Lescott had come to the mountains anticipating a visit of two weeks.
His accident had resolved him to shorten it to the nearest day upon
which he felt capable of making the trip out to the railroad. Yet, June
had ended; July had burned the slopes from emerald to russet-green;
August had brought purple tops to the ironweed, and still he found
himself lingering. And this was true although he recognized a growing
sentiment of disapproval for himself. He knew indubitably that he stood
charged with the offense for which Socrates was invited to drink the
hemlock: "corrupting the morals of the youth, and teaching strange
gods." Feeling the virtue of his teaching, he was unwilling as Socrates
to abandon the field. In Samson he thought he recognized twin gifts: a
spark of a genius too rare to be allowed to flicker out, and a
potentiality for constructive work among his own people, which needed
for its perfecting only education and experience. Having aroused a
soul's restiveness in the boy, he felt a direct responsibility for it
and him, to which he added a deep personal regard. Though the kinsmen
looked upon him as an undesirable citizen, bringing teachings which
they despised, the hospitality of old Spicer South continued unbroken
and a guarantee of security on Misery.
"Samson," he suggested one day when they were alone, "I want you to
come East. You say that gun is your tool, and that each man must stick
to his own. You are in part right, in part wrong. A mail uses any tool
better for understanding other tools. You have the right to use your
brains and talents to the full."
The boy's face was somber in the intensity of his mental struggle, and
his answer had that sullen ring which was not really sullenness at all,
but self-repression.
"I reckon a feller's biggest right is to stand by his kinfolks. Unc'
Spicer's gittin' old. He's done been good ter me. He needs me here."
"I appreciate that. He will be older later. You can go now, and come
back to him when he needs you more. If what I urged meant disloyalty to
your people, I would cut out my tongue before I argued for it. You must
believe me in that. I want you to be in the fullest sense your people's
leader. I want you to be not only their Samson--but their Moses."
The boy looked up and nodded. The mountaineer is not given to
demonstration. He rarely shakes hands, and he does not indulge in
superlatives of affection. He loved and admired this man from the
outside world, who seemed to him to epitomize wisdom, but his code did
not permit him to say so.
"I reckon ye aims ter be friendly, all right," was his conservative
response.
The painter went on earnestly:
"I realize that I am urging things of which your people disapprove,
but it is only because they misunderstand that they do disapprove. They
are too close, Samson, to see the purple that mountains have when they
are far away. I want you to go where you can see the purple. If you are
the sort of man I think, you won't be beguiled. You won't lose your
loyalty. You won't be ashamed of your people."
"I reckon I wouldn't be ashamed," said the youth. "I reckon there
hain't no better folks nowhar."
"I'm sure of it. There are going to be sweeping changes in these
mountains. Conditions here have stood as immutably changeless as the
hills themselves for a hundred years. That day is at its twilight. I
tell you, I know what I'm talking about. The State of Kentucky is
looking this way. The State must develop, and it is here alone that it
can develop. In the Bluegrass, the possibilities for change are
exhausted. Their fields lie fallow, their woodlands are being stripped.
Tobacco has tainted the land. It has shouldered out the timber, and is
turning forest to prairie. A land of fertile loam is vying with cheap
soil that can send almost equal crops to market. There is no more
timber to be cut, and when the timber goes the climate changes. In
these hills lie the sleeping sources of wealth. Here are virgin forests
and almost inexhaustible coal veins. Capital is turning from an orange
squeezed dry, and casting about for fresher food. Capital has seen your
hills. Capital is inevitable, relentless, omnipotent. Where it comes,
it makes its laws. Conditions that have existed undisturbed will
vanish. The law of the feud, which militia and courts have not been
able to abate, will vanish before Capital's breath like the mists when
the sun strikes them. Unless you learn to ride the waves which will
presently sweep over your country, you and your people will go under.
You may not realize it, but that is true. It is written."
The boy had listened intently, but at the end he smiled, and in his
expression was something of the soldier who scents battle, not without
welcome.
"I reckon if these here fellers air a-comin' up here ter run things,
an' drownd out my folks, hit's a right good reason fer me ter stay here
--an' holp my folks."
"By staying here, you can't help them. It won't be work for guns, but
for brains. By going away and coming back armed with knowledge, you can
save them. You will know how to play the game."
"I reckon they won't git our land, ner our timber, ner our coal,
without we wants ter sell hit. I reckon ef they tries thet, guns will
come in handy. Things has stood here like they is now, fer a hundred
years. I reckon we kin keep 'em that-away fer a spell longer." But it
was evident that Samson was arguing against his own belief; that he was
trying to bolster up his resolution and impeached loyalty, and that at
heart he was sick to be up and going to a world which did not despise
"eddication." After a little, he waved his hand vaguely toward "down
below."
