The Call of the Cumberlands Part 35

"Five years ago, I should have met you with a Winchester rifle,"

laughed the Kentuckian. "Now I shall not."

"I'll go with you, Horton, and make a sketch or two," volunteered George Lescott, who just then arrived from town. "And, by the way, Samson, here's a letter that came for you just as I left the studio."

The mountaineer took the envelope with a Hixon postmark, and for an instant gazed at it with a puzzled expression. It was addressed in a feminine hand, which he did not recognize. It was careful, but perfect, writing, such as one sees in a school copybook. With an apology he tore the covering, and read the letter. Adrienne, glancing at his face, saw it suddenly pale and grow as set and hard as marble.

Samson's eyes were dwelling with only partial comprehension on the script. This is what he read:

"DEAR SAMSON: The war is on again. Tamarack Spicer has killed Jim Asberry, and the Hollmans have killed Tamarack. Uncle Spicer is shot, but he may get well. There is n.o.body to lead the Souths. I am trying to hold them down until I hear from you. Don't come if you don't want to--but the gun is ready. With love,

SALLY."

CHAPTER XXV

Samson, throwing things hurriedly into his bag, heard a knock on his door. He opened it, and outside in the hall stood Adrienne. Her face was pale, and she leaned a little on the hand which rested against the white jamb.

"What does it mean?" she asked.

He came over.

"It means, Drennie," he said, "that you may make a pet of a leopard cub, but there will come a day when something of the jungle comes out in him --and he must go. My uncle has been shot, and the feud is on--I've been sent for."

He paused, and she half-whispered in an appealing voice:

"Don't go."

"You don't mean that," he said, quietly. "If it were you, you would go. Whether I get back here or not"--he hesitated--"my grat.i.tude will be with you--always." He broke off, and said suddenly: "Drennie, I don't want to say good-by to you. I can't."

"It's not necessary yet," she answered. "I'm going to drive you to New York."

"No!" he exclaimed. "It's too far, and I've got to go fast----"

"That's why I'm going," she promptly a.s.sured him. "I'm the only fool on these premises that can get all the speed out of a car that's in her engine--and the constables are good to me. I just came up here to--" she hesitated, then added--"to see you alone for a moment, and to say that teacher has never had such a bright little pupil, in her life--and--"

the flippancy with which she was masking her feeling broke and she added, in a shaken voice as she thrust out her hand, man-fashion--"and to say, G.o.d keep you, boy."

He seized the hand in both his own, and gripped it hard. He tried to speak, but only shook his head with a rueful smile.

"I'll be waiting at the door with the car," she told him, as she left.

Horton, too, came in to volunteer a.s.sistance.

"Wilfred," said Samson, feelingly, 'there isn't any man I'd rather have at my back, in a stand-up fight. But this isn't exactly that sort.

Where I'm going, a fellow has got to be invisible. No, you can't help, now. Come down later. We'll organize Horton, South and Co."

"South, Horton and Co.," corrected Wilfred; "native sons first."

At that moment, Adrienne believed she had decided the long-mooted question. Of course, she had not. It was merely the stress of the moment; exaggerating the importance of one she was losing at the expense of the one who was left. Still, as she sat in the car waiting, her world seemed slipping into chaos under her feet, and, when Samson had taken his place at her side, the machine leaped forward into a reckless plunge of speed.

Samson stopped at his studio, and threw open an old closet where, from a littered pile of discarded background draperies, canvases and stretchers, he fished out a buried and dust-covered pair of saddlebags.

They had long lain there forgotten, but they held the rusty clothes in which he had left Misery. He threw them over his arm and dropped them at Adrienne's feet, as he handed her the studio keys.

"Will you please have George look after things, and make the necessary excuses to my sitters? He'll find a list of posing appointments in the desk."

The girl nodded.

"What are those?" she asked, gazing at the great leather pockets as at some relic unearthed from Pompeian excavations.

"Saddlebags, Drennie," he said, "and in them are homespun and jeans.

One can't lead his 'fluttered folk and wild' in a cutaway coat."

Shortly they were at the station, and the man, standing at the side of the machine, took her hand.

"It's not good-by, you know," he said, smiling. "Just _auf Wiedersehen_."

She nodded and smiled, too, but, as she smiled, she shivered, and turned the car slowly. There was no need to hurry, now.

Samson had caught the fastest west-bound express on the schedule. In thirty-six hours, he would be at Hixon. There were many things which his brain must attack and digest in these hours. He must arrange his plan of action to its minutest detail, because he would have as little time for reflection, once he had reached his own country, as a wildcat flung into a pack of hounds.

