The Call of the Cumberlands

by Charles Neville Buck

CHAPTER XXVII

The Honorable Asa Smithers was not the regular Judge of the Circuit which numbered Hixon among its county-seats. The elected incumbent was ill, and Smithers had been named as his pro-tem. successor. Callomb climbed to the second story of the frame bank building, and pounded loudly on a door, which bore the boldly typed shingle:

"ASA SMITHERS, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW."

The temporary Judge admitted a visitor in uniform, whose countenance was stormy with indignant protest. The Judge himself was placid and smiling. The lawyer, who was for the time being exalted to the bench, hoped to ascend it more permanently by the votes of the Hollman faction, since only Hollman votes were counted. He was a young man of powerful physique with a face ruggedly strong and honest.

It was such an honest and fearless face that it was extremely valuable to its owner in concealing a crookedness as resourceful as that of a fox, and a moral cowardice which made him a spineless tool in evil hands. A shock of tumbled red hair over a fighting face added to the appearance of combative strength. The Honorable Asa was conventionally dressed, and his linen was white, but his collar was innocent of a necktie. Callomb stood for a moment inside the door, and, when he spoke, it was to demand crisply:

"Well, what are you going to do about it?"

"About what, Captain?" inquired the other, mildly.

"Is it possible you haven't heard? Since yesterday noon, two more murders have been added to the holocaust. You represent the courts of law. I represent the military arm of the State. Are we going to stand by and see this go on?"

The Judge shook his head, and his visage was sternly thoughtful and hypocritical. He did not mention that he had just come from conference with the Hollman leaders. He did not explain that the venire he had drawn from the jury drum had borne a singularly solid Hollman compaction.

"Until the Grand Jury acts, I don't see that we can take any steps."

"And," stormed Captain Callomb, "the Grand Jury will, like former Grand Juries, lie down in terror and inactivity. Either there are no courageous men in your county, or these panels are selected to avoid including them."

Judge Smithers' face darkened. If he was a moral coward, he was at least a coward crouching behind a seeming of fearlessness.

"Captain," he said, coolly, but with a dangerous hint of warning, "I don't see that your duties include contempt of court."

"No!" Callomb was now thoroughly angered, and his voice rose. "I am sent down here subject to your orders, and it seems you are also subject to orders. Here are two murders in a day, capping a climax of twenty years of bloodshed. You have information as to the arrival of a man known as a desperado with a grudge against the two dead men, yet you know of no steps to take. Give me the word, and I'll go out and bring that man, and any others you name, to your bar of justice—if it is a bar of justice! For God's sake, give me something else to do than to bring in prisoners to be shot down in cold blood."

The Judge sat balancing a pencil on his extended forefinger as though it were a scale of justice.

"You have been heated in your language, sir," he said, sternly, "but it is a heat arising from an indignation which I share. Consequently, I pass it over. I cannot instruct you to arrest Samson South before the Grand Jury has accused him. The law does not contemplate hasty or unadvised action. All men are innocent until proven guilty. If the Grand Jury wants South, I'll instruct you to go and get him. Until then, you may leave my part of the work to me."

His Honor rose from his chair.

"You can at least give this Grand Jury such instructions on murder as will point out their duty. You can assure them that the militia will protect them. Through your prosecutor, you can bring evidence to their attention, you——"

"If you will excuse me," interrupted His Honor, drily, "I'll judge of how I am to charge my Grand Jury. I have been in communication with the family of Mr. Purvy, and it is not their wish at the present time to bring this case before the panel."

Callomb laughed ironically.

"No, I could have told you that before you conferred with them. I could have told you that they prefer to be their own courts and executioners, except where they need you. They also preferred to have me get a man they couldn't take themselves, and then to assassinate him in my hands. Who in the hell do you work for, Judge-for-the-moment Smithers? Are you holding a job under the State of Kentucky, or under the Hollman faction of this feud? I am instructed to take my orders from you. Will you kindly tell me my master's real name?"

Smithers turned pale with anger, his fighting face grew as truculent as a bulldog's, while Callomb stood glaring back at him like a second bulldog, but the Judge knew that he was being honestly and fearlessly accused. He merely pointed to the door. The Captain turned on his heel, and stalked out of the place, and the Judge came down the steps, and crossed the street to the court-house. Five minutes later, he turned to the shirt-sleeved man who was leaning on the bench, and said in his most judicial voice:

"Mr. Sheriff, open court."

The next day the mail-carrier brought in a note for the temporary
Judge. His Honor read it at recess, and hastened across to Hollman's
Mammoth Department Store. There, in council with his masters, he asked
instructions. This was the note:

"THE HON. ASA SMITHERS.