"Ef I went down thar," he questioned suddenly and irrelevantly, "would
I hev' ter cut my ha'r?"
"My dear boy," laughed Lescott, "I can introduce you in New York
studios to many distinguished gentlemen who would feel that their heads
had been shorn if they let their locks get as short as yours. In New
York, you might stroll along Broadway garbed in turban and a
_burnouse_ without greatly exciting anybody. I think my own hair
is as long as yours."
"Because," doggedly declared the mountaineer, "I wouldn't allow nobody
ter make me cut my ha'r."
"Why?" questioned Lescott, amused at the stubborn inflection.
"I don't hardly know why--" He paused, then admitted with a glare as
though defying criticism: "Sally likes hit that-away--an' I won't let
nobody dictate ter me, that's all."
The leaven was working, and one night Samson announced to his Uncle
from the doorstep that he was "studyin' erbout goin' away fer a spell,
an' seein' the world."
The old man laid down his pipe. He cast a reproachful glance at the
painter, which said clearly, though without words:
"I have opened my home to you and offered you what I had, yet in my
old age you take away my mainstay." For a time, he sat silent, but his
shoulders hunched forward with a sag which they had not held a moment
before. His seamed face appeared to age visibly and in the moment. He
ran one bony hand through his gray mane of hair.
"I 'lowed you was a-studyin' erbout thet, Samson," he said, at last.
"I've done ther best fer ye I knowed. I kinder 'lowed thet from now on
ye'd do the same fer me. I'm gittin' along in years right smart...."
"Uncle Spicer," interrupted the boy, "I reckon ye knows thet any time
ye needed me I'd come back."
The old man's face hardened.
"Ef ye goes," he said, almost sharply, "I won't never send fer ye. Any
time ye ever wants ter come back, ye knows ther way. Thar'll be room
an' victuals fer ye hyar."
"I reckon I mout be a heap more useful ef I knowed more."
"I've heered fellers say that afore. Hit hain't never turned out thet
way with them what has left the mountings. Mebby they gets more useful,
but they don't git useful ter us. Either they don't come back at all,
or mebby they comes back full of newfangled notions--an' ashamed of
their kinfoiks. Thet's the way, I've noticed, hit gen'ally turns out."
Samson scorned to deny that such might be the case with him, and was
silent. After a time, the old man went on again in a weary voice, as he
bent down to loosen his brogans and kick them noisily off on to the
floor:
"The Souths hev done looked to ye a good deal, Samson. They 'lowed
they could depend on ye. Ye hain't quite twenty-one yet, an' I reckon I
could refuse ter let ye sell yer prop'ty. But thar hain't no use tryin'
ter hold a feller when he wants ter quit. Ye don't 'low ter go right
away, do ye?"
"I hain't plumb made up my mind ter go at all," said the boy,
shamefacedly. "But, ef I does go, I hain't a-goin' yit. I hain't spoke
ter nobody but you about hit yit."
Lescott felt reluctant to meet his host's eyes at breakfast the next
morning, dreading their reproach, but, if Spicer South harbored
resentment, he meant to conceal it, after the stoic's code. There was
no hinted constraint of cordiality. Lescott felt, however, that in
Samson's mind was working the leaven of that unspoken accusation of
disloyalty. He resolved to make a final play, and seek to enlist Sally
in his cause. If Sally's hero-worship could be made to take the form of
ambition for Samson, she might be brought to relinquish him for a time,
and urge his going that he might return strengthened. Yet, Sally's
devotion was so instinctive and so artless that it would take
compelling argument to convince her of any need of change. It was
Samson as he was whom she adored. Any alteration was to be distrusted.
Still, Lescott set out one afternoon on his doubtful mission. He was
more versed in mountain ways than he had been. His own ears could now
distinguish between the bell that hung at the neck of Sally's brindle
heifer and those of old Spicer's cows. He went down to the creek at the
hour when he knew Sally, also, would be making her way thither with her
milk-pail, and intercepted her coming. As she approached, she was
singing, and the man watched her from the distance. He was a landscape
painter and not a master of _genre_ or portrait. Yet, he wished
that he might, before going, paint Sally. She was really, after all, a
part of the landscape, as much a thing of nature and the hills as the
hollyhocks that had come along the picket-fences. She swayed as
gracefully and thoughtlessly to her movements as do strong and pliant
stems under the breeze's kiss. Artfulness she had not; nor has the
flower: only the joy and fragrance of a brief bloom. It was that
thought which just now struck the painter most forcibly. It was
shameful that this girl and boy should go on to the hard and unlighted
life that inevitably awaited them, if neither had the opportunity of
development. She would be at forty a later edition of the Widow Miller.
