Happy Spradling, whose father had overseen the raising of Victor
McCalloway's house, was only two years younger than Boone. When he had
gone away, a lad of seventeen, he had been untroubled by thoughts of
girls, and she had certainly wasted no meditation upon him.
But the Boone who came back was not quite the same boy who had gone
away. He was still roughly dressed, judged by exacting standards, but
corduroy had supplanted his old jeans, and he returned with a much
developed figure and an improved bearing.
Now one afternoon Happy Spradling stood with a pail, by a
"spring-branch" of crystal water, as Boone came by and halted. She, too,
had been to one of those settlement schools that were just beginning to
introduce new standards in the hills, and her homecoming to unrelieved
crudities was not an unmixed pleasure. Certain it is that the slim girl
in her calico gown was blessed with a fresh and vigorous beauty. Her
sloe-brown eyes were heavy lashed, and her skin was blossom clear. Dark
hair crowned her well-poised head in heavy masses--and the boy was
surprised because he had not remembered her as so lovely.
"Ye look right sensibly like a picture outen ther Bible of Rebekkah at
the well," he banteringly announced, and the girl flushed.
"Ye ain't quite so uncurried of guise as ye used to be your own self,
Boone," she generously acceded, and they both laughed.
They talked on for a while, and before Boone started away the girl
invited shyly, with lids that drooped, "Come over sometime, Boone, an'
tell me all about the college."
But it happened that the next day he went, with a note from McCalloway,
to the home of Larry Masters, the "mine boss," at the edge of Marlin
Town, and there fate ambushed him in the person of the girl who had
asked him to dance at the Christmas party.
Anne Masters came to the door in response to the boy's knock, and when
he had seen her he stood hesitant with his eyes fixed upon her until her
cheeks flushed, while he forgot the note he had brought for her father.
Anne herself did not recognize him at first, for Boone stood close to
six feet now, and although he would always be, in a fashion, careless of
dress, he would never again be the sloven, as were the kinsmen about
him. His corduroy breeches, flannel shirt and boots that laced halfway
up the calf, all seemed a part of himself, like a falcon's plumage. But
what the girl noticed first, since she was both young and
impressionable, was the crisp curl of his red brown hair and the direct
fearlessness of his sky-blue eyes.
"I reckon ye don't remember me," he hazarded, by way of introduction;
and she shook her head.
"Have I seen you before?" she inquired, and Boone found it difficult to
talk to her because he was so busy looking at her. There had been girls
as well as boys at the state university, but among them had been none
like Anne Masters. Boone was to learn from a broader experience that
there were few like her--anywhere. Even now when she was a bud not yet
blossomed, she had that indescribable fairy god-mother's gift to which
no analyst can fit a formula--the charm which lays its spell upon others
and the gift of individuality.
"You've seed me--seen me, I mean--before. But it's right natcher'l fer
ye to fergit it, because it was a long spell back. You gave me the first
Christmas gift I ever got in my life--a piece of plum cake. Do you
remember me now?"
The light of recollection broke over her face, illuminating it--and Anne
Masters had those eyes that actually sparkle within--the dancing eyes
that are much rarer than the phrase.
"Of course I remember you! I've thought about you--lots. I've always
called you the 'fruit-cake boy.'" Suddenly her laugh rippled out in a
lilting merriment. "Don't you remember when you challenged Morgan with
the fencing foils?"
"Oh," exclaimed Boone, flushing, "I'd plumb disremembered that."
It was June, with days of diamond weather and the bloom still upon wild
rose and rhododendron. Anne looked away beyond the boy's head to the
tallest crest of the many that ringed the town. Suddenly she demanded:
"Have you ever been up there--at the tip-top of that mountain?"
He nodded his head, and she at once commanded: "I want you to show me
the way up there--I want to go up and climb to the top of that tree that
you can see from here, the one that stands up higher than all the
others."
Boone shook his head soberly. "It's a right hazardous undertakin' fer
anybody thet isn't used to scalin' clifts," he objected. "Why do you
want to go up there to the top of old Slag-face?"
Her expression had clouded to autocratic displeasure at his failure of
immediate assent, but only for an instant; then her eyes altered again
from coercive frown to irresistible smile.
"Why?" she exclaimed. "Why does a bird want to fly? Up there at the top
of that tree you'd be almost in the sky. You'd be looking down on
everything but the clouds themselves. When I was a little girl--" she
announced suddenly, "they had a hard time persuading me that I
_couldn't_ fly. They had to keep watching me, because I'd climb up on
things and try to fly down."