From the railroad station to his home, he must make his way--most probably fight his way--through thirty miles of hostile territory where all the trails were watched. And yet, for the time, all that seemed too remotely unreal to hold his thoughts. He was seeing the coolly waving curtains of flowered chintz that stirred in the windows of his room at the Lescott house and the crimson ramblers that nodded against the sky.

He was hearing a knock on the door, and seeing, as it opened, the figure of Adrienne Lescott and the look that had been in her eyes.

He took out Sally's letter, and read it once more. He read it mechanically and as a piece of news that had brought evil tidings.

Then, suddenly, another aspect of it struck him--an aspect to which the shock of its reception had until this tardy moment blinded him. The letter was perfectly grammatical and penned in a hand of copy-book roundness and evenness. The address, the body of the missive, and the signature, were all in one chirography. She would not have intrusted the writing of this letter to any one else.

Sally had learned to write!

Moreover, at the end were the words "with love." It was all plain now.

Sally had never repudiated him. She was declaring herself true to her mission and her love. All that heartbreak through which he had gone had been due to his own misconception, and in that misconception he had drawn into himself and had stopped writing to her. Even his occasional letters had for two years ceased to brighten her heart-strangling isolation--and she was still waiting.... She had sent no word of appeal until the moment had come of which she had promised to inform him.

Sally, abandoned and alone, had been fighting her way up--that she might stand on his level.

"Good G.o.d!" groaned the man, in abjectly bitter self-contempt. His hand went involuntarily to his cropped head, and dropped with a gesture of self-doubting. He looked down at his tan shoes and silk socks. He rolled back his shirtsleeve and contemplated the forearm that had once been as brown and tough as leather. It was now the arm of a city man, except for the burning of one outdoor week. He was returning at the eleventh hour--stripped of the faith of his kinsmen, half-stripped of his faith in himself. If he were to realize the constructive dreams of which he had last night so confidently prattled to Adrienne, he must lead his people from under the blighting shadow of the feud.

Yet, if he was to lead them at all, he must first regain their shaken confidence, and to do that he must go, at their head, through this mire of war to vindication. Only a fighting South could hope to be heard in behalf of peace. His eventual regeneration belonged to some to-morrow.

To-day held the need of such work as that of the first Samson--to slay.

He must reappear before his kinsmen as much as possible the boy who had left them--not the fop with newfangled affectations. His eyes fell upon the saddlebags on the floor of the Pullman, and he smiled satirically. He would like to step from the train at Hixon and walk brazenly through the town in those old clothes, challenging every hostile glance. If they shot him down on the streets, as they certainly would do, it would end his questioning and his anguish of dilemma. He would welcome that, but it would, after all, be shirking the issue.

He must get out of Hixon and into his own country unrecognized. The lean boy of four years ago was the somewhat filled out man now. The one concession that he had made to Paris life was the wearing of a closely cropped mustache. That he still wore--had worn it chiefly because he liked to hear Adrienne's humorous denunciation of it. He knew that, in his present guise and dress, he had an excellent chance of walking through the streets of Hixon as a stranger. And, after leaving Hixon, there was a mission to be performed at Jesse Purvy's store. As he thought of that mission a grim glint came to his pupils.

All journeys end, and as Samson pa.s.sed through the tawdry cars of the local train near Hixon he saw several faces which he recognized, but they either eyed him in inexpressive silence, or gave him the greeting of the "furriner."

Then the whistle shrieked for the trestle over the Middle Fork, and at only a short distance rose the cupola of the brick court-house and the scattered roofs of the town. Scattered over the green slopes by the river bank lay the white spread of a tented company street, and, as he looked out, he saw uniformed figures moving to and fro, and caught the ring of a bugle call. So the militia was on deck; things must be bad, he reflected. He stood on the platform and looked down as the engine roared along the trestle. There were two gatling guns. One pointed its muzzle toward the town, and the other scowled up at the face of the mountain. Sentries paced their beats. Men in undershirts lay dozing outside tent flaps. It was all a picture of disciplined readiness, and yet Samson knew that soldiers made of painted tin would be equally effective. These military forces must remain subservient to local civil authorities, and the local civil authorities obeyed the nod of Judge Hollman and Jesse Purvy.

As Samson crossed the toll-bridge to the town proper he pa.s.sed two brown-shirted militiamen, lounging on the rail of the middle span. They grinned at him, and, recognizing the outsider from his clothes, one of them commented: