The Call of the Cumberlands Part 5

The daughter went to a rear window, and gazed up at the mountain. The cloudless skies were still in hiding behind a curtain of mist. The woman was idly watching the vanishing fog wraiths, and her father came over to her side. Then, the baby cried, and she stepped back. Purvy himself remained at the window. It was a thing he did not often do. It left him exposed, but the most cautiously guarded life has its moments of relaxed vigilance. He stood there possibly thirty seconds, then a sharp fusillade of clear reports barked out and was shattered by the hills into a long reverberation. With a hand clasped to his chest, Purvy turned, walked to the middle of the floor, and fell.

The henchmen rushed to the open sash. They leaped out, and plunged up the mountain, tempting the a.s.sa.s.sin's fire, but the a.s.sa.s.sin was satisfied. The mountain was again as quiet as it had been at dawn. Its impenetrable mask of green was blank and unresponsive. Somewhere in the cool of the dewy treetops a squirrel barked. Here and there, the birds saluted the sparkle and freshness of June. Inside, at the middle of the store, Jesse Purvy shifted his head against his daughter's knee, and said, as one stating an expected event:

"Well, they've got me."

An ordinary mountaineer would have been carried home to die in the darkness of a dirty and windowless shack. The long-suffering star of Jesse Purvy ordained otherwise. He might go under or he might once more beat his way back and out of the quicksands of death. At all events, he would fight for life to the last gasp.

Twenty miles away in the core of the wilderness, removed from a railroad by a score of semi-perpendicular miles, a fanatic had once decided to found a school. The fact that the establishment in this place of such a school as his mind pictured was sheer madness and impossibility did not in the least deter him. It was a thing that could not be done, and it was a thing that he had done none the less.

Now a faculty of ten men, like himself holding degrees of Masters of Dreams, taught such as cared to come such things as they cared to learn. Substantial two-and three-storied buildings of square-hewn logs lay grouped in a sort of Arts and Crafts village around a clean-clipped campus. The Stagbone College property stretched twenty acres square at the foot of a hill. The drone of its own saw-mill came across the valley. In a book-lined library, wainscoted in natural woods of three colors, the original fanatic often sat reflecting pleasurably on his folly. Higher up the hillside stood a small, but model, hospital, with a modern operating table and a case of surgical instruments, which, it was said, the State could not surpa.s.s. These things had been the gifts of friends who liked such a type of G.o.d-inspired madness. A "fotched-on"

trained nurse was in attendance. From time to time, eminent Bluegra.s.s surgeons came to Hixon by rail, rode twenty miles on mules, and held clinics on the mountainside.

To this haven, Jesse Purvy, the murder lord, was borne in a litter carried on the shoulders of his dependents. Here, as his steadfast guardian star decreed, he found two prominent medical visitors, who hurried him to the operating table. Later, he was removed to a white bed, with the June sparkle in his eyes, pleasantly modulated through drawn blinds, and the June rustle and bird chorus in his ears--and his own thoughts in his brain.

Conscious, but in great pain, Purvy beckoned Jim Asberry and Aaron Hollis, his chiefs of bodyguard, to his bedside, and waved the nurse back out of hearing.

"If I don't get well," he said, feebly, "there's a job for you two boys. I reckon you know what it is?"

They nodded, and Asberry whispered a name:

"Samson South?"

"Yes," Purvy spoke in a weak whisper; but the old vindictiveness was not smothered. "You got the old man, I reckon you can manage the cub.

If you don't, he'll get you both one day."

The two henchmen scowled.

"I'll git him to-morrer," growled Asberry. "Thar hain't no sort of use in a-waitin'."

"No!" For an instant Purvy's voice rose out of its weakness to its old staccato tone of command, a tone which brought obedience. "If I get well, I have other plans. Never mind what they are. That's my business.

If I don't die, leave him alone, until I give other orders." He lay back and fought for breath. The nurse came over with gentle insistence, ordering quiet, but the man, whose violent life might be closing, had business yet to discuss with his confidential va.s.sals. Again, he waved her back.

"If I get well," he went on, "and Samson South is killed meanwhile, I won't live long either. It would be my life for his. Keep close to him.

The minute you hear of my death--get him." He paused again, then supplemented, "You two will find something mighty interestin' in my will."

It was afternoon when Purvy reached the hospital, and, at nightfall of the same day, there arrived at his store's entrance, on stumbling, hard -ridden mules, several men, followed by two tawny hounds whose long ears flapped over their lean jaws, and whose eyes were listless and tired, but whose black muzzles wrinkled and sniffed with that sensitive instinct which follows the man-scent. The ex-sheriff's family were inst.i.tuting proceedings independent of the Chief's orders. The next morning, this party plunged into the mountain tangle, and beat the cover with the bloodhounds in leash.

