The first peep of daylight through the studio skylight found the
mountain boy awake. Before the daylight came he had seen the stars
through its panes. Lescott's servant, temporarily assigned to the
studio, was still sleeping when Samson dressed and went out. As he put
on his clothes, he followed his custom of strapping the pistol-holster
under his left armpit outside his shirt. He did it with no particular
thought and from force of habit. His steps carried him first into
Washington Square, at this cheerless hour empty except for a shivering
and huddled figure on a bench and a rattling milk-cart. The boy
wandered aimlessly until, an hour later, he found himself on Bleecker
Street, as that thoroughfare began to awaken and take up its day's
activity. The smaller shops that lie in the shadow of the elevated
trestle were opening their doors. Samson had been reflecting on the
amused glances he had inspired yesterday and, when he came to a store
with a tawdry window display of haberdashery and ready-made clothing,
he decided to go in and investigate.
Evidently, the garments he now wore gave him an appearance of poverty
and meanness, which did not comport with the dignity of a South. Had
any one else criticized his appearance his resentment would have
blazed, but he could make voluntary admissions. The shopkeeper's
curiosity was somewhat piqued by a manner of speech and appearance
which, were, to him, new, and which he could not classify. His first
impression of the boy in the stained suit, slouch hat, and patched
overcoat, was much the same as that which the Pullman porter had
mentally summed up as, "Po' white trash"; but the Yiddish shopman could
not place his prospective customer under any head or type with which he
was familiar. He was neither "kike," "wop," "rough-neck," nor beggar,
and, as the proprietor laid out his wares with unctuous solicitude, he
was, also, studying his unresponsive and early visitor. When Samson,
for the purpose of trying on a coat and vest, took off his own outer
garments, and displayed, without apology or explanation, a huge and
murderous-looking revolver, the merchant became nervously excited. Had
Samson made gratifying purchases, he might have seen nothing, but it
occurred to the mountaineer, just as he was counting money from a
stuffed purse, that it would perhaps be wiser to wait and consult
Lescott in matters of sartorial selection. So, with incisive bluntness,
he countermanded his order--and made an enemy. The shopkeeper, standing
at the door of his basement establishment, combed his beard with his
fingers, and thought regretfully of the fat wallet; and, a minute
after, when two policemen came by, walking together, he awoke suddenly
to his responsibilities as a citizen. He pointed to the figure now half
a block away.
"Dat feller," he said, "chust vent out off my blace. He's got a young
cannon strapped to his vish-bone. I don't know if he's chust a rube, or
if maybe he's bad. Anyway, he's a gun-toter."
The two patrolmen only nodded, and sauntered on. They did not hurry,
but neither did Samson. Pausing to gaze into a window filled with
Italian sweetmeats, he felt a hand on his shoulder, and turned to find
himself looking into two pairs of accusing eyes.
"What's your game?" shortly demanded one of the officers.
"What's ther matter?" countered Samson, as tartly as he had been
questioned.
"Don't you know better than to tote a gun around this town?"
"I reckon thet's my business, hain't hit?"
The boy stepped back, and shook the offending hand from his shoulder.
His gorge was rising, but he controlled it, and turned on his heel,
with the manner of one saying the final word.
"I reckon ye're a-barkin' up ther wrong tree."
"Not by a damned sight, we ain't!" One of the patrolmen seized and
pinioned his arms, while the second threateningly lifted his club.
"Don't try to start anything, young feller," he warned. The street was
awake now and the ever-curious crowd began to gather. The big officer
at Samson's back held his arms locked and gave curt directions to his
partner. "Go through him, Quinn."
Samson recognized that he was in the hands of the law, and a different
sort of law from that which he had known on Misery. He made no effort
to struggle, but looked very straight and unblinkingly into the eyes of
the club-wielder.
"Don't ye hit me with thet thing," he said, quietly. "I warns ye."
The officer laughed as he ran his left hand over Samson's hips and
chest, and brought out the offending weapon.
"I guess that's about all. We'll let you explain the rest of it to the
judge. It's a trick on the Island for yours."
The Island meant nothing to Samson South, but the derisive laughter of
the crowd, and the roughness with which the two bluecoats swung him
around, and ordered him to march, set on edge every defiant nerve.
Still, he gazed directly into the faces of his captors, and inquired
with a cruelly forced calm:
"Does ye 'low ter take me ter the jail-house?"