"Have you plumb outgrown that idee?" he inquired, somewhat drily.
"Because I'm not cravin' to help you fly offen that mountain top."
Her laugh rippled out like bird notes as she replied with large scorn of
fourteen years: "_That_ was when I was a child."
After a moment she added appealingly: "The last time I saw you, General
Prince said that when I came to these hills, you'd be 'charitable' to
me."
"I aims to be," he asserted stoutly, "but it wouldn't skeercely be
charitable to be the cause of your breakin' an arm or"--he paused an
instant before adding with sedateness--"or a limb."
* * * * *
But Anne had her way. She always had her way, and some days later they
looked down on an outspread world from the crest of Slag-face. Boone had
not been long in discovering that this slender girl was driven by a
dauntless spirit that made of physical courage a positive fetish, so he
had pretended weariness himself from time to time and demanded a
breathing spell.
The sky overhead was splendidly soft and blue, broken by tumbling cloud
masses, which, it seemed, one could almost reach out and touch.
From the foreground where they sat flushed and resting, with moss and
rock and woodland about them, the prospect went off into distances where
mountain shadows fell across valleys, and other ridges were ranked row
on row. Still more remote was the vagueness of the horizon whose misty
violet merged with the robin's-egg blue of the sky.
The girl stood, leaning against the tree, and her violet eyes were full
of imaginative light.
Through lids half closed the boy looked at her. She was an exponent of
that world of which he had dreamed. He thought of the hall where he had
first seen her; of the silk and broadcloth, of the mahogany and silver;
of the whole setting which was home to her, and to him a place into
which he had come as a trespasser in homespun.
Into the tempering of the crude ore came a new element. Asa Gregory had
been the fire, and so far Victor McCalloway had been the water. Now,
came the third factor of life's process--the oil; for there and then on
the hilltop he had fallen in love, and it was not until he was riding
home in the starlight that he stopped to consider the chances of
disaster.
It had been a wonderful day, accepted without questioning; but now he
drew his horse suddenly to a stop and took his hat from his head. For a
time he sat there in his saddle, as unmoving as though he and the beast
he rode were inanimate parts of an equestrian group; the statue of a
pioneer lad rough-mounted.
His face stiffened painfully, and he licked his lips. Finally he said to
the dark woods where the whippoorwills were calling and the fireflies
flickering:
"Great God! I mout jest as well fall in love with a star up thar in
heaven." Something like a groan escaped him, and after a while he
gathered up his reins. Again he spoke, but in a dull voice:
"I'll quit afore I get in too far. Tomorrow night I'll go over thar and
'set up' with Happy Spradling."
He remembered how they had laughed at him at college when, quite
naturally, he had used that term, "settin' up with a gal," to express
the idea of courtship. Now he laughed himself, but bitterly. That was
what his own people called it, and, after all, it was better to remember
that he was of his own people.
The next night Boone kept his word. He brushed his clothes and did what
he could with the unruly crispness of his hair, and then he set out for
the log house of Cyrus Spradling on the headwaters of Snag Ridge.
He was not going on this, his first formal visit to a girl, with such
leaping pulses as might have been expected. He was following out an
almost grim determination quite devoid of eagerness. Having lost his
heart to royalty, he was now bent on forcing himself back into a society
where he had a right to be.
He had not slept much that night after the excursion to Slag-face, and
what sleep he had had, had been troubled by dreams in which Anne had
stood smiling down on him from the mountain top, while he looked up from
a deep gorge where the shadows lay black. He was driven by a mad sense
of necessity to climb up and stand beside her--but always he slid back,
or fell from narrow ledges, until he was bruised, bleeding--and
unsuccessful. He woke up panting, and afterward dreamed the same thing
over. And every time he fell he found Happy waiting in the gorge and
saying, "Why don't ye stay here with me? You don't have to climb after
me--and I'm a right pretty gal." Always too he answered, in the words
that Anne had used, "Why do I want to go up there? Up there you'd be
looking down on everything but the clouds themselves"--and he would
begin climbing once more, clutching with raw fingers upon frail and
slippery supports.
All day he had argued with himself, and being young and unversed in such
problems he told himself that the only way to halt this runaway thing
within himself that led to no hope was to set his heart upon something
which lay in reach. His inexperience told him that Happy liked him; that
she was a nice girl trying to better her condition in life as he was
himself trying, and he meant to commandeer his own heart and lay it at
her feet. It was, of course, an absurd and impossible thing to
undertake, but this he must learn for himself.