He had seen the widow. Sally's charm must be as ephemeral under the
life of illiterate drudgery and perennial child-bearing as her mother's
had been. Her shoulders, now so gloriously straight and strong, would
sag, and her bosom shrink, and her face harden and take on that drawn
misery of constant anxiety. But, if Samson went and came back with some
conception of cherishing his wife--yes, the effort was worth making.
Yet, as the girl came down the slope, gaily singing a very melancholy
song, the painter broke off in his reflections, and his thoughts
veered. If Samson left, would he ever return? Might not the old man
after all be right? When he had seen other women and tasted other
allurements would he, like Ulysses, still hold his barren Ithaca above
the gilded invitation of Calypso? History has only one Ulysses. Sally's
voice was lilting like a bird's as she walked happily. The song was one
of those old ballads that have been held intact since the stock learned
to sing them in the heather of the Scotch highlands before there was an
America.
"'She's pizened me, mother, make my bed soon,
Fer I'm sick at my heart and I fain would lay doon.'"
The man rose and went to meet her.
"Miss Sally," he began, uncertainly, "I want to talk to you."
She was always very grave and diffident with Lescott. He was a strange
new type to her, and, though she had begun with a predilection in his
favor, she had since then come to hold him in adverse prejudice. Before
his arrival, Samson had been all hers. She had not missed in her lover
the gallantries that she and her women had never known. At evening,
when the supper dishes were washed and she sat in the honeysuckle
fragrance of the young night with the whippoorwills calling, she had
been accustomed to hear a particular whippoorwill-note call, much like
the real ones, yet distinct to her waiting ears. She was wont to rise
and go to the stile to meet him. She had known that every day she
would, seemingly by chance, meet Samson somewhere along the creek, or
on the big bowlder at the rift, or hoeing on the sloping cornfield.
These things had been enough. But, of late, his interests had been
divided. This painter had claimed many of his hours and many of his
thoughts. There was in her heart an unconfessed jealousy of the
foreigner. Now, she scrutinized him solemnly, and nodded.
"Won't you sit down?" he invited, and the girl dropped cross-legged on
a mossy rock, and waited. To-day, she wore a blue print dress, instead
of the red one. It was always a matter of amazement to the man that in
such an environment she was not only wildly beautiful, but invariably
the pink of neatness. She could climb a tree or a mountain, or emerge
from a sweltering blackberry patch, seemingly as fresh and unruffled as
she had been at the start. The man stood uncomfortably looking at her,
and was momentarily at a loss for words with which to commence.
"What was ye a-goin' ter tell me?" she asked.
"Miss Sally," he began, "I've discovered something about Samson."
Her blue eyes flashed ominously.
"Ye can't tell me nothin' 'bout Samson," she declared, "withouten
hit's somethin' nice."
"It's something very nice," the man reassured her.
"Then, ye needn't tell me, because I already knows hit," came her
prompt and confident announcement.
Lescott shook his head, dubiously.
"Samson is a genius," he said.
"What's thet?"
"He has great gifts--great abilities to become a figure in the world."
She nodded her head, in prompt and full corroboration.
"I reckon Samson'll be the biggest man in the mountings some day."
"He ought to be more than that."
Suspicion at once cast a cloud across the violet serenity of her eyes.
"What does ye mean?" she demanded.
"I mean"--the painter paused a moment, and then said bluntly--"I mean
that I want to take him back with me to New York."
The girl sprang to her feet with her chin defiantly high and her brown
hands clenched into tight little fists. Her bosom heaved convulsively,
and her eyes blazed through tears of anger. Her face was pale.
"Ye hain't!" she cried, in a paroxysm of fear and wrath. "Ye hain't a-
goin' ter do no sich--no sich of a damn thing!" She stamped her foot,
and her whole girlish body, drawn into rigid uprightness, was a-quiver
with the incarnate spirit of the woman defending her home and
institutions. For a moment after that, she could not speak, but her
determined eyes blazed a declaration of war. It was as though he had
posed her as the Spirit of the Cumberlands.
He waited until she should be calmer. It was useless to attempt
stemming her momentary torrent of rage. It was like one of the sudden
and magnificent tempests that often swept these hills, a brief visit of
the furies. One must seek shelter and wait. It would end as suddenly as
it had come. At last, he spoke, very softly.
