The Call of the Cumberlands

by Charles Neville Buck

"I heered thet Tam'rack was in the jail-house, an' somebody hed ter go ter Hixon. So, of course, I knowed hit would be you."

CHAPTER XII

Lescott stayed on a week after that simply in deference to Samson's insistence. To leave at once might savor of flight under fire, but when the week was out the painter turned his horse's head toward town, and his train swept him back to the Bluegrass and the East. As he gazed out of his car windows at great shoulders of rock and giant trees, things he was leaving behind, he felt a sudden twinge of something akin to homesickness. He knew that he should miss these great humps of mountains and the ragged grandeur of the scenery. With the rich smoothness of the Bluegrass, a sense of flatness and heaviness came to his lungs. Level metal roads and loamy fields invited his eye. The tobacco stalks rose in profuse heaviness of sticky green; the hemp waved its feathery tops; and woodlands were clear of underbrush—the pauper counties were behind him.

A quiet of unbroken and deadly routine settled down on Misery. The conduct of the Souths in keeping hands off, and acknowledging the justice of Tamarack Spicer's jail sentence, had been their answer to the declaration of the Hollmans in letting Samson ride into and out of Hixon. The truce was established. When, a short time later, Tamarack left the country to become a railroad brakeman, Jesse Purvy passed the word that his men must, until further orders, desist from violence. The word had crept about that Samson, too, was going away, and, if this were true, Jesse felt that his future would be more secure than his past. Purvy believed Samson guilty, despite the exoneration of the hounds. Their use had been the idea of over-fervent relatives. He himself scoffed at their reliability.

"I wouldn't believe no dog on oath," he declared. Besides, he preferred to blame Samson, since he was the head of the tribe and because he himself knew what cause Samson had to hate him. Perhaps, even now, Samson meant to have vengeance before leaving. Possibly, even, this ostentatious care to regard the truce was simply a shrewdly planned sham meant to disarm his suspicion.

Until Samson went, if he did go, Jesse Purvy would redouble his caution. It would be a simple matter to have the boy shot to death, and end all question. Samson took no precautions to safeguard his life, but he had a safeguard none the less. Purvy felt sure that within a week after Samson fell, despite every care he might take, he, too, would fall. He was tired of being shot down. Purvy was growing old, and the fires of war were burning to embers in his veins. He was becoming more and more interested in other things. It dawned upon him that to be known as a friend of the poor held more allurement for gray-haired age than to be known as a master of assassins. It would be pleasant to sit undisturbed, and see his grandchildren grow up, and he recognized, with a sudden ferocity of repugnance, that he did not wish them to grow up as feud fighters. Purvy had not reformed, but, other things being equal, he would prefer to live and let live. He had reached that stage to which all successful villains come at some time, when he envied the placid contentment of respected virtues. Ordering Samson shot down was a last resort—one to be held in reserve until the end.

So, along Misery and Crippleshin, the men of the factions held their fire while the summer spent itself, and over the mountain slopes the leaves began to turn, and the mast to ripen.

Lescott had sent a box of books, and Samson had taken a team over to Hixon, and brought them back. It was a hard journey, attended with much plunging against the yokes and much straining of trace chains. Sally had gone with him. Samson was spending as much time as possible in her society now. The girl was saying little about his departure, but her eyes were reading, and without asking she knew that his going was inevitable. Many nights she cried herself to sleep, but, when he saw her, she was always the same blithe, bird-like creature that she had been before. She was philosophically sipping her honey while the sun shone.

Samson read some of the books aloud to Sally, who had a child's passion for stories, and who could not have spelled them out for herself. He read badly, but to her it was the flower of scholastic accomplishment, and her untrained brain, sponge-like in its acquisitiveness, soaked up many new words and phrases which fell again quaintly from her lips in talk. Lescott had spent a week picking out those books. He had wanted them to argue for him; to feed the boy's hunger for education, and give him some forecast of the life that awaited him. His choice had been an effort to achieve multum in parvo, but Samson devoured them all from title page to finis line, and many of them he went back to, and digested again.

He wrestled long and gently with his uncle, struggling to win the old man's consent to his departure. But Spicer South's brain was no longer plastic. What had been good enough for the past was good enough for the future. He sought to take the most tolerant view, and to believe that Samson was acting on conviction and not on an ingrate's impulse, but that was the best he could do, and he added to himself that Samson's was an abnormal and perverted conviction. Nevertheless, he arranged affairs so that his nephew should be able to meet financial needs, and to go where he chose in a fashion befitting a South. The old man was intensely proud, and, if the boy were bent on wasting himself, he should waste like a family head, and not appear a pauper among strangers.