"Wa'al she kain't jest ter say play hit, yit, but she aims ter git somebody ter l'arn her how some day—She l'arnt readin' an' writin' when she war past three score."
Back in Marlin Town—a town now boasting sidewalks of concrete and a new brick station, the fishermen saw the columned and porticoed mansions of the old man's sons—and their thoughts went back to the store with its bolts of calico, its harness, and above it the living quarters where these children had been born.
For the wealth of that county in coal had brought spurs of railroads bristling into pockets of the wilderness where there had hardly been "critter trails," and overnight fortunes had sprung into being. Moneyed interests that centered there would have made the young attorney, who was also the district's member in Congress, something more than a local representative, had he not chosen to represent the native holders and to stand as a buffer between their unsophistication and their would-be exploiters. But if Boone could set his name to no million-dollar checks or build himself no colonial mansions, more practice came to the office where his shingle hung than he and his two new associates could handle.
In other newly developed sections, Boone had seen the native exploited and embittered. It had been his care that when prosperity came into Marlin it should come as a blessing to the hill dwellers and not as a curse. To that end he had locked horns with some adroit and powerful adversaries, outriders of capital who would have been bandits had the way lain open. They had first laughed at him, then resolved to crush him and in the end sought to propitiate him. Finally they gave him his half of the road and shook their heads in wonderment because he chose the way of folly and refused to be made deviously rich.
To each new advance he had had one answer: "I belong to these people, gentlemen. They must be fairly dealt with."
And yet while these mighty transitions worked themselves into being, the alchemy of the Midas touch left life unchanged back of Cedar Mountain itself. The brooding range threw its cordon of peaks across the tide of development and turned it right and left. Not until the many fields lying virgin and accessible had been worked out, would capital need to wrestle with engineering assaults upon those sky-high barriers of flint.
And with fidelity to history's ironic precedent, the man whose dream had been strong in a world of doubters stood by unbenefited, while others who had not known the nature of a vision reaped wealth. For Larry Masters had thrown his initial winnings into other speculative properties. He was the gambler who had won a large bet, and whose ambition straightway burns to "break the bank." He had bought land in his own right on a rising tide of values, and he had seen his own veins of coal narrow to nothing, until his engineers had "pulled the pillars" and abandoned the lodes. Finding himself ill omened and fallen on desert spots in a land of oases, he had closed his bungalow in disgust and taken a salaried position with an oil concern operating in Mexico.
Sometimes there comes into a Kentucky midsummer a strayed touch of autumn. Then while the woods stand freckled and the ironweed waves its sprays of dusty purple, a touch of languor steals into the sky, and the horizon veils itself with a mist that is sweetly melancholy.
On such a period, when the sun should have held its dog-day heat, yet fell in mellow mildness, Boone Wellver sat on a low, hickory-withed chair outside the door of McCalloway's house.