"You don't understand me, Miss Sally. I'm not trying to take Samson
away from you. If a man should lose a girl like you, he couldn't gain
enough in the world to make up for it. All I want is that he shall have
the chance to make the best of his life."
"I reckon Samson don't need no fotched-on help ter make folks
acknowledge him."
"Every man needs his chance. He can be a great painter--but that's the
least part of it. He can come back equipped for anything that life
offers. Here, he is wasted."
"Ye mean"--she put the question with a hurt quaver in her voice--"ye
mean we all hain't good enough fer Samson?"
"No. I only mean that Samson wants to grow--and he needs space and new
scenes in which to grow. I want to take him where he can see more of
the world--not only a little section of the world. Surely, you are not
distrustful of Samson's loyalty? I want him to go with me for a while,
and see life."
"Don't ye say hit!" The defiance in her voice was being pathetically
tangled up with the tears. She was speaking in a transport of grief.
"Don't ye say hit. Take anybody else--take 'em all down thar, but leave
us Samson. We needs him hyar. We've jest got ter have Samson hyar."
She faced him still with quivering lips, but in another moment, with a
sudden sob, she dropped to the rock, and buried her face in her crossed
arms. Her slender body shook under a harrowing convulsion of
unhappiness. Lescott felt as though he had struck her; as though he had
ruthlessly blighted the irresponsible joyousness which had a few
minutes before sung from her lips with the blitheness of a mocking-
bird. He went over and softly laid a hand on her shoulder.
"Miss Sally--" he began.
She suddenly turned on him a tear-stained, infuriated face, stormy
with blazing eyes and wet cheeks and trembling lips.
"Don't touch me," she cried; "don't ye dare ter touch me! I hain't
nothin' but a gal--but I reckon I could 'most tear ye ter pieces. Ye're
jest a pizen snake, anyhow!" Then, she pointed a tremulous finger off
up the road. "Git away from hyar," she commanded. "I don't never want
ter see ye again. Ye're tryin' ter steal everything I loves. Git away,
I tells ye!--git away--begone!"
"Think it over," urged Lescott, quietly. "See if your heart doesn't
say I am Samson's friend--and yours." He turned, and began making his
way over the rocks; but, before he had gone far, he sat down to reflect
upon the situation. Certainly, he was not augmenting his popularity. A
half-hour later, he heard a rustle, and, turning, saw Sally standing
not far off. She was hesitating at the edge of the underbrush, and
Lescott read in her eyes the effort it was costing her to come forward
and apologize. Her cheeks were still pale and her eyes wet, but the
tempest of her anger had spent itself, and in the girl who stood
penitently, one hand nervously clutching a branch of rhododendron, one
foot twisting in the moss, Lescott was seeing an altogether new Sally.
There was a renunciation in her eyes that in contrast with the child-
like curve of her lips, and slim girlishness of her figure, seemed
entirely pathetic.
As she stood there, trying to come forward with a pitiful effort at
composure and a twisted smile, Lescott wanted to go and meet her. But
he knew her shyness, and realized that the kindest thing would be to
pretend that he had not seen her at all. So, he covertly watched her,
while he assumed to sit in moody unconsciousness of her nearness.
Little by little, and step by step, she edged over to him, halting
often and looking about with the impulse to slip out of sight, but
always bracing herself and drawing a little nearer. Finally, he knew
that she was standing almost directly over him, and yet it was a moment
or two more before her voice, sweetly penitent, announced her arrival.
"I reckon--I reckon I've got ter ask yore pardon," she said, slowly
and with labored utterance. He looked up to see her standing with her
head drooping and her fingers nervously pulling a flower to pieces.
"I reckon I hain't a plumb fool. I knows thet Samson's got a right ter
eddication. Anyhow, I knows he wants hit."
"Education," said the man, "isn't going to change Samson, except to
make him finer than he is--and more capable."
She shook her head. "I hain't got no eddication," she answered. "Hit's
a-goin' ter make him too good fer me. I reckon hit's a-goin' ter jest
about kill me.... Ye hain't never seed these here mountings in the
winter time, when thar hain't nothin' green, an' thar hain't no birds
a-singin', an' thar hain't nothin' but rain an' snow an' fog an' misery.
They're a-goin' ter be like thet all the time fer me, atter Samson's
gone away." She choked back something like a sob before she went on.
"Yes, stranger, hit's a-goin' ter pretty nigh kill me, but--" Her lips
twisted themselves into the pathetic smile again, and her chin came
stiffly up. "But," she added, determinedly, "thet don't make no
difference, nohow."