"SIR: I arrived in this county yesterday, and am prepared, if called as a witness, to give to the Grand Jury full and true particulars of the murder of Jesse Purvy and the killing of Aaron Hollis. I am willing to come under escort of my own kinsmen, or of the militiamen, as the Court may advise.

"The requirement of any bodyguard, I deplore, but in meeting my legal obligations, I do not regard it as necessary or proper to walk into a trap.

"Respectfully, SAMSON SOUTH."

Smithers looked perplexedly at Judge Hollman.

"Shall I have him come?" he inquired.

Hollman threw the letter down on his desk with a burst of blasphemy:

"Have him come?" he echoed. "Hell and damnation, no! What do we want him to come here and spill the milk for? When we get ready, we'll indict him. Then, let your damned soldiers go after him—as a criminal, not a witness. After that, we'll continue this case until these outsiders go away, and we can operate to suit ourselves. We don't fall for Samson South's tricks. No, sir; you never got that letter! It miscarried. Do you hear? You never got it."

Smithers nodded grudging acquiescence. Most men would rather be independent officials than collar-wearers.

Out on Misery Samson South had gladdened the soul of his uncle with his return. The old man was mending, and, for a long time, the two had talked. The failing head of the clan looked vainly for signs of degeneration in his nephew, and, failing to find them, was happy.

"Hev ye decided, Samson," he inquired, "thet ye was right in yer notion 'bout goin' away?"

Samson sat reflectively for a while, then replied:

"We were both right, Uncle Spicer—and both wrong. This is my place, but if I'm to take up the leadership it must be in a different fashion. Changes are coming. We can't any longer stand still."

Spicer South lighted his pipe. He, too, in these last years, had seen in the distance the crest of the oncoming wave. He, too, recognized that, from within or without, there must be a regeneration. He did not welcome it, but, if it must come, he preferred that it come not at the hands of conquerors, but under the leadership of his own blood.

"I reckon there's right smart truth to that," he acknowledged. "I've been studyin' 'bout hit consid'able myself of late. Thar's been sev'ral fellers through the country talkin' coal an' timber an' railroads—an' sich like."

Sally went to mill that Saturday, and with her rode Samson. There, besides Wile McCager, he met Caleb Wiley and several others. At first, they received him sceptically, but they knew of the visit to Purvy's store, and they were willing to admit that in part at least he had erased the blot from his escutcheon. Then, too, except for cropped hair and a white skin, he had come back as he had gone, in homespun and hickory. There was nothing highfalutin in his manners. In short, the impression was good.

"I reckon now that ye're back, Samson," suggested McCager, "an' seein' how yore Uncle Spicer is gettin' along all right, I'll jest let the two of ye run things. I've done had enough." It was a simple fashion of resigning a regency, but effectual.

Old Caleb, however, still insurgent and unconvinced, brought in a minority report.

"We wants fightin' men," he grumbled, with the senile reiteration of his age, as he spat tobacco and beat a rat-tat on the mill floor with his long hickory staff. "We don't want no deserters."

"Samson ain't a deserter," defended Sally. "There isn't one of you fit to tie his shoes." Sally and old Spicer South alone knew of her lover's letter to the Circuit Judge, and they were pledged to secrecy.

"Never mind, Sally!" It was Samson himself who answered her. "I didn't come back because I care what men like old Caleb think. I came back because they needed me. The proof of a fighting man is his fighting, I reckon. I'm willing to let 'em judge me by what I'm going to do."

So, Samson slipped back, tentatively, at least, into his place as clan head, though for a time he found it a post without action. After the fierce outburst of bloodshed, quiet had settled, and it was tacitly understood that, unless the Hollman forces had some coup in mind which they were secreting, this peace would last until the soldiers were withdrawn.

"When the world's a-lookin'," commented Judge Hollman, "hit's a right good idea to crawl under a log—an' lay still."

Purvy had been too famous a feudist to pass unsung. Reporters came as far as Hixon, gathered there such news as the Hollmans chose to give them, and went back to write lurid stories and description, from hearsay, of the stockaded seat of tragedy. Nor did they overlook the dramatic coincidence of the return of "Wildcat" Samson South from civilization to savagery. They made no accusation, but they pointed an inference and a moral—as they thought. It was a sermon on the triumph of heredity over the advantages of environment. Adrienne read some of these saffron misrepresentations, and they distressed her.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, it came insistently to the ears of Captain Callomb that some plan was on foot, the intricacies of which he could not fathom, to manufacture a case against a number of the Souths, quite apart from their actual guilt, or likelihood of guilt. Once more, he would be called upon to go out and drag in men too well fortified to be taken by the posses and deputies of the Hollman civil machinery. At this news, he chafed bitterly, and, still rankling with a sense of shame at the loss of his first prisoner, he formed a plan of his own, which he revealed over his pipe to his First Lieutenant.