The two gentle-faced dogs picked their way between the flowering rhododendrons, the glistening laurels, the feathery pine sprouts and the moss-covered rocks. They went gingerly and alertly on ungainly, cushioned feet. Just as their masters were despairing, they came to a place directly over the store, where a branch had been bent back and hitched to clear the outlook, and where a boot heel had crushed the moss. There one of them raised his nose high into the air, opened his mouth, and let out a long, deep-chested bay of discovery.

CHAPTER VI

George Lescott had known hospitality of many brands and degrees. He had been the lionized celebrity in places of fashion. He had been the guest of equally famous brother artists in the cities of two hemispheres, and, since sincere painting had been his pole-star, he had gone where his art's wanderl.u.s.t beckoned. His most famous canvas, perhaps, was his "Prayer Toward Mecca," which hangs in the Metropolitan. It shows, with a power that holds the observer in a compelling grip, the wonderful colors of a sunset across the desert.

One seems to feel the renewed life that comes to the caravan with the welcome of the oasis. One seems to hear the grunting of the kneeling camels and the stirring of the date palms. The Bedouins have spread their prayer-rugs, and behind them burns the west. Lescott caught in that, as he had caught in his mountain sketches, the broad spirit of the thing. To paint that canvas, he had endured days of racking camel -travel and burning heat and thirst. He had followed the lure of transitory beauty to remote sections of the world. The present trip was only one of many like it, which had brought him into touch with varying peoples and distinctive types of life. He told himself that never had he found men at once so crude and so courteous as these hosts, who, facing personal perils, had still time and willingness to regard his comfort.

They could not speak grammatically; they could hardly offer him the necessities of life, yet they gave all they had, with a touch of courtliness.

In a fabric soiled and threadbare, one may sometimes trace the tarnished design that erstwhile ran in gold through a rich pattern.

Lescott could not but think of some fine old growth gone to seed and decay, but still bearing at its crest a single beautiful blossom while it held in its veins a poison.

Such a blossom was Sally. Her scarlet lips and sweet, grave eyes might have been the inheritance gift of some remote ancestress whose feet, instead of being bare and brown, had trod in high-heeled, satin slippers. When Lord Fairfax governed the Province of Virginia, that first Sally, in the stateliness of panniered brocades and powdered hair, may have tripped a measure to the harpsichord or spinet. Certain it is she trod with no more untrammeled grace than her wild descendant.

For the nation's most untamed and untaught fragment is, after all, an unamalgamated stock of British and Scottish bronze, which now and then strikes back to its beginning and sends forth a pure peal from its corroded bell-metal. In all America is no other element whose blood is so purely what the Nation's was at birth.

The coming of the kinsmen, who would stay until the present danger pa.s.sed, had filled the house. The four beds in the cabin proper were full, and some slept on floor mattresses. Lescott, because a guest and wounded, was given a small room aside. Samson, however, shared his quarters in order to perform any service that an injured man might require. It had been a full and unusual day for the painter, and its incidents crowded in on him in retrospect and drove off the possibility of sleep. Samson, too, seemed wakeful, and in the isolation of the dark room the two men fell into conversation, which almost lasted out the night. Samson went into the confessional. This was the first human being he had ever met to whom he could unburden his soul.

The thirst to taste what knowledge lay beyond the hills; the unnamed wanderl.u.s.t that had at times brought him a restiveness so poignant as to be agonizing; the undefined attuning of his heart to the beauty of sky and hill; these matters he had hitherto kept locked in guilty silence. To the men of his clan these were eccentricities bordering on the abnormal; frailties to be pa.s.sed over with charity, as one would pa.s.s over the infirmities of an afflicted child. To Samson they looked as to a sort of feud Messiah. His destiny was stern, and held no place for dreams. For him, they could see only danger in an insatiable hunger for learning. In a weak man, a school-teacher or parson sort of a man, that might be natural, but this young c.o.c.k of their walk was being reared for the pit--for conflict. What was important in him was stamina, and sharp strength of spur. These qualities he had proven from infancy. Weakening proclivities must be eliminated.

So, the boy had been forced to keep throttled impulses that, for being throttled, had smoldered and set on fire the inner depths of his soul.

During long nights, he had secretly digested every available book. Yet, in order to vindicate himself from the unspoken accusation of growing weak, of forgetting his destiny, he had courted trouble, and sought combat. He was too close to his people's point of view for perspective.

He shared their idea that the thinking man weakens himself as a fighting man. He had never heard of a Cyrano de Bergerac, or an Aramis.

Now had come some one with whom he could talk: a man who had traveled and followed, without shame, the beckoning of Learning and Beauty. At once, the silent boy found himself talking intimately, and the artist found himself studying one of the strangest human paradoxes he had yet seen.

In a cove, or lowland pocket, stretching into the mountainside, lay the small and meager farm of the Widow Miller. The Widow Miller was a "South"; that is to say she fell, by tie of marriage, under the protection of the clan-head. She lived alone with her fourteen-year-old son and her sixteen-year-old daughter. The daughter was Sally. At sixteen, the woman's figure had been as pliantly slim, her step as light as was her daughter's now. At forty, she was withered. Her face was hard, and her lips had forgotten how to smile. Her shoulders sagged, and she was an old woman, who smoked her pipe, and taught her children that rudimentary code of virtue to which the mountains subscribe. She believed in a brimstone h.e.l.l and a personal devil. She believed that the whale had swallowed Jonah, but she thought that "Thou shalt not kill" was an edict enunciated by the Almighty with mental reservations.

