The Call of the Cumberlands

by Charles Neville Buck

The day of painting was followed by others like it. The disabling of Lescott's left hand made the constant companionship of the boy a matter that needed no explanation or apology, though not a matter of approval to his uncle.

Another week had passed without the reappearance of Tamarack Spicer.

One afternoon, Lescott and Samson were alone on a cliff-protected shelf, and the painter had just blocked in with umber and neutral tint the crude sketch of his next picture. In the foreground was a steep wall, rising palisade-like from the water below. A kingly spruce-pine gave the near note for a perspective which went away across a valley of cornfields to heaping and distant mountains. Beyond that range, in a slender ribbon of pale purple, one saw the ridge of a more remote and mightier chain.

The two men had lost an hour huddled under a canopy beneath the cannonading of a sudden storm. They had silently watched titanic battallions of thunder-clouds riding the skies in gusty puffs of gale, and raking the earth with lightning and hail and water. The crags had roared back echoing defiance, and the great trees had lashed and bent and tossed like weeds in the buffeting. Every gully had become a stream, and every gulch-rock a waterfall. Here and there had been a crashing of spent timber, and now the sun had burst through a rift in the west, and flooded a segment of the horizon with a strange, luminous field of lesson. About this zone of clarity were heaped masses of gold- rimmed and rose-edged clouds, still inky at their centers.

"My God!" exclaimed the mountain boy abruptly. "I'd give 'most anything ef I could paint that."

Lescott rose smilingly from his seat before the easel, and surrendered his palette and sheaf of brushes.

"Try it," he invited.

For a moment, Samson stood hesitant and overcome with diffidence; then, with set lips, he took his place, and experimentally fitted his fingers about a brush, as he had seen Lescott do. He asked no advice. He merely gazed for awhile, and then, dipping a brush and experimenting for his color, went to sweeping in his primary tones.

The painter stood at his back, still smiling. Of course, the brush- stroke was that of the novice. Of course, the work was clumsy and heavy. But what Lescott noticed was not so much the things that went on canvas as the mixing of colors on the palette, for he knew that the palette is the painter's heart, and its colors are the elements of his soul. What a man paints on canvas is the sum of his acquirement; but the colors he mixes are the declarations of what his soul can see, and no man can paint whose eyes are not touched with the sublime. At that moment, Lescott knew that Samson had such eyes.

The splashes of lemon yellow that the boy daubed above the hills might have been painted with a brush dipped in the sunset. The heavy clouds with their gossamer edgings had truth of tone and color. Then the experimenter came to the purple rim of mountain tops.