As Boone reached the house, old man Spradling sat on his porch in the
twilight with his cob pipe between his teeth. Cyrus remained what his
"fore-parents" had been before him, a rough-hewn man of undeviating
honesty and of an innate kindliness that showed out only in deeds and
not at all in demonstrativeness.
Just now he wore an expression of countenance that was somewhat glum as
he watched the lingering afterglow which edged the western crests of the
"Kaintuck' Ridges" with pale amber.
"Set ye a cheer, Booney," he invited, with a brief nod. "I reckon ye
didn't skeercely fare over hyar ter set an' talk with me, but ther gal
hain't quite through holpin' her mammy with the dish-washin' yit--an' I
wants ter put some questions ter ye afore she comes out."
The lad drew a hickory-withed chair forward and sat down, laying his hat
on the floor at his feet.
"Ye've done been off ter college, son," began old Cyrus reflectively, as
he bit on his pipe stem and judicially nodded his head.
"I've always countenanced book-lore myself, even when folks hes faulted
me fer hit. I've contended thet ther times change an' what was good
enough fer ther parents hain't, of needcessity, good enough fer ther
young ones. 'Peared like, ter me, a body kinderly hes a better chanst
ter be godly ef he hain't benighted."
"I reckon there ain't no two ways about that proposition," agreed the
boy eagerly. "Hit just stands ter reason."
"An yit, hyar latterly," suggested the mountaineer dubiously, "I've done
commenced ter misdoubt ef I've been right, atter all. Thet's what I
wanted ter question ye about. My woman an' me, we sent Happy off ter
thet new school in Leslie--an' since she's come home I misdoubts ef her
name fits her es well es hit did afore she went over thar. She used ter
sing like a bird all day--an' now she don't."
"I don't see how knowin' something can make a body unhappy," protested
Boone.
Cyrus Spradling studied him with a keen, but not unkindly, fixedness of
gaze.
"Ye don't, don't ye? Wa'al, let me norrate ye a leetle parable. Suppose
you an' me hes done been pore folks livin' in a small dwellin'-house.
We've done been plum content, because we hain't never knowed nothing
better. But suppose one of us goes a'visitin' ter rich kin-folks--an'
t'other one stays home." He paused there to rekindle his pipe, and the
voice of his resumed "parable" was troubled.
"Ther one thet's been away hes done took up notions of wealth that he
kain't nuver hope ter satisfy. The mean cabin seems a heap meaner when
he comes back ter hit--but ther other pore damn fool--he's still happy
an' contented because he don't know no better."
"I reckon," laughed the young visitor, "if the feller that had gone away
was anything but the disablest body in the world, he'd set about
improving the house he had to dwell in."
"I hope ter God ye're right, Booney. Hit's been a mighty sober thing fer
me ter ponder over, though--whether I was helpin' my gal or hurtin'
her."
Boone was smitten with a sense of guilt. He felt that he ought to make
confession that he had come here tonight because he had already
recognized a new flame in his heart, and a flame which the voice of
sanity and wisdom told him he must quench: that he was here because
discontent had driven him. But his voice was firm as he made some
commonplace reply, and Cyrus nodded his satisfaction. "Mebby if thar's a
few boys like thet, growin' up hyarabouts, ther few gals thet gits
larnin' won't be foredoomed ter lead lonesome lives, atter all."
The moonlight was beginning to convert the dulness of twilight into a
nocturne of soft and tempered beauty.
Boone felt suddenly appalled, as if the father had given him parental
recognition and approval, and laid upon him an obligation. He wanted to
rise and frame some excuse for immediate flight, but it was of course
too late for that.
The evening star came up over the dark contours of the ridge. It shone
soft and lustrous in the sky, where other stars would soon add their
myriad points of light, but however many others might fill the heavens
there would still be only one evening star--and Boone, as he waited for
one girl, fell to thinking of the other with whom he had climbed
Slag-face yesterday; the girl who had set fire to his young imagination.
Then Happy came out of the door and soon after the father went in.
"Thar hain't no place fer an ign'rant old feller like me, out hyar
amongst ther young an' wise," he chuckled as he left them. "I reckon ye
aims ter talk algebry an' sich-like."
The mountains were great upward sweeps of velvet darkness. Down in the
slopes, where the moonlight fell, was a bath of silver and shadows, not
dead and inky but blue and living, but Happy Spradling, keyed to the
emotional influences of that June evening, found herself labouring with
a distrait and unresponsive visitor, who made an early excuse for
departure.