I
He was the younger of two brothers, in his sixteenth year; and he
had his father's eyes--a tender and idyllic blue. There, however, the
obvious resemblance ended. The elder's azure gaze was set in a face
scarred and riven by hardship, debauch and disease; he had been--before
he had inevitably returned to the mountains where he was born--a
brakeman in the lowest stratum of the corruption of small cities on
big railroads; and his thin stooped body, his gaunt head and uncertain
hands, all bore the stamp of ruinous years. But in the midst of this
his eyes, like David's, retained their singularly tranquil color of
sweetness and innocence.
David was the youngest, the freshest thing imaginable; he was overtall
and gawky, his cheeks were as delicately rosy as apple blossoms, and his
smile was an epitome of ingenuous interest and frank wonder. It was
as if some quality of especial fineness, lingering unspotted in Hunter
Kinemon, had found complete expression in his son David. A great deal of
this certainly was due to his mother, a thick solid woman, who retained
more than a trace of girlish beauty when she stood back, flushed from
the heat of cooking, or, her bright eyes snapping, tramped with heavy
pails from the milking shed on a winter morning.
Both the Kinemon boys were engaging. Allen, almost twenty-one, was,
of course, the more conspicuous; he was called the strongest youth in
Greenstream County. He had his mother's brown eyes; a deep bony box of
a chest; rippling shoulders; and a broad peaceful countenance. He drove
the Crabapple stage, between Crabapple, the village just over the back
mountain, and Beaulings, in West Virginia. It was twenty-six miles from
point to point, a way that crossed a towering range, hung above a far
veil of unbroken spruce, forded swift glittering streams, and followed
a road that passed rare isolated dwellings, dominating rocky and
precarious patches and hills of cultivation. One night Allen slept in
Beaulings; the next he was home, rising at four o'clock in order to take
his stage out of Crabapple at seven sharp.
It was a splendid job, and brought them thirty-five dollars a month; not
in mere trade at the store, but actual money. This, together with Hunter
Kinemon's position, tending the rich bottom farm of State Senator Gait,
gave them a position of ease and comfort in Greenstream. They were a
very highly esteemed family.
Gait's farm was in grazing; it extended in deep green pastures and
sparkling water between two high mountainous walls drawn across east and
west. In the morning the rising sun cast long delicate shadows on one
side; at evening the shadow troops lengthened across the emerald valley
from the other. The farmhouse occupied a fenced clearing on the eastern
rise, with a gray huddle of barn and sheds below, a garden patch of
innumerable bean poles, and an incessant stir of snowy chickens. Beyond,
the cattle moved in sleek chestnut-brown and orange herds; and farther
out flocks of sheep shifted like gray-white clouds on a green-blue sky.
It was, Mrs. Kinemon occasionally complained, powerful lonely, with the
store two miles up the road, Crabapple over a heft of a rise, and no
personable neighbors; and she kept a loaded rifle in an angle of the
kitchen when the men were all out in a distant pasturage. But David
liked it extremely well; he liked riding an old horse after the steers,
the all-night sap boilings in spring groves, the rough path across a rib
of the mountain to school.
Nevertheless, he was glad when studying was over for the year. It
finished early in May, on account of upland planting, and left
David with a great many weeks filled only with work that seem to him
unadulterated play. Even that didn't last all the time; there were hours
when he could fish for trout, plentiful in cool rocky pools; or shoot
gray squirrels in the towering maples. Then, of evenings, he could
listen to Allen's thrilling tales of the road, of the gambling and
fighting among the lumbermen in Beaulings, or of strange people that had
taken passage in the Crabapple stage--drummers, for the most part, with
impressive diamond rings and the doggonedest lies imaginable. But they
couldn't fool Allen, however believing he might seem.... The Kinemons
were listening to such a recital by their eldest son now.
They were gathered in a room of very general purpose. It had a rough
board floor and crumbling plaster walls, and held a large scarred cherry
bed with high posts and a gayly quilted cover; a long couch, covered
with yellow untanned sheepskins; a primitive telephone; some painted
wooden chairs; a wardrobe, lurching insecurely forward; and an empty
iron stove with a pipe let into an original open hearth with a wide
rugged stone. Beyond, a door opened into the kitchen, and back of the
bed a raw unguarded flight of steps led up to the peaked space where
Allen and David slept.
Hunter Kinemon was extended on the couch, his home-knitted socks
comfortably free of shoes, smoking a sandstone pipe with a reed stem.
Mrs. Kinemon was seated in a rocking-chair with a stained and torn red
plush cushion, that moved with a thin complaint on a fixed base. Allen
was over against the stove, his corduroy trousers thrust into greased
laced boots, and a black cotton shirt open on a chest and throat like
pink marble. And David supported his lanky length, in a careless and
dust-colored garb, with a capacious hand on the oak beam of the mantel.
It was May, school had stopped, and a door was open on a warm still
dusk. Allen's tale had come to an end; he was pinching the ear of a
diminutive dog--like a fat white sausage with wire-thin legs and a rat
tail--that never left him. The smoke from the elder Kinemon's pipe rose
in a tranquil cloud. Mrs. Kinemon rocked vigorously, with a prolonged
wail of the chair springs. “I got to put some tallow to that chair,”
Kinemon proclaimed.
“The house on Elbow Barren's took,” Allen told him suddenly--“the one
just off the road. I saw smoke in the chimney this evening.”
A revival of interest, a speculation, followed this announcement.
“Any women'll get to the church,” Mr. Kinemon asserted. “I wonder? Did a
person say who were they?”
“I asked; but they're strange to Crabapple. I heard this though: there
weren't any women to them--just men--father and sons like. I drew up
right slow going by; but nobody passed out a word. It's a middling bad
farm place--rocks and berry bushes. I wouldn't reckon much would be
content there.”
David walked out through the open doorway and stood on the small
covered portico, that with a bench on each side, hung to the face of
the dwelling. The stars were brightening in the sky above the confining
mountain walls; there was a tremendous shrilling of frogs; the faint
clamor of a sheep bell. He was absolutely, irresponsibly happy. He
wished the time would hurry when he'd be big and strong like Allen, and
get out into the absorbing stir of the world.