The Call of the Cumberlands Part 18

some while he lasted."

The boy was conscious again, though still faint, when the desk sergeant wrote on the station-house blotter:

"Carrying a deadly weapon, and resisting an officer."

The lieutenant had strolled in, and was contemplatively turning over in his hand the heavy forty-five-calibre Colt.

"Some rod that!" he announced. "We don't get many like it here. Where did you breeze in from, young fellow?"

"Thet's my business," growled Samson. Then, he added: "I'll be obleeged if ye'll send word ter Mr. George Lescott ter come an' bail me out."

"You seem to know the procedure," remarked the desk sergeant, with a smile. "Who is Mr. George Lescott, and where's his hang-out?"

One of the arresting officers looked up from wiping with his handkerchief the sweat-band of his helmet.

"George Lescott?" he repeated. "I know him. He's got one of them studios just off Washington Square. He drives down-town in a car the size of the Olympic. I don't know how he'd get acquainted with a b.o.o.b like this."

"Oh, well!" the desk sergeant yawned. "Stick him in the cage. We'll call up this Lescott party later on. I guess he's still in the hay, and it might make him peevish to wake him up."

Left alone in the police-station cell, the boy began to think. First of all, he was puzzled. He had fared forth peaceably, and spoken to no one except the storekeeper. To force a man into peace by denying him his gun, seemed as unreasonable as to prevent fisticuffs by cutting off hands. But, also, a deep sense of shame swept over him, and scalded him. Getting into trouble here was, somehow, different from getting into trouble at home--and, in some strange way, bitterly humiliating.

Lescott had risen early, meaning to go down to the studio, and have breakfast with Samson. His mother and sister were leaving for Bermuda by a nine o'clock sailing. Consequently, eight o'clock found the household gathered in the breakfast-room, supplemented by Mr. Wilfred Horton, whose orchids Adrienne Lescott was wearing, and whose luggage was already at the wharf.

"Since Wilfred is in the party to take care of things, and look after you," suggested Lescott, as he came into the room a trifle late, "I think I'll say good-by here, and run along to the studio. Samson is probably feeling like a new boy in school this morning. You'll find the usual litter of flowers and fiction in your staterooms to attest my filial and brotherly devotion."

"Was the brotherly sentiment addressed to me?" inquired Wilfred, with an unsmiling and brazen gravity that brought to the girl's eyes and lips a half-mocking and wholly decorative twinkle of amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Just because I try to be a sister to you, Wilfred," she calmly reproved, "I can't undertake to make my brother do it, too. Besides, he couldn't be a sister to you."

"But by dropping that att.i.tude--which is entirely gratuitous--you will compel him to a.s.sume it. My sentiment as regards brotherly love is brief and terse, 'Let George do it!'" Mr. Horton was complacently consuming his breakfast with an excellent appet.i.te, to which the prospect of six weeks among Bermuda lilies with Adrienne lent a fillip.

"So, brother-to-be," he continued, "you have my permission to run along down-town, and feed your savage."

"Beg pardon, sir!" The Lescott butler leaned close to the painter's ear, and spoke with a note of apology as though deploring the necessity of broaching such a subject. "But will you kindly speak with the Macdougal Street Police Station?"

"With the what?" Lescott turned in surprise, while Horton surrendered himself to unrestrained and boisterous laughter.

"The barbarian!" he exclaimed. "I call that snappy work. Twelve hours in New York, and a run-in with the police! I've noticed," he added, as the painter hurriedly quitted the room, "that, when you take the bad man out of his own c.o.c.k-pit, he rarely lasts as far as the second round."

"It occurs to me, Wilfred," suggested Adrienne, with the hint of warning in her voice, "that you may be just a trifle overdoing your att.i.tude of amus.e.m.e.nt as to this barbarian. George is fond of him, and believes in him, and George is quite often right in his judgment."

"George," added Mrs. Lescott, "had a broken arm down there in the mountains, and these people were kind to him in many ways. I wish I could see Mr. South, and thank him."

Lescott's manner over the telephone was indicating to a surprised desk sergeant a decidedly greater interest than had been antic.i.p.ated, and, after a brief and pointed conversation in that quarter, he called another number. It was a private number, not included in the telephone book and communicated with the residence of an attorney who would not have permitted the generality of clients to disturb him in advance of office hours.

A realization that the "gun-lugger" had friends "higher up" percolated at the station-house in another hour, when a limousine halted at the door, and a legal celebrity, whose ways were not the ways of police stations or magistrates' courts, stepped to the curb.

"I am waiting to meet Mr. Lescott," announced the Honorable Mr.

Wickliffe, curtly.

When a continuance of the case had been secured, and bond given, the famous lawyer and Samson lunched together at the studio as Lescott's guests, and, after the legal luminary had thawed the boy's native reserve and wrung from him his story, he was interested enough to use all his eloquence and logic in his efforts to show the mountaineer what inherent necessities of justice lay back of seemingly restrictive laws.

