In Old Kentucky Part 3

His hands and face were not sunburned--indeed, his hands were delicately fashioned and much whiter than any she had ever seen before on man or woman. His appearance certainly did not, to her, convey the thought of strength--and manhood, there among the mountains, is thought to find its first and last expression through its muscle; yet, for some reason, although her first glance made her think he was a puny creature, she neither scorned nor pitied him. He was, perhaps, too smoothly dressed, too carefully shaved; the gun he had laid down so carelessly had too much "bright work" on it--but on the whole, she liked him. A city maiden might have well been dazzled by the really handsome chap. This simple country girl was not--but, on the whole, she liked him.

Her hand which held the spelling-book dropped, unconsciously, so that the open pages of the volume were revealed, upside down, against her knee.

"Studying your lessons?" he inquired, quite casually, good-naturedly, coming nearer.

Again her disappointment rushed upon her. Impulsively she told him of it.

"Oh," said she, "I don't know how! I bought me this yere book down in th' settlement, an' thought I'd learn things outen it. But how'm I goin'

to learn? I can't make nothin' out of it to get a start with."

Instantly the pathos of this situation, not its humor, made appeal to him.

"Isn't there a school here?" he inquired.

"Nearest school is twenty mile acrost, over on Turkey Creek," she said briefly. "Oncet there was a nearer one, but teacher was a Hatfield, and McCoys got him, of course. This was McCoy kentry 'fore they all got so killed off. He ought to 'a' knowed better than come over here to teach."

This casual reference to a famous feud--news of whose infamy had spread far, far beyond the mountains which had hatched it--from the lips of one so young and lovely (for he had long ago admitted to himself that as she stood there she was lovelier than any being he had ever seen before) appalled Frank Layson, son of level regions, graduate of Harvard, casual sportsman, amateur mountaineer, who had come to look over his patrimony and the country round about.

"Ah--yes," said he, and frowned. And then: "It leaves you in hard luck, though, doesn't it, if you want to learn and can't," said he.

"It sartin does, for--oh, I _do_ hanker powerful to learn!"

"May I stay here by the fire with you a while and get warm, too," he asked. (The unaccustomed exercise of tramping through the mountains had kept him in a fever heat all day.)

"An' welcome," she said cordially, moving aside a bit, so that he could approach without the circ.u.mnavigation of a mighty stump.

He could not tell whether or not she had made note of many sweat-beads on his brow and wondered at them on a chilly man.

"Perhaps," said he, "I might, in a few minutes, show you a little about what you want to know. I've been lucky. I have had a chance to learn."

She liked the way he said it. There was no hint of superiority about it.

He was not "stuck up," in his claim of knowledge. He "had had a chance,"

and took no credit to himself for it. This pleased her, won her confidence--if, already, that had not been done by his frank face, in spite of his fancy clothes and her a.s.sumption that he was a namby-pamby weakling.

"Oh--if you would!" she said, so eagerly that it seemed to him most pitiful.

So, five minutes later, when all her clothing save her heavy outer skirt, had been quite dried there by the fire, and that same fire's abounding warmth had sent his temperature up to high discomfort mark, they sat down, side by side, upon a log, the spelling-book between them, and he began the pleasant task of teaching her her A, B, Cs.

"'A,'" said he, "is this one at the very start."

"The peaked one," said she.

"Yes, that one.

"And 'B,'" he went on, much amused, but with a perfectly grave face, "is this one with two loops fastened, so, to a straight stalk."

"I know where thar _is_ a bee-tree," she remarked, irrelevantly.

"It will help recall this in your mind," said he, maintaining perfect gravity, "imagine it with two big loops of rope fastened to one side of it--"

"Rope wouldn't stick out that-a-way," said she, "it would just droop.

They'd have to be of somethin' stiffen"

"Well--" said he, and tried to think of something.

"You could use that railroad-iron that I saw 'em heat red-hot an' bend, down in the valley," she suggested.