"Can that rube stuff. Get along, get along!" And the officers started
him on his journey with a shove that sent him lurching and stumbling
forward. Then, the curb of control slipped. The prisoner wheeled, his
face distorted with passion, and lashed out with his fist to the face
of the biggest patrolman. It was a foolish and hopeless attack, as the
boy realized, but in his code it was necessary. One must resent
gratuitous insult whatever the odds, and he fought with such
concentrated fury and swiftness, after his rude hill method of "fist
and skull," driving in terrific blows with hands and head, that the
crowd breathed deep with the delicious excitement of the combat--and
regretted its brevity.
The amazed officers, for an instant handicapped by their surprise,
since they were expecting to monopolize the brutality of the occasion,
came to their senses, and had instant recourse to the comforting
reinforcement of their locust clubs. The boy went down under a rat-tat
of night sticks, which left him as groggy and easy to handle as a
fainting woman.
"You got ter hand it ter dat guy," commented a sweater-clad onlooker,
as they dragged Samson into a doorway to await the wagon. "He was goin'
some while he lasted."
The boy was conscious again, though still faint, when the desk
sergeant wrote on the station-house blotter:
"Carrying a deadly weapon, and resisting an officer."
The lieutenant had strolled in, and was contemplatively turning over
in his hand the heavy forty-five-calibre Colt.
"Some rod that!" he announced. "We don't get many like it here. Where
did you breeze in from, young fellow?"
"Thet's my business," growled Samson. Then, he added: "I'll be
obleeged if ye'll send word ter Mr. George Lescott ter come an' bail me
out."
"You seem to know the procedure," remarked the desk sergeant, with a
smile. "Who is Mr. George Lescott, and where's his hang-out?"
One of the arresting officers looked up from wiping with his
handkerchief the sweat-band of his helmet.
"George Lescott?" he repeated. "I know him. He's got one of them
studios just off Washington Square. He drives down-town in a car the
size of the Olympic. I don't know how he'd get acquainted with a boob
like this."
"Oh, well!" the desk sergeant yawned. "Stick him in the cage. We'll
call up this Lescott party later on. I guess he's still in the hay, and
it might make him peevish to wake him up."
Left alone in the police-station cell, the boy began to think. First
of all, he was puzzled. He had fared forth peaceably, and spoken to no
one except the storekeeper. To force a man into peace by denying him
his gun, seemed as unreasonable as to prevent fisticuffs by cutting off
hands. But, also, a deep sense of shame swept over him, and scalded
him. Getting into trouble here was, somehow, different from getting
into trouble at home--and, in some strange way, bitterly humiliating.
Lescott had risen early, meaning to go down to the studio, and have
breakfast with Samson. His mother and sister were leaving for Bermuda
by a nine o'clock sailing. Consequently, eight o'clock found the
household gathered in the breakfast-room, supplemented by Mr. Wilfred
Horton, whose orchids Adrienne Lescott was wearing, and whose luggage
was already at the wharf.
"Since Wilfred is in the party to take care of things, and look after
you," suggested Lescott, as he came into the room a trifle late, "I
think I'll say good-by here, and run along to the studio. Samson is
probably feeling like a new boy in school this morning. You'll find the
usual litter of flowers and fiction in your staterooms to attest my
filial and brotherly devotion."
"Was the brotherly sentiment addressed to me?" inquired Wilfred, with
an unsmiling and brazen gravity that brought to the girl's eyes and
lips a half-mocking and wholly decorative twinkle of amusement.
"Just because I try to be a sister to you, Wilfred," she calmly
reproved, "I can't undertake to make my brother do it, too. Besides, he
couldn't be a sister to you."
"But by dropping that attitude--which is entirely gratuitous--you will
compel him to assume it. My sentiment as regards brotherly love is
brief and terse, 'Let George do it!'" Mr. Horton was complacently
consuming his breakfast with an excellent appetite, to which the
prospect of six weeks among Bermuda lilies with Adrienne lent a fillip.
"So, brother-to-be," he continued, "you have my permission to run
along down-town, and feed your savage."
"Beg pardon, sir!" The Lescott butler leaned close to the painter's
ear, and spoke with a note of apology as though deploring the necessity
of broaching such a subject. "But will you kindly speak with the
Macdougal Street Police Station?"
"With the what?" Lescott turned in surprise, while Horton surrendered
himself to unrestrained and boisterous laughter.
