your feeling for me, too, and, thank God! I have that same friendship from you. Haven’t I?”
For a moment, she only nodded; but her eyes were bent on the road ahead of her. The man waited in tense silence. Then, she raised her face, and it was a face that smiled with the serenity of one who has wakened out of a troubled dream.
“You will always have that, Samson, dear,” she assured him.
“Have I enough of it, to ask you to do for her what you did for me? To take her and teach her the things she has the right to know?”
“I’d love it,” she cried. And then she smiled, as she added: “She will be much easier to teach. She won’t be so stupid, and one of the things I shall teach her”–she paused, and added whimsically–“will be to make you cut your hair again.”
But, just before they drew up at the house of old Spicer South, she said:
“I might as well make a clean breast of it, Samson, and give my vanity the punishment it deserves. You had me in deep doubt.”
“About what?”
“About–well, about us. I wasn’t quite sure that I wanted Sally to have you–that I didn’t need you myself. I’ve been a shameful little cat to Wilfred.”
“But now–?” The Kentuckian broke off.
“Now, I know that my friendship for you and my love for him have both had their acid test–and I am happier than I’ve ever been before. I’m glad we’ve been through it. There are no doubts ahead. I’ve got you both.”
“About him,” said Samson, thoughtfully. “May I tell you something which, although it’s a thing in your own heart, you have never quite known?”
She nodded, and he went on.
“The thing which you call fascination in me was really just a proxy, Drennie. You were liking qualities in me that were really his qualities. Just because you had known him only in gentle guise, his finish blinded you to his courage. Because he could turn ‘to woman the heart of a woman,’ you failed to see that under it was the ‘iron and fire.’ You thought you saw those qualities in me, because I wore my bark as shaggy as that scaling hickory over there. When he was getting anonymous threats of death every morning, he didn’t mention them to you. He talked of teas and dances. I know his danger was real, because they tried to have me kill him–and if I’d been the man they took me for, I reckon I’d have done it. I was mad to my marrow that night–for a minute. I don’t hold a brief for Wilfred, but I know that you liked me first for qualities which he has as strongly as I–and more strongly. He’s a braver man than I, because, though raised to gentle things, when you ordered him into the fight, he was there. He never turned back, or flickered. I was raised on raw meat and gunpowder, but he went in without training.”
The girl’s eyes grew grave and thoughtful, and for the rest of the way she rode in silence.
There were transformations, too, in the house of Spicer South. Windows had been cut, and lamps adopted. It was no longer so crudely a pioneer abode. While they waited for dinner, a girl lightly crossed the stile, and came up to the house. Adrienne met her at the door, while Samson and Horton stood back, waiting. Suddenly, Miss Lescott halted and regarded the newcomer in surprise. It was the same girl she had seen, yet a different girl. Her hair no longer fell in tangled masses. Her feet were no longer bare. Her dress, though simple, was charming, and, when she spoke, her English had dropped its half-illiterate peculiarities, though the voice still held its bird-like melody.
“Oh, Samson,” cried Adrienne, “you two have been deceiving me! Sally, you were making up, dressing the part back there, and letting me patronize you.”
Sally’s laughter broke from her throat in a musical peal, but it still held the note of shyness, and it was Samson who spoke.
“I made the others ride on, and I got Sally to meet you just as she was when I left her to go East.” He spoke with a touch of the mountaineer’s over-sensitive pride. “I wanted you first to see my people, not as they are going to be, but as they were. I wanted you to know how proud I am of them–just that way.”
That evening, the four of them walked together over to the cabin of the Widow Miller. At the stile, Adrienne Lescott turned to the girl, and said:
“I suppose this place is preempted. I’m going to take Wilfred down there by the creek, and leave you two alone.”
Sally protested with mountain hospitality, but even under the moon she once more colored adorably.
Adrienne turned up the collar of her sweater around her throat, and, when she and the man who had waited, stood leaning on the rail of the footbridge, she laid a hand on his arm.
“Has the water flowed by my mill, Wilfred?” she asked.
“What do you mean?” His voice trembled.
“Will you have anything to ask me when Christmas comes?”
“If I can wait that long, Drennie,” he told her.
“Don’t wait, dear,” she suddenly exclaimed, turning toward him, and raising eyes that held his answer. “Ask me now!”
But the question which he asked was one that his lips smothered as he pressed them against her own.
Back where the poplar threw its sooty shadow on the road, two figures sat close together on the top of a stile, talking happily in whispers. A girl raised her face, and the moon shone on the deepness of her eyes, as her lips curved in a trembling smile.
“You’ve come back, Samson,” she said in a low voice, “but, if I’d known how lovely she was, I’d have given up hoping. I don’t see what made you come.”
Her voice dropped again into the tender cadence of dialect.
“I couldn’t live withouten ye, Samson. I jest couldn’t do hit.” Would he remember when she had said that before?
“I reckon, Sally,” he promptly told her, “I couldn’t live withouten _you,_ neither.” Then, he added, fervently, “I’m plumb dead shore I couldn’t.”
THE END