"You simply 'got in bad' through your failure to understand conditions here," laughed the lawyer. "I guess we can pull you through, but in future you'll have to submit to some guidance, my boy."

And Samson, rather to Lescott's surprise, nodded his head with only a ghost of resentment. From friends, he was willing to learn.

Lescott had been afraid that this initial experience would have an extinguishing effect on Samson's ambitions. He half-expected to hear the dogged announcement, "I reckon I'll go back home. I don't b'long hyar nohow." But no such remark came.

One night, they sat in the cafe of an old French hostelry where, in the polyglot chatter of three languages, one hears much shop talk of art and literature. Between the mirrored walls, Samson was for the first time glimpsing the shallow sparkle of Bohemia. The orchestra was playing an appealing waltz. Among the diners were women gowned as he had never seen women gowned before. They sat with men, and met the challenge of ardent glances with dreamy eyes. They hummed an accompaniment to the air, and sometimes loudly and publicly quarreled.

But Samson looked on as taciturn and unmoved as though he had never dined elsewhere. And yet, his eyes were busy, for suddenly he laid down his knife, and picked up his fork.

"Hit 'pears like I've got a pa.s.sel of things ter l'arn," he said, earnestly. "I reckon I mout as well begin by l'arnin' how ter eat." He had heretofore regarded a fork only as a skewer with which to hold meat in the cutting.

Lescott laughed.

"Most rules of social usage," he explained, "go back to the test of efficiency. It is considered good form to eat with the fork, princ.i.p.ally because it is more efficient,"

The boy nodded.

"All right," he acquiesced. "You l'arn me all them things, an' I'll be obleeged ter ye. Things is diff'rent in diff'rent places. I reckon the Souths hes a right ter behave es good es anybody."

When a man, whose youth and courage are at their zenith, and whose brain is tuned to concert pitch, is thrown neck and crop out of squalid isolation into the melting pot of Manhattan, puzzling problems of readjustment must follow. Samson's half-starved mind was reaching out squid-like tentacles in every direction. He was saying little, seeing much, not yet coordinating or tabulating, but grimly bolting every morsel of enlightenment. Later, he would digest; now, he only gorged.

Before he could hope to benefit by the advanced instruction of the life -cla.s.ses, he must toil and sweat over the primer stages of drawing.

Several months were spent laboring with charcoal and paper over plaster casts in Lescott's studio, and Lescott himself played instructor. When the skylight darkened with the coming of evening, the boy whose mountain nature cried out for exercise went for long tramps that carried him over many miles of city pavements, and after that, when the gas was lit, he turned, still insatiably hungry, to volumes of history, and algebra, and facts. So gluttonous was his protege's application that the painter felt called on to remonstrate against the danger of overwork. But Samson only laughed; that was one of the things he had learned to do since he left the mountains.

"I reckon," he drawled, "that as long as I'm at work, I kin keep out of trouble. Seems like that's the only way I kin do it."

A sloop-rigged boat with a crew of two was dancing before a brisk breeze through blue Bermuda waters. Off to the right, Hamilton rose sheer and colorful from the bay. At the tiller sat the white-clad figure of Adrienne Lescott. Puffs of wind that whipped the tautly bellying sheets lashed her dark hair about her face. Her lips, vividly red like poppy-petals, were just now curved into an amused smile, which made them even more than ordinarily kissable and tantalizing. Her companion was neglecting his nominal duty of tending the sheet to watch her.

"Wilfred," she teased, "your contrast is quite startling--and, in a way, effective. From head to foot, you are spotless white--but your scowl is absolutely 'the blackest black that our eyes endure.' And,"

she added, in an injured voice, "I'm sure I've been very nice to you."

"I have not yet begun to scowl," he a.s.sured her, and proceeded to show what superlatives of saturnine expression he held in reserve. "See here, Drennie, I know perfectly well that I'm a sheer imbecile to reveal the fact that you've made me mad. It pleases you too perfectly.

It makes you happier than is good for you, but----"

"It's a terrible thing to make me happy, isn't it?" she inquired, sweetly.

"Unspeakably so, when you derive happiness from the torture of your fellow-man."

"My brother-man," she amiably corrected him.

"Good Lord!" he groaned in desperation. "I ought to turn cave man, and seize you by the hair--and drag you to the nearest minister--or prophet, or whoever could marry us. Then, after the ceremony, I ought to drag you to my own grotto, and beat you."

"Would I have to wear my wedding ring in my nose?" She put the question with the manner of one much interested in acquiring useful information.

"Drennie, for the nine-hundred-thousandth time; simply, in the interests of harmony and to break the deadlock, will you marry me?"