The Call of the Cumberlands Part 37

But they had much to say to each other, and, finally, Samson broke the silence:

"Did ye think I wasn't a-comin' back, Sally?" he questioned, softly.

At that moment, he had no realization that his tongue had ever fashioned smoother phrases. And she, too, who had been making war on crude idioms, forgot, as she answered:

"Ye done said ye was comin'." Then, she added a happy lie: "I knowed plumb sh.o.r.e ye'd do hit."

After a while, she drew away, and said, slowly:

"Samson, I've done kept the old rifle-gun ready fer ye. Ye said ye'd need it bad when ye come back, an' I've took care of it."

She stood there holding it, and her voice dropped almost to a whisper as she added:

"It's been a lot of comfort to me sometimes, because it was your'n. I knew if ye stopped keerin' fer me, ye wouldn't let me keep it--an' as long as I had it, I--" She broke off, and the fingers of one hand touched the weapon caressingly.

The man knew many things now that he had not known when he said good- by. He recognized in the very gesture with which she stroked the old walnut stock the pathetic heart-hunger of a nature which had been denied the fulfillment of its strength, and which had been bestowing on an inanimate object something that might almost have been the stirring of the mother instinct for a child. Now, thank G.o.d, her life should never lack anything that a flood-tide of love could bring to it. He bent his head in a mute sort of reverence.

After a long while, they found time for the less-wonderful things.

"I got your letter," he said, seriously, "and I came at once." As he began to speak of concrete facts, he dropped again into ordinary English, and did not know that he had changed his manner of speech.

For an instant, Sally looked up into his face, then with a sudden laugh, she informed him:

"I can say, 'isn't,' instead of, 'hain't,' too. How did you like my writing?"

He held her off at arms' length, and looked at her pridefully, but under his gaze her eyes fell, and her face flushed with a sudden diffidence and a new shyness of realization. She wore a calico dress, but at her throat was a soft little bow of ribbon. She was no longer the totally unself-conscious wood-nymph, though as natural and instinctive as in the other days. Suddenly, she drew away from him a little, and her hands went slowly to her breast, and rested there. She was fronting a great crisis, but, in the first flush of joy, she had forgotten it. She had spent lonely nights struggling for rudiments; she had sought and fought to refashion herself, so that, if he came, he need not be ashamed of her. And now he had come, and, with a terrible clarity and distinctness, she realized how pitifully little she had been able to accomplish. Would she pa.s.s muster? She stood there before him, frightened, self-conscious and palpitating, then her voice came in a whisper:

"Samson, dear, I'm not holdin' you to any promise. Those things we said were a long time back. Maybe we'd better forget 'em now, and begin all over again."

But, again, he crushed her in his arms, and his voice rose triumphantly:

"Sally, I have no promises to take back, and you have made none that I'm ever going to let you take back--not while life lasts!"

Her laugh was the delicious music of happiness. "I don't want to take them back," she said. Then, suddenly, she added, importantly: "I wear shoes and stockings now, and I've been to school a little. I'm awfully-- awfully ignorant, Samson, but I've started, and I reckon you can teach me."

His voice choked. Then, her hands strayed up, and clasped themselves about his head.

"Oh, Samson," she cried, as though someone had struck her, "you've cut yore ha'r."

"It will grow again," he laughed. But he wished that he had not had to make that excuse. Then, being honest, he told her all about Adrienne Lescott--even about how, after he believed that he had been outcast by his uncle and herself, he had had his moments of doubt. Now that it was all so clear, now that there could never be doubt, he wanted the woman who had been so true a friend to know the girl whom he loved. He loved them both, but was in love with only one. He wanted to present to Sally the friend who had made him, and to the friend who had made him the Sally of whom he was proud. He wanted to tell Adrienne that now he could answer her question--that each of them meant to the other exactly the same thing: they were friends of the rarer sort, who had for a little time been in danger of mistaking their comradeship for pa.s.sion.

As they talked, sitting on the stile, Sally held the rifle across her knees. Except for their own voices and the soft chorus of night sounds, the hills were wrapped in silence--a silence as soft as velvet.

Suddenly, in a pause, there came to the girl's ears the cracking of a twig in the woods. With the old instinctive training of the mountains, she leaped noiselessly down, and for an instant stood listening with intent ears. Then, in a low, tense whisper, as she thrust the gun into the man's hands, she cautioned:

"Git out of sight. Maybe they've done found out ye've come back--maybe they're trailin' ye!"

