The girl stepped forward, and held the weapon finger on trigger, close
to her cousin's chest.
"Ye lies, Tam'rack," she said, in a very low and steady voice--a voice
that could not be mistaken, a voice relentlessly resolute and purposeful.
"Ye lies like ye always lies. Yore heart's black an' dirty. Ye're a
murderer an' a coward. Samson's a-comin' back ter me.... I'm a-goin'
ter be Samson's wife." The tensity of her earnestness might have told a
subtler psychologist than Tamarack that she was endeavoring to convince
herself. "He hain't never run away. He's hyar in this room right now."
The mountaineer started, and cast an apprehensive glance about him. The
girl laughed, with a deeply bitter note, then she went on:
"Oh, you can't see him, Tam'rack. Ye mout hunt all night, but wharever
I be, Samson's thar, too. I hain't nothin' but a part of Samson--an'
I'm mighty nigh ter killin' ye this minute--he'd do hit, I reckon."
"Come on now, Sally," urged the man, ingratiatingly. He was thoroughly
cowed, seeking compromise. A fool woman with a gun: every one knew it
was a dangerous combination, and, except for himself, no South had ever
been a coward. He knew a certain glitter in their eyes. He knew it was
apt to presage death, and this girl, trembling in her knees but holding
that muzzle against his chest so unwaveringly, as steady as granite,
had it in her pupils. Her voice held an inexorable monotony suggestive
of tolling bells. She was not the Sally he had known before, but a new
Sally, acting under a quiet sort of exaltation, capable of anything. He
knew that, should she shoot him dead there in her house, no man who
knew them both would blame her. His life depended on strategy. "Come
on, Sally," he whined, as his face grew ashen. "I didn't aim ter make
ye mad. I jest lost my head, an' made love ter ye. Hit hain't no sin
ter kiss a feller's own cousin." He was edging toward the door.
"Stand where ye're at," ordered Sally, in a voice of utter loathing,
and he halted. "Hit wasn't jest kissin' me--" She broke off, and
shuddered again. "I said thet Samson was in this here room. Ef ye moves
twell I tells ye ye kin, ye'll hear him speak ter ye, an' ef he speaks
ye won't never hear nothin' more. This here is Samson's gun. I reckon
he'll tell me ter pull the trigger terectly!"
"Fer God's sake, Sally!" implored the braggart. "Fer God's sake, look
over what I done. I knows ye're Samson's gal. I----"
"Shet up!" she said, quietly; and his voice died instantly.
"Yes, I'm Samson's gal, an' I hain't a-goin' ter kill ye this time,
Tam'rack, unlessen ye makes me do hit. But, ef ever ye crosses that
stile out thar ag'in, so help me God, this gun air goin' ter shoot."
Tamarack licked his lips. They had grown dry. He had groveled before a
girl--but he was to be spared. That was the essential thing.
"I promises," he said, and turned, much sobered, to the door.
Sally stood for a while, listening until she heard the slopping hoof-
beats of his retreat, then she dropped limply into the shaky shuck-
bottomed chair, and sat staring straight ahead, with a dazed and almost
mortal hurt in her eyes. It was a trance-like attitude, and the gesture
with which she several times wiped her calico sleeve across the lips
his kisses had defiled, seemed subconscious. At last, she spoke aloud,
but in a far-away voice, shaking her head miserably.
"I reckon Tam'rack's right," she said. "Samson won't hardly come back.
Why would he come back?"
* * * * *
The normal human mind is a reservoir, which fills at a rate of speed
regulated by the number and calibre of its feed pipes. Samson's mind
had long been almost empty, and now from so many sources the waters of
new things were rushing in upon it that under their pressure it must
fill fast, or give away.
He was saved from hopeless complications of thought by a sanity which
was willing to assimilate without too much effort to analyze. That
belonged to the future. Just now, all was marvelous. What miracles
around him were wrought out of golden virtue, and what out of brazen
vice, did not as yet concern him. New worlds are not long new worlds.
The boy from Misery was presently less bizarre to the eye than many of
the unkempt bohemians he met in the life of the studios: men who
quarreled garrulously over the end and aim of Art, which they spelled
with a capital A--and, for the most part, knew nothing of. He retained,
except within a small circle of intimates, a silence that passed for
taciturnity, and a solemnity of visage that was often construed into
surly egotism.
He still wore his hair long, and, though his conversation gradually
sloughed off much of its idiom and vulgarism, enough of the mountaineer
stood out to lend to his personality a savor of the crudely picturesque.
Meanwhile, he drew and read and studied and walked and every day's
advancement was a forced march. The things that he drew began by
degrees to resolve themselves into some faint similitude to the things
from which he drew them. The stick of charcoal no longer insisted on
leaving in the wake of its stroke smears like soot. It began to be
governable. But it was the fact that Samson saw things as they were and
insisted on trying to draw them just as he saw them, which best pleased
his sponsor. During those initial months, except for his long tramps,
occupied with thoughts of the hills and the Widow Miller's cabin, his
life lay between Lescott's studio and the cheap lodgings which he had
taken near by. Sometimes while he was bending toward his easel there
would rise before his imagination the dark unshaven countenance of Jim
Asberry. At such moments, he would lay down the charcoal, and his eyes
would cloud into implacable hatred. "I hain't fergot ye, Pap," he would
mutter, with the fervor of a renewed vow. With the speed of a clock's
minute hand, too gradual to be seen by the eye, yet so fast that it
soon circles the dial, changes were being wrought in the raw material
called Samson South. One thing did not change. In every crowd, he found
himself searching hungrily for the face of Sally, which he knew he
could not find. Always, there was the unadmitted, yet haunting, sense
of his own rawness. For life was taking off his rough edges--and there
were many--and life went about the process in workmanlike fashion, with
sandpaper. The process was not enjoyable, and, though the man's soul
was made fitter, it was also rubbed raw. Lescott, tremendously
interested in his experiment, began to fear that the boy's too great
somberness of disposition would defeat the very earnestness from which
it sprang. So, one morning, the landscape-maker went to the telephone,
and called for the number of a friend whom he rightly believed to be
the wisest man, and the greatest humorist, in New York. The call
brought no response, and the painter dried his brushes, and turned up
Fifth Avenue to an apartment hotel in a cross street, where on a
certain door he rapped with all the elaborate formula of a secret code.