"The barbarian!" he exclaimed. "I call that snappy work. Twelve hours
in New York, and a run-in with the police! I've noticed," he added, as
the painter hurriedly quitted the room, "that, when you take the bad
man out of his own cock-pit, he rarely lasts as far as the second round."
"It occurs to me, Wilfred," suggested Adrienne, with the hint of
warning in her voice, "that you may be just a trifle overdoing your
attitude of amusement as to this barbarian. George is fond of him, and
believes in him, and George is quite often right in his judgment."
"George," added Mrs. Lescott, "had a broken arm down there in the
mountains, and these people were kind to him in many ways. I wish I
could see Mr. South, and thank him."
Lescott's manner over the telephone was indicating to a surprised desk
sergeant a decidedly greater interest than had been anticipated, and,
after a brief and pointed conversation in that quarter, he called
another number. It was a private number, not included in the telephone
book and communicated with the residence of an attorney who would not
have permitted the generality of clients to disturb him in advance of
office hours.
A realization that the "gun-lugger" had friends "higher up" percolated
at the station-house in another hour, when a limousine halted at the
door, and a legal celebrity, whose ways were not the ways of police
stations or magistrates' courts, stepped to the curb.
"I am waiting to meet Mr. Lescott," announced the Honorable Mr.
Wickliffe, curtly.
When a continuance of the case had been secured, and bond given, the
famous lawyer and Samson lunched together at the studio as Lescott's
guests, and, after the legal luminary had thawed the boy's native
reserve and wrung from him his story, he was interested enough to use
all his eloquence and logic in his efforts to show the mountaineer what
inherent necessities of justice lay back of seemingly restrictive laws.
"You simply 'got in bad' through your failure to understand conditions
here," laughed the lawyer. "I guess we can pull you through, but in
future you'll have to submit to some guidance, my boy."
And Samson, rather to Lescott's surprise, nodded his head with only a
ghost of resentment. From friends, he was willing to learn.
Lescott had been afraid that this initial experience would have an
extinguishing effect on Samson's ambitions. He half-expected to hear
the dogged announcement, "I reckon I'll go back home. I don't b'long
hyar nohow." But no such remark came.
One night, they sat in the cafe of an old French hostelry where, in
the polyglot chatter of three languages, one hears much shop talk of
art and literature. Between the mirrored walls, Samson was for the
first time glimpsing the shallow sparkle of Bohemia. The orchestra was
playing an appealing waltz. Among the diners were women gowned as he
had never seen women gowned before. They sat with men, and met the
challenge of ardent glances with dreamy eyes. They hummed an
accompaniment to the air, and sometimes loudly and publicly quarreled.
But Samson looked on as taciturn and unmoved as though he had never
dined elsewhere. And yet, his eyes were busy, for suddenly he laid down
his knife, and picked up his fork.
"Hit 'pears like I've got a passel of things ter l'arn," he said,
earnestly. "I reckon I mout as well begin by l'arnin' how ter eat." He
had heretofore regarded a fork only as a skewer with which to hold meat
in the cutting.
Lescott laughed.
"Most rules of social usage," he explained, "go back to the test of
efficiency. It is considered good form to eat with the fork,
principally because it is more efficient,"
The boy nodded.
"All right," he acquiesced. "You l'arn me all them things, an' I'll be
obleeged ter ye. Things is diff'rent in diff'rent places. I reckon the
Souths hes a right ter behave es good es anybody."
When a man, whose youth and courage are at their zenith, and whose
brain is tuned to concert pitch, is thrown neck and crop out of squalid
isolation into the melting pot of Manhattan, puzzling problems of
readjustment must follow. Samson's half-starved mind was reaching out
squid-like tentacles in every direction. He was saying little, seeing
much, not yet coordinating or tabulating, but grimly bolting every
morsel of enlightenment. Later, he would digest; now, he only gorged.
Before he could hope to benefit by the advanced instruction of the life
-classes, he must toil and sweat over the primer stages of drawing.
Several months were spent laboring with charcoal and paper over plaster
casts in Lescott's studio, and Lescott himself played instructor. When
the skylight darkened with the coming of evening, the boy whose
mountain nature cried out for exercise went for long tramps that
carried him over many miles of city pavements, and after that, when the
gas was lit, he turned, still insatiably hungry, to volumes of history,
and algebra, and facts. So gluttonous was his protégé's application
that the painter felt called on to remonstrate against the danger of
overwork. But Samson only laughed; that was one of the things he had
learned to do since he left the mountains.