With an instant shock, she remembered what mission had brought him back, and what was his peril; and he, too, for whom the happiness of the moment had swallowed up other things, came back to a recognition of facts. Dropping into the old woodcraft, he melted out of sight into the shadow, thrusting the girl behind him, and crouched against the fence, throwing the rifle forward, and peering into the shadows. As he stood there, balancing the gun once more in his hands, old instincts began to stir, old battle hunger to rise, and old realizations of primitive things to a.s.sault him. Then, when they had waited with bated breath until they were both rea.s.sured, he rose and swung the stock to his shoulder several times. With something like a sigh of contentment, he said, half to himself:

"Hit feels mighty natural ter throw this old rifle-gun up. I reckon maybe I kin still shoot hit."

"I learned some things down there at school, Samson," said the girl, slowly, "and I wish--I wish you didn't have to use it."

"Jim Asberry is dead," said the man, gravely.

"Yes," she echoed, "Jim Asberry's dead." She stopped there. Yet, her sigh completed the sentence as though she had added, "but he was only one of several. Your vow went farther."

After a moment's pause, Samson added:

"Jesse Purvy's dead."

The girl drew back, with a frightened gasp. She knew what this meant, or thought she did.

"Jesse Purvy!" she repeated. "Oh, Samson, did ye--?" She broke off, and covered her face with her hands.

"No, Sally," he told her. "I didn't have to." He recited the day's occurrences, and they sat together on the stile, until the moon had sunk to the ridge top.

Captain Sidney Callomb, who had been despatched in command of a militia company to quell the trouble in the mountains, should have been a soldier by profession. All his enthusiasms were martial. His precision was military. His cool eye held a note of command which made itself obeyed. He had a rare gift of handling men, which made them ready to execute the impossible. But the elder Callomb had trained his son to succeed him at the head of a railroad system, and the young man had philosophically undertaken to satisfy his military ambitions with State Guard shoulder-straps.

The deepest sorrow and mortification he had ever known was that which came to him when Tamarack Spicer, his prisoner of war and a man who had been surrendered on the strength of his personal guarantee, had been a.s.sa.s.sinated before his eyes. That the manner of this killing had been so outrageously treacherous that it could hardly have been guarded against, failed to bring him solace. It had shown the inefficiency of his efforts, and had brought on a carnival of blood-letting, when he had come here to safeguard against that danger. In some fashion, he must make amends. He realized, too, and it rankled deeply, that his men were not being genuinely used to serve the State, but as instruments of the Hollmans, and he had seen enough to distrust the Hollmans. Here, in Hixon, he was seeing things from only one angle. He meant to learn something more impartial.

Besides being on duty as an officer of militia, Callomb was a Kentuckian, interested in the problems of his Commonwealth, and, when he went back, he knew that his cousin, who occupied the executive mansion at Frankfort, would be interested in his suggestions. The Governor had asked him to report his impressions, and he meant to form them after a.n.a.lysis.

So, smarting under his impotency, Captain Callomb came out of his tent one morning, and strolled across the curved bridge to the town proper.

He knew that the Grand Jury was convening, and he meant to sit as a spectator in the court-house and study proceedings when they were instructed.

But before he reached the court-house, where for a half-hour yet the cupola bell would not clang out its summons to veniremen and witnesses, he found fresh fuel for his wrath.

He was not a popular man with these clansmen, though involuntarily he had been useful in leading their victims to the slaughter. There was a scowl in his eyes that they did not like, and an arrogant hint of iron laws in the livery he wore, which their instincts distrusted.

Callomb saw without being told that over the town lay a sense of portentous tidings. Faces were more sullen than usual. Men fell into scowling knots and groups. A clerk at a store where he stopped for tobacco inquired as he made change:

"Heered the news, stranger?"

"What news?"

"This here 'Wildcat' Samson South come back yis-tiddy, an' last evenin' towards sundown, Jesse Purvy an' Aaron Hollis was shot dead."

For an instant, the soldier stood looking at the young clerk, his eyes kindling into a wrathful blaze. Then, he cursed under his breath. At the door, he turned on his heel:

"Where can Judge Smithers be found at this time of day?" he demanded.

CHAPTER XXVII