“Well, hit’s over and cain’t be he’ped, but you’ve done what’s right at last,” Jephthah assured them. “The church is a mighty good thing for young fellers like you. A good wife’ll do a sight to he’p along.”
He looked at them kindly. He had never liked his boys half so well.
“I’m mighty proud of the both of ye,” he concluded heartily. “Ef Creed Bonbright ever does come back in the mountains, we’ll show him that the Turrentines can be better friends than foes to a man.”
Chapter XXI
The Baptising
October had led forth her train across the Cumberlands. One night the forest was fairly green, but early risers next morning found that in the darkness while they slept the hickories had been touched to gold, the oaks smitten with a promise of the glowing mahogany-red which was to be theirs. Sourwood and sumach blazed; the woodbine flung its banner of blood, chestnuts were yellow where the nuts dropped through them from loosened burs. The varying dark greens of balsam and fir, pine and cedar, heightened by contrast the glow of colour, while the dim blue sky above set its note of tender distance and forgetfulness. On a thousand mountain peaks smoked and smouldered, flared and flamed the altar fires of autumn.
After that each day saw a deepening of the glory in the hills. It was like a noble overture a multitudinous chorus made visible. The marvel of it was that one sense should be so clamorously challenged while the other was not addressed. The ear hearkened ever amid that grand symphony of colour for some mighty harmony of sound. But even the piping song-birds were gone, and the cry of a hawk wheeling high in the blue, the voice of a woman calling her cow, these sounded loud in the autumnal hush.
The streams were shrunken to pools whose clear jade reaches reflected the blazing banners above them, and offered mimic seas for the sailing of painted argosies when the wind shook the leaves down. There was a fruity odour of persimmon and wild grape forever in the air. The salmon-pink globes stood defined against the blue on leafless twigs, while the frost sweetened them to sugary jelly, and the black wild grape by the water-courses yielded an odour that was only less material than the flavour of its juices. Every angle of the rail fences became a parterre with golden-rod, cat-brier, and the red-and-yellow pied leaves of blackberries, while a fringe of purple and white asters thrust fragile fingers through the rails below, or the stout iron-weed pushed its purple-red blooms into view at the head of tall, lance-like stems.