With winter came desolation. The sumac no longer flared vermilion and
the flaming torches of the maples were quenched.
Roads were quagmires where travellers slipped and laboured through
viscid mud and over icy fords. The hills were scowling ranks of slate
gray. A tarnished sun paraded murky skies from its pallid dawn to its
setting in a bed of inflamed and angry clouds.
And as the sullen spirit of winter came to this isolation, another
spirit came with it--equally grim.
The campaign had progressed with torrential bitterness to its inevitable
culmination. Exhausted invective had, like a jaded thing, sought greater
lengths--when already the superlative was reached. Each side shrieked
loud and blatant warnings of an attempt at rape upon the ballot. There
was irresponsible talk of the freeman's final recourse to arms and of
blood-letting in the name of liberty. At last had come the day of
election itself with howls of fraud and claims of victory ringing from
both camps: then a lull, like that in which two bleeding and exhausted
dogs draw off from the clamp of locked jaws to pant at each other with
weltering fangs and blood-shot eyes.
As Saul Fulton had predicted, the gaze of the State turned anxiously to
the hills. There, remote and slow to give its election returns, lay the
Eleventh Congressional District with all its counties solidly
Republican. Already the margin was recognized as narrow enough, perhaps,
to hinge on the "Bloody Eleventh." While the State waited, the Democrats
asseverated that the "Bloody Eleventh" was marking time, awaiting a
response to the query it had wired to its state headquarters:
"How much do you need?"
Those were days of tension and rumblings in the craters, and one day the
rumour was born that the vote of Marlin County was to be counted out.
In an hour after that whisper mysteriously originated, thirty horsemen
were riding faster than road conditions warranted, by every crooked
creek-bed and trail that debouched from the county seat. They made light
of quicksand and flooded ford. They laughed at shelving precipice
brinks. Each of them shouted inflammatory words at every cabin and
dwelling house along his way; each of them kindled signal fires atop the
ridges, and when the first pallid light of dawn crept into the fog reek
of the hillsides an army was on the march to Marlin Town.
That evening, in a grimly beleaguered court house, the commissioners
certified the ballots as cast, and the cloud of black hats melted as
quietly as it had formed.
In the state courts, on points of legal technicality, with mandamus and
injunction, the fight went on bitterly and slowly. The narrow margin
fluctuated: the outcome wavered.
When Saul Fulton returned to his birthplace in December, his face was
sinister with forebodings. But his object in coming was not ostensibly
political. He meant to drive down, from the creeks and valleys of Marlin
County, a herd of cattle collected from scattered sources for marketing
in the bluegrass. It was an undertaking that a man could hardly manage
single handed, and since a boy would work for small wages he offered to
make Boone his assistant. To Boone, who had never seen a metalled road,
it meant adventuring forth into the world of his dreams.
He would see the theatre where this stupendous political war was being
waged--he would be only a few miles from the state capitol itself, where
these two men, each of whom called himself the Governor of Kentucky,
pulled the wires, directed the forces and shifted the pawns.
Victor McCalloway smiled when Boone told him, in a voice shaken with
emotion, that the day had come when he could go out and see the world.
Boone and Saul slept, that night, in a mining town with the glare of
coke furnaces biting red holes through the surrounding blackness of the
ridges.
To Boone Wellver, this journey was as full of mystifying and alluringly
colourful events as a mandarin's cloak is crusted with the richness of
embroidery. Save for his ingrained sense of a man's obligation to
maintain always an incurious dignity, he would have looked through
widened eyes of amazement from the first miles of his travelling. When
the broken raggedness of peaks began to flatten toward the billowing
bluegrass, his wonder grew. There at home the world stood erect and
lofty. Here it seemed to lie prone. The very air tasted flat in his
nostrils and, missing the screens of forested peaks, he felt a painful
want of privacy--like a turtle deprived of its shell, or a man suddenly
stripped naked.
Upon his ears a thousand sounds seemed to beat in tumult--and
dissonance. Men no longer walked with a soundless footfall, or spoke in
lowered voices.
In the county seat to which they brought their gaunt cattle, his
bewilderment mounted almost to vertigo, for about the court house square
were congregated men and beasts--all unfamiliar to the standards of his
experience.
The native beef here was fat, corn-fed stock, and the hogs were rounder
and squatter than the mast-nourished razor-backs he had known at home.