"That's it," said he. "Two loops of railroad-iron fastened to a bee-tree" (he pointed) "just as these loops, here, are fastened to the straight black stem. That's 'B.'"

"I won't forget," said she, her beautiful young brow puckered earnestly as she stored the knowledge in her brain.

"And this is 'C,'" said he.

"'C,' 'C'" said she. "Jest take off one of th' loops an' use it by itself."

"That's so," said he. "And here is 'D'"

"Cut off th' top th' tree," said she. "Just cut it plumb off, loop an'

all."

He laughed. It was clear that she would be an earnest and quick-thinking pupil to whomever had the task of giving her her education.

As he looked at her, now, he for the first time fully realized her beauty. He had known, from the first, that she was most attractive, most unusual for a mountain maid; but now, laughing, although her head was still bent to the book, her big eyes, sparkling with her merriment, raised frankly to his face, were revelations to him. He had not seen such eyes before, and all the old-time similes for deep-brown orbs sprang instantly to mind. "Fathomless pools," "translucent amber"--no simile would really describe them. Late hours had never dimmed them, illness had never made them heavy, he was sure a lie had never made them shift from their straight gaze for one short second. He had not seen such eyes in cities!

And from careful contemplation of the eyes, he kept on with a careful contemplation of the other beauties of his fair and unexpected pupil.

Her homespun gown, always ill-shaped and now unusually protuberant in spots, unusually tight in others, because of its late wetting and impromptu, partial drying, could not hide the sylvan grave of her small-boned and lissome figure, just budding into womanhood. Her feet, crossed on the ground, were as patrician in their nakedness as any bluegra.s.s belle's in satin slippers. Her ankles, scratched by casual thorns and already beginning to blush brown from the June sun's ardent kisses, were as delicate as any he had ever seen enmeshed in silken hose. Her hands, long, slender, taper-fingered, actually dainty, although brown and roughened by hard labor, were, it seemed to him, better fitted for the fingering of a piano's keys than for the coa.r.s.e and heavy tasks to which he knew they must be well accustomed. He gazed at her in veritable wonder. How had she blossomed, thus, here in this wilderness?

"Where do you live?" he asked, interrupting their scholastic efforts.

"Up thar," she pointed, and, above, he could just see the top of a mud-and-stick chimney rise above a crag between the trees.

"Have you brothers or sisters?"

"Ain't got n.o.body," she answered, and to her face there came a look of keen resentment rather than of sorrow or of resignation. "I'm all th'

feud left," she said simply. She looked at Layson quickly, wondering if he would be surprised that she should not have fought and also died.

"Girl cain't fight alone, much," she went on, in hurried explanation, or, rather, quick excuse. "I might take a shot if I should git a chanst, but I ain't had none, an', besides, I guess it air plum wrong to kill, even if there's blood scores to be settled up. I toted 'round a rifle with me till last fall, but then I give it up. They won't git me--but maybe you don't know what feuds are in the mountings, here."

He was looking at her with new interest. All his life he had heard much about the dreadful mountain feuds. As the bogey-man is used in Eastern nurseries, so are the mountaineers used in the nurseries of old Kentucky and of Tennessee to frighten children with. Their family fights, not less persistent or less deadly than the enmities between the warring barons of the Rhine in middle ages, form a magnificent foundation for dire tales.

"Yes," said he, "I know about the feuds, of course. But you--"

It did not seem possible to him, even after her frank statements, that this bright and joyous creature could in any way be joined to such a b.l.o.o.d.y history as he knew the histories of some of these long feuds to be.

"It's been thirty years an' better," said the girl, "since the Brierlys and Lindsays had some trouble about a claybank filly an' took to shootin' one another--shootin' straight an' shootin' often an' to kill.

For years th' fight went on. They fired on sight, an' sometimes 'twas a Lindsay went an' sometimes 'twas a Brierly. Bimeby there was just two men left--my pappy an' Lem Lindsay.

"One day Lem sent word to my pappy to meet him without no weepons an'

shake han's an' make it up."