But it was that last meeting in which he had thawed her shyness into friendliness that Glory remembered most eagerly. That had seemed to make of Spurrier not only a hero admired from a distance but a hero who was also a friend, and she was hungry for friends.
So it came to pass that to these two widely variant welcomes, neither of which he suspected, John Spurrier was returning from Russia when spring had lightly brushed the Cumberland slopes with delicate fragrance and the color of blossoming.
In Louisville, in Frankfort, and in other Kentucky towns along his way the returning man had made stops and investigations, to the end that he came 112 primed with certain information of an ex-cathedra sort.
The fruits of this research included an abstract of the personnel of the legislature and the trend of oil influences in State politics, and he studied his notebook as he traveled from the rolling, almost voluptuous fertility of the bluegrass section to the piedmont where the foothills began to break the sky.
On the porch of the dilapidated hotel at Waterfall a sparse crowd centered about a seated figure, and when he had reached the spot Spurrier paused, challenged by a sense of the medieval, that gripped him as tangibly as a hand clapped upon his shoulder.
The seated man was blind and shabby, with a beggar’s cup strapped to his knee, and a “fiddle” nestling close to the stubbled chin of a disfigured face. He sang in a weird falsetto, with minors that rose thin and dolorous, but he was in every essential the ballad singer who improvised his lays upon topical themes, as did Scott’s last minstrel—a survival of antiquity.
Now he was whining out a personal plaint in the words of his “song ballet.”
“I used ter hev ther sight ter see ther hills so high an’ green,
I used ter work a standard rig an’ drill fer kerosene.”
The singer’s lugubrious pathos appeared to be received with attentive and uncritical interest. Beyond doubt he took himself seriously and sadly.