Very cautiously, the door opened, and revealed a stout man with a
humorous, clean-shaven face. On a table lay a scattered sheaf of rough
and yellow paper, penciled over in a cramped and interlined hand. The
stout man's thinning hair was rumpled over a perspiring forehead.
Across the carpet was a worn stretch that bespoke much midnight pacing.
The signs were those of authorship.
"Why didn't you answer your 'phone?" smiled Lescott, though he knew.
The stout man shrugged his shoulders and pointed to the wall, where
the disconnected receiver was hanging down. "Necessary precaution
against creditors," he explained. "I am out--except to you."
"Busy?" interrogated Lescott. "You seem to have a manuscript in the
making."
"No." The stout man's face clouded with black foreboding. "I shall
never write another story. I'm played out." He turned, and restively
paced the worn carpet, pausing at the window for a despondent glance
across the roofs and chimney pots of the city. Lescott, with the
privilege of intimacy, filled his pipe from the writer's tobacco jar.
"I want your help. I want you to meet a friend of mine, and take him
under your wing in a fashion. He needs you."
The stout man's face again clouded. A few years ago, he had been
peddling his manuscripts with the heart-sickness of unsuccessful middle
age. To-day, men coupled his name with those of Kipling and De
Maupassant. One of his antipathies was meeting people who sought to
lionize him. Lescott read the expression, and, before his host had time
to object, swept into his recital.
At the end he summarized:
"The artist is much like the setter-pup. If it's in him, it's as
instinctive as a dog's nose. But to become efficient he must go a-field
with a steady veteran of his own breed."
"I know!" The great man, who was also the simple man, smiled
reminiscently. "They tried to teach me to herd sheep when my nose was
itching for bird country. Bring on your man; I want to know him."
Samson was told nothing of the benevolent conspiracy, but one evening
shortly later he found himself sitting at a café table with his sponsor
and a stout man, almost as silent as himself. The stout man responded
with something like churlish taciturnity to the half-dozen men and
women who came over with flatteries. But later, when the trio was left
alone, his face brightened, and he turned to the boy from Misery.
"Does Billy Conrad still keep store at Stagbone?"
Samson started, and his gaze fell in amazement. At the mention of the
name, he saw a cross-roads store, with rough mules hitched to fence
palings. It was a picture of home, and here was a man who had been
there! With glowing eyes, the boy dropped unconsciously back into the
vernacular of the hills.
"Hev ye been thar, stranger?"
The writer nodded, and sipped his whiskey.
"Not for some years, though," he confessed, as he drifted into
reminiscence, which to Samson was like water to a parched throat.
When they left the café, the boy felt as though he were taking leave of
an old and tried friend. By homely methods, this unerring diagnostician
of the human soul had been reading him, liking him, and making him feel
a heart-warming sympathy. The man who shrunk from lion-hunters, and who
could return the churl's answer to the advances of sycophant and
flatterer, enthusiastically poured out for the ungainly mountain boy all
the rare quality and bouquet of his seasoned personal charm. It was a
vintage distilled from experience and humanity. It had met the ancient
requirement for the mellowing and perfecting of good Madeira, that it
shall "voyage twice around the world's circumference," and it was a
thing reserved for his friends.
"It's funny," commented the boy, when he and Lescott were alone, "that
he's been to Stagbone."
"My dear Samson," Lescott assured him, "if you had spoken of Tucson,
Arizona, or Caracas or Saskatchewan, it would have been the same. He
knows them all."
It was not until much later that Samson realized how these two really
great men had adopted him as their "little brother," that he might have
their shoulder-touch to march by. And it was without his realization,
too, that they laid upon him the imprint of their own characters and
philosophy. One night at Tonelli's table-d'hôte place, the latest
diners were beginning to drift out into Tenth Street. The faded
soprano, who had in better days sung before a King, was wearying as she
reeled out ragtime with a strong Neapolitan accent. Samson had been
talking to the short-story writer about his ambitions and his hatreds.
He feared he was drifting away from his destiny--and that he would in
the end become too softened. The writer leaned across the table, and
smiled.
"Fighting is all right," he said; "but a man should not be just the
fighter." He mused a moment in silence, then quoted a scrap of verse:
"'Test of the man, if his worth be,
"'In accord with the ultimate plan,
"'That he be not, to his marring,
"'Always and utterly man;
"'That he bring out of the battle
"'Fitter and undefiled,
"'To woman the heart of a woman,
"'To children the heart of a child.'"
Samson South offered no criticism. He had known life from the stoic's
view-point. He had heard the seductive call of artistic yearnings. Now,
it dawned on him in an intensely personal fashion, as it had begun
already to dawn in theory, that the warrior and the artist may meet on
common and compatible ground, where the fighting spirit is touched and
knighted with the gentleness of chivalry. He seemed to be looking from
a new and higher plane, from which he could see a mellow softness on
angles that had hitherto been only stern and unrelieved.