"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."
CHAPTER XXVIII
Callomb spent the night at the house of Spicer South. He met and talked with a number of the kinsmen, and, if he read in the eyes of some of them a smoldering and unforgiving remembrance of his unkept pledge, at least they repressed all expression of censure.
With Spicer South and Samson, the Captain talked long into the night. He made many jottings in a notebook. He, with Samson abetting him, pointed out to the older and more stubborn man the necessity of a new regime in the mountains, under which the individual could walk in greater personal safety. As for the younger South, the officer felt, when he rode away the next morning, that he had discovered the one man who combined with the courage and honesty that many of his clansmen shared the mental equipment and local influence to prove a constructive leader.
When he returned to the Bluegrass, he meant to have a long and unofficial talk with his relative, the Governor.
He rode back to the ridge with a strong bodyguard. Upon this Samson had insisted. He had learned of Callomb's hasty and unwise denunciation of Smithers, and he knew that Smithers had lost no time in relating it to his masters. Callomb would be safe enough in Hollman country, because the faction which had called for troops could not afford to let him be killed within their own precincts. But, if Callomb could be shot down in his uniform, under circumstances which seemed to bear the earmarks of South authorship, it would arouse in the State at large a tidal wave of resentment against the Souths, which they could never hope to stem. And so, lest one of Hollman's hired assassins should succeed in slipping across the ridge and waylaying him, Samson conducted him to the frontier of the ridge.