"There's a nigger in the woodpile, Merriwether," he said. "We are simply being used to do the dirty work up here, and I'm going to do a little probing of my own. I guess I'll turn the company over to you for a day or two."

"What idiocy are you contemplating now?" inquired the second in command.

"I'm going to ride over on Misery, and hear what the other side has to say. I've usually noticed that one side of any story is pretty good until the other's told."

"You mean you are going to go over there where the Souths are intrenched, where every road is guarded?" The Lieutenant spoke wrathfully and with violence. "Don't be an ass, Callomb. You went over there once before, and took a man away—and he's dead. You owe them a life, and they collect their dues. You will be supported by no warrant of arrest, and can't take a sufficient detail to protect you."

"No," said Callomb, quietly; "I go on my own responsibility and I go by myself."

"And," stormed Merriwether, "you'll never come back."

"I think," smiled Callomb, "I'll get back. I owe an old man over there an apology, and I want to see this desperado at first hand."

"It's sheer madness. I ought to take you down to this infernal crook of a Judge, and have you committed to a strait-jacket."

"If," said Callomb, "you are content to play the cats-paw to a bunch of assassins, I'm not. The mail-rider went out this morning, and he carried a letter to old Spicer South. I told him that I was coming unescorted and unarmed, and that my object was to talk with him. I asked him to give me a safe-conduct, at least until I reached his house, and stated my case. I treated him like an officer and a gentleman, and, unless I'm a poor judge of men, he's going to treat me that way."

The Lieutenant sought vainly to dissuade Callomb, but the next day the Captain rode forth, unaccompanied. Curious stares followed him, and Judge Smithers turned narrowing and unpleasant eyes after him, but at the point where the ridge separated the territory of the Hollmans from that of the Souths, he saw waiting in the road a mounted figure, sitting his horse straight, and clad in the rough habiliments of the mountaineer.

As Callomb rode up he saluted, and the mounted figure with perfect gravity and correctness returned that salute as one officer to another. The Captain was surprised. Where had this mountaineer with the steady eyes and the clean-cut jaw learned the niceties of military etiquette?

"I am Captain Callomb of F Company," said the officer. "I'm riding over to Spicer South's house. Did you come to meet me?"

"To meet and guide you," replied a pleasant voice. "My name is Samson
South."

The militiaman stared. This man whose countenance was calmly thoughtful scarcely comported with the descriptions he had heard of the "Wildcat of the Mountains"; the man who had come home straight as a storm-petrel at the first note of tempest, and marked his coming with double murder. Callomb had been too busy to read newspapers of late. He had heard only that Samson had "been away."

While he wondered, Samson went on:

"I'm glad you came. If it had been possible I would have come to you." As he told of the letter he had written the Judge, volunteering to present himself as a witness, the officer's wonder grew.

"They said that you had been away," suggested Callomb. "If it's not an impertinent question, what part of the mountains have you been visiting?"

Samson laughed.

"Not any part of the mountains," he said. "I've been living chiefly in
New York—and for a time in Paris."

Callomb drew his horse to a dead halt.

"In the name of God," he incredulously asked, "what manner of man are you?"

"I hope," came the instant reply, "it may be summed up by saying that I'm exactly the opposite of the man you've had described for you back there at Hixon."

"I knew it," exclaimed the soldier, "I knew that I was being fed on lies! That's why I came. I wanted to get the straight of it, and I felt that the solution lay over here."

They rode the rest of the way in deep conversation. Samson outlined his ambitions for his people. He told, too, of the scene that had been enacted at Purvy's store. Callomb listened with absorption, feeling that the narrative bore axiomatic truth on its face.

At last he inquired:

"Did you succeed up there—as a painter?"

"That's a long road," Samson told him, "but I think I had a fair start. I was getting commissions when I left."

"Then, I am to understand"—the officer met the steady gray eyes and put the question like a cross-examiner bullying a witness—"I am to understand that you deliberately put behind you a career to come down here and herd these fence-jumping sheep?"

"Hardly that," deprecated the head of the Souths. "They sent for me— that's all. Of course, I had to come."

"Why?"

"Because they had sent. They are my people."

The officer leaned in his saddle.

"South," he said, "would you mind shaking hands with me? Some day, I want to brag about it to my grandchildren."