The sun rose on the morning after Lescott arrived, the mists lifted, and the cabin of the Widow Miller stood revealed. Against its corners several hogs sc.r.a.ped their bristled backs with satisfied grunts. A noisy rooster c.o.c.ked his head inquiringly sidewise before the open door, and, hopping up to the sill, invaded the main room. A towsled -headed boy made his way to the barn to feed the cattle, and a red patch of color, as bright and tuneful as a Kentucky cardinal, appeared at the door between the morning-glory vines. The red patch of color was Sally.

She made her way, carrying a bucket, to the spring, where she knelt down and gazed at her own image in the water. Her grave lips broke into a smile, as the reflected face, framed in its ma.s.s of reflected red hair, gazed back at her. Then, the smile broke into a laugh.

"h.e.l.lo, Sally Miller!" she gaily accosted her picture-self. "How air ye this mornin', Sally Miller?"

She plunged her face deep in the cool spring, and raised it to shake back her hair, until the water flew from its ma.s.ses. She laughed again, because it was another day, and because she was alive. She waded about for a while where the spring joined the creek, and delightedly watched the schools of tiny, almost transparent, minnows that darted away at her coming. Then, standing on a rock, she paused with her head bent, and listened until her ears caught the faint tinkle of a cowbell, which she recognized. Nodding her head joyously, she went off into the woods, to emerge at the end of a half-hour later, carrying a pail of milk, and smiling joyously again--because it was almost breakfast time.

But, before going home, she set down her bucket by the stream, and, with a quick glance toward the house to make sure that she was not observed, climbed through the brush, and was lost to view. She followed a path that her own feet had made, and after a steep course upward, came upon a bald face of rock, which stood out storm-battered where a rift went through the backbone of the ridge. This point of vantage commanded the other valley. From its edge, a white oak, dwarfed, but patriarchal, leaned out over an abrupt drop. No more sweeping or splendid view could be had within miles, but it was not for any reason so general that Sally had made her pilgrimage. Down below, across the treetops, were a roof and a chimney from which a thread of smoke rose in an attenuated shaft. That was Spicer South's house, and Samson's home. The girl leaned against the gnarled bowl of the white oak, and waved toward the roof and chimney. She cupped her hands, and raised them to her lips like one who means to shout across a great distance, then she whispered so low that only she herself could hear:

"h.e.l.lo, Samson South!"

She stood for a s.p.a.ce looking down, and forgot to laugh, while her eyes grew religiously and softly deep, then, turning, she ran down the slope. She had performed her morning devotions.

That day at the house of Spicer South was an off day. The kinsmen who had stopped for the night stayed on through the morning. Nothing was said of the possibility of trouble. The men talked crops, and tossed horseshoes in the yard; but no one went to work in the fields, and all remained within easy call. Only young Tamarack Spicer, a raw-boned nephew, wore a sullen face, and made a great show of cleaning his rifle and pistol. He even went out in the morning, and practised at target -shooting, and Lescott, who was still very pale and weak, but able to wander about at will, gained the impression that in young Tamarack he was seeing the true type of the mountain "bad-man." Tamarack seemed willing to feed that idea, and admitted apart to Lescott that, while he obeyed the dictates of the truce, he found them galling, and was straining at his leash.

"I don't take nothin' offen n.o.body," he sullenly confided. "The Hollmans gives me my half the road."

Shortly after dinner, he disappeared, and, when the afternoon was well advanced, Samson, too, with his rifle on his arm, strolled toward the stile. Old Spicer South glanced up, and removed his pipe from his mouth to inquire:

"Whar be ye a-goin'?"

"I hain't a-goin' fur," was the non-committal response.

"Meybe hit mout be a good idea ter stay round clost fer a spell." The old man made the suggestion casually, and the boy replied in the same fashion.

"I hain't a-goin' ter be outen sight."

He sauntered down the road, but, when he had pa.s.sed out of vision, he turned sharply into the woods, and began climbing. His steps carried him to the rift in the ridge where the white oak stood sentinel over the watch-tower of rock. As he came over the edge from one side, his bare feet making no sound, he saw Sally sitting there, with her hands resting on the moss and her eyes deeply troubled. She was gazing fixedly ahead, and her lips were trembling. At once Samson's face grew black. Some one had been making Sally unhappy. Then, he saw beyond her a standing figure, which the tree trunk had hitherto concealed. It was the loose-knitted figure of young Tamarack Spicer.

"In course," Spicer was saying, "we don't 'low Samson shot Jesse Purvy, but them Hollmans'll 'spicion him, an' I heered just now, thet them dawgs was trackin' straight up hyar from the mouth of Misery.

They'll git hyar against sundown."