"I reckon," he drawled, "that as long as I'm at work, I kin keep out
of trouble. Seems like that's the only way I kin do it."
* * * * *
A sloop-rigged boat with a crew of two was dancing before a brisk
breeze through blue Bermuda waters. Off to the right, Hamilton rose
sheer and colorful from the bay. At the tiller sat the white-clad
figure of Adrienne Lescott. Puffs of wind that whipped the tautly
bellying sheets lashed her dark hair about her face. Her lips, vividly
red like poppy-petals, were just now curved into an amused smile, which
made them even more than ordinarily kissable and tantalizing. Her
companion was neglecting his nominal duty of tending the sheet to watch
her.
"Wilfred," she teased, "your contrast is quite startling--and, in a
way, effective. From head to foot, you are spotless white--but your
scowl is absolutely 'the blackest black that our eyes endure.' And,"
she added, in an injured voice, "I'm sure I've been very nice to you."
"I have not yet begun to scowl," he assured her, and proceeded to show
what superlatives of saturnine expression he held in reserve. "See
here, Drennie, I know perfectly well that I'm a sheer imbecile to
reveal the fact that you've made me mad. It pleases you too perfectly.
It makes you happier than is good for you, but----"
"It's a terrible thing to make me happy, isn't it?" she inquired,
sweetly.
"Unspeakably so, when you derive happiness from the torture of your
fellow-man."
"My brother-man," she amiably corrected him.
"Good Lord!" he groaned in desperation. "I ought to turn cave man, and
seize you by the hair--and drag you to the nearest minister--or
prophet, or whoever could marry us. Then, after the ceremony, I ought
to drag you to my own grotto, and beat you."
"Would I have to wear my wedding ring in my nose?" She put the
question with the manner of one much interested in acquiring useful
information.
"Drennie, for the nine-hundred-thousandth time; simply, in the
interests of harmony and to break the deadlock, will you marry me?"
"Not this afternoon," she smiled. "Watch for the boom! I'm going to
bring her round."
The young man promptly ducked his head, and played out the line, as
the boat dipped her masthead waterward, and came about on the other
tack. When the sails were again drumming under the fingers of the wind,
she added:
"Besides, I'm not sure that harmony is what I want."
"You know you'll have to marry me in the end. Why not now?" he
persisted, doggedly. "We are simply wasting our youth, dear."
His tone had become so calamitous that the girl could not restrain a
peal of very musical laughter.
"Am I so very funny?" he inquired, with dignity.
"You are, when you are so very tragic," she assured him.
He realized that his temper was merely a challenge to her teasing, and
he wisely fell back into his customary attitude of unruffled insouciance.
"Drennie, you have held me off since we were children. I believe I
first announced my intention of marrying you when you were twelve. That
intention remains unaltered. More: it is unalterable and inevitable. My
reasons for wanting to needn't be rehearsed. It would take too long. I
regard you as possessed of an alert and remarkable mind--one worthy of
companionship with my own." Despite the frivolous badinage of his words
and the humorous smile of his lips, his eyes hinted at an underlying
intensity. "With no desire to flatter or spoil you, I find your
personal aspect pleasing enough to satisfy me. And then, while a man
should avoid emotionalism, I am in love with you." He moved over to a
place in the sternsheets, and his face became intensely earnest. He
dropped his hand over hers as it lay on the tiller shaft. "God knows,
dear," he exclaimed, "how much I love you!"
Her eyes, after holding his for a moment, fell to the hand which still
imprisoned her own. She shook her head, not in anger, but with a manner
of gentle denial, until he released her fingers and stepped back.
"You are a dear, Wilfred," she comforted, "and I couldn't manage to
get on without you, but you aren't marriageable--at least, not yet."
"Why not?" he argued. "I've stood back and twirled my thumbs all
through your _début_ winter. I've been Patience without the
comfort of a pedestal. Now, will you give me three minutes to show you
that you are not acting fairly, or nicely at all?"
"Duck!" warned the girl, and once more they fell silent in the sheer
physical delight of two healthy young animals, clean-blooded and sport-
loving, as the tall jib swept down; the "high side" swept up, and the
boat hung for an exhilarating moment on the verge of capsizing. As it
righted itself again, like the craft of a daring airman banking the
pylons, the girl gave him a bright nod. "Now, go ahead," she acceded,
"you have three minutes to put yourself in nomination as the exemplar
of your age and times."