The men, too, who bought and sold them, were fuller nourished and fuller
voiced. It was as if they never whispered and had never had to talk in
soft caution. Upon himself from time to time he felt amused glances, as
though he, like his bony steers, stood branded to the eye with the
ineradicable mark of something strayed in from a land of poverty.
But when eventually the cattle had been sold, Saul took him on to the
capitol of the State, and there, on the twelfth of December, he stood,
with a heart that hammered his ribs, in a great crowd before the state
house and gazed up at the platform upon which the choice of his own
people was being inaugurated as Governor.
Boone was dazzled by the gold-laced uniforms of all the colonels on the
retiring executive's staff, and as he turned away, in the amber light of
the winter afternoon, his soul was all but satiated with the heady
intoxication of full living.
On a brilliantly frosted morning, when the weed stalks by the roadside
were crystal-rimmed, and the sky was an illimitable arch of blue
sparkle, he trudged at Saul's side along a white turnpike between smooth
stone walls and well-kept fences. Yet for all his enthusiasm of
admiration, a new sense of misgiving and vague trouble began to settle
heavily at his heart.
No one, along the way, halted to "meet an' make their manners."
Vehicles, drawn by horses that lifted their hocks and knees high, passed
swiftly and without greeting. The threadbare poorness of his clothes, a
thing of which he had never before been conscious, now uncomfortably
obtruded itself upon realization. At home, where every man was poor,
there had been no sense of inferiority, but here was a regime of
disquieting contrasts.
When they at last turned through a gate with stone pillars, he caught
sight of a long maple and oak-flanked avenue, and at its end a great
brick house. Against the age-tempered facade stood out the trim of white
paint and the dignity of tall, fluted columns. He marvelled that Saul
Fulton had been able in so short a time to buy himself such a palace.
But while he still mulled over his wonderment in silence, Saul led him
by a detour around the mansion and its ivory-white out-buildings, and
continued through back pastures and fields, disfigured by black and
sharp tobacco stubble. Boone followed past fodder-racks and pig-sties,
until they brought up at a square, two-roomed house with blank,
unpainted walls, set in a small yard as barren as those of the hills,
but unrelieved by any background of laurel or forest. About this
untempered starkness of habitation stretched empty fields, snow-patched
and desolate, and the boy's face dropped as he heard his kinsman's
announcement, "This hyar's whar I dwells at."
"Who--who dwells over yon at t'other house?" came Boone's rather timid
query. "Ther huge brick one, with them big white poles runnin' up in
front."
Saul laughed with a rasping note in his voice, "Hit b'longs ter Colonel
Tom Wallifarro, ther lawyer, but he don't dwell thar hisself, save only
now an' then."
Fulton paused, and his face took on the unpleasant churlishness of class
hatred. "Ther whole kit and kaboodle of 'em will be hyar soon, though.
They all comes back fer Christmas, an' holds dancin' parties, and
carousin's, damn 'em!"
A seriously puzzled expression clouded the boy's eyes, and he asked
simply, "Hain't ye friendly with 'em, Saul?"
"No," was the short rejoinder, "I hain't friendly with no rich lowlander
that holds scorn fer an honest man jest because he's poor."
On subsequent occasions when Boone passed the "great house" it seemed
almost as quiet as though it were totally untenanted, but with the
approach of Christmas it awoke from its sleep of inactivity.
The young mountaineer was trudging along one day through a gracious
woodland, which even, in the starkness of winter, hinted at the nobility
that summer leafage must give to its parklike spaces. His way carried
him close to the paddocks flanking the ample barns, and he could see
that the house windows were ruddy from inner hearth fires, and decked
with holly wreaths.
In the paddocks themselves were a dozen persons, all opulent of seeming,
and what interested the passer-by, even more than the people, were the
high-headed, gingerly stepping horses that were being led out by negro
boys for their inspection.
In the group Boone recognized the man whom Asa had identified that day
in Marlin as Mr. Masters, a "mine boss," and the gentleman who had come
with him out of the mountain hotel. The boy surmised that this latter
must be Colonel Tom Wallifarro himself, the owner of all these acres.
There was a small girl too, whom Masters called "daughter." Boone had
for girls the fine disdain of his age, and this one he guessed to be
some four or five years younger than himself. But she was unlike any
other he had ever seen, and it puzzled him that so much attention should
be squandered on a "gal-child," though he acknowledged to himself--"but
she's plum purty." He went by with a casual glance and a high chin, but
in his brain whirled many puzzling thoughts, springing from a first
glimpse of wealth.