The Call of the Cumberlands by Charles Neville Buck
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Charles Neville Buck >> The Call of the Cumberlands
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21 Produced by Avinash Kothare, Tiffany Vergon, Charles Aldarondo,
Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
THE CALL OF THE CUMBERLANDS
BY
CHARLES NEVILLE BUCK
CHAPTER I
Close to the serried backbone of the Cumberland ridge through a sky of
mountain clarity, the sun seemed hesitating before its descent to the
horizon. The sugar-loaf cone that towered above a creek called Misery
was pointed and edged with emerald tracery where the loftiest timber
thrust up its crest plumes into the sun. On the hillsides it would be
light for more than an hour yet, but below, where the waters tossed
themselves along in a chorus of tiny cascades, the light was already
thickening into a cathedral gloom. Down there the "furriner" would have
seen only the rough course of the creek between moss-velveted and
shaded bowlders of titanic proportions. The native would have
recognized the country road in these tortuous twistings. Now there were
no travelers, foreign or native, and no sounds from living throats
except at intervals the clear "Bob White" of a nesting partridge, and
the silver confidence of the red cardinal flitting among the pines.
Occasionally, too, a stray whisper of breeze stole along the creek-bed
and rustled the beeches, or stirred in the broad, fanlike leaves of the
"cucumber trees." A great block of sandstone, to whose summit a man
standing in his saddle could scarcely reach his fingertips, towered
above the stream, with a gnarled scrub oak clinging tenaciously to its
apex. Loftily on both sides climbed the mountains cloaked in laurel and
timber.
Suddenly the leafage was thrust aside from above by a cautious hand,
and a shy, half-wild girl appeared in the opening. For an instant she
halted, with her brown fingers holding back the brushwood, and raised
her face as though listening. Across the slope drifted the call of the
partridge, and with perfect imitation she whistled back an answer. It
would have seemed appropriate to anyone who had seen her that she
should talk bird language to the birds. She was herself as much a wood
creature as they, and very young. That she was beautiful was not
strange. The women of the mountains have a morning-glory bloom--until
hardship and drudgery have taken toll of their youth--and she could not
have been more than sixteen.
It was June, and the hills, which would be bleakly forbidding barriers
in winter, were now as blithely young as though they had never known
the scourging of sleet or the blight of wind. The world was abloom, and
the girl, too, was in her early June, and sentiently alive with the
strength of its full pulse-tide. She was slim and lithely resilient of
step. Her listening attitude was as eloquent of pausing elasticity as
that of the gray squirrel. Her breathing was soft, though she had come
down a steep mountainside, and as fragrant as the breath of the elder
bushes that dashed the banks with white sprays of blossom. She brought
with her to the greens and grays and browns of the woodland's heart a
new note of color, for her calico dress was like the red cornucopias of
the trumpet-flower, and her eyes were blue like little scraps of sky.
Her heavy, brown-red hair fell down over her shoulders in loose
profusion. The coarse dress was freshly briar-torn, and in many places
patched; and it hung to the lithe curves of her body in a fashion which
told that she wore little else. She had no hat, but the same spirit of
childlike whimsey that caused her eyes to dance as she answered the
partridge's call had led her to fashion for her own crowning a headgear
of laurel leaves and wild roses. As she stood with the toes of one bare
foot twisting in the gratefully cool moss, she laughed with the sheer
exhilaration of life and youth, and started out on the table top of the
huge rock. But there she halted suddenly with a startled exclamation,
and drew instinctively back. What she saw might well have astonished
her, for it was a thing she had never seen before and of which she had
never heard. Now she paused in indecision between going forward toward
exploration and retreating from new and unexplained phenomena. In her
quick instinctive movements was something like the irresolution of the
fawn whose nostrils have dilated to a sense of possible danger.
Finally, reassured by the silence, she slipped across the broad face of
the flat rock for a distance of twenty-five feet, and paused again to
listen.
At the far edge lay a pair of saddlebags, such as form the only
practical equipment for mountain travelers. They were ordinary
saddlebags, made from the undressed hide of a brindle cow, and they
were fat with tight packing. A pair of saddlebags lying unclaimed at
the roadside would in themselves challenge curiosity. But in this
instance they gave only the prefatory note to a stranger story. Near
them lay a tin box, littered with small and unfamiliar-looking tubes of
soft metal, all grotesquely twisted and stained, and beside the box was
a strangely shaped plaque of wood, smeared with a dozen hues. That this
plaque was a painter's sketching palette was a thing which she could
not know, since the ways of artists had to do with a world as remote
from her own as the life of the moon or stars. It was one of those
vague mysteries that made up the wonderful life of "down below." Even
the names of such towns as Louisville and Lexington meant nothing
definite to this girl who could barely spell out, "The cat caught the
rat," in the primer. Yet here beside the box and palette stood a
strange jointed tripod, and upon it was some sort of sheet. What it all
meant, and what was on the other side of the sheet became a matter of
keenly alluring interest. Why had these things been left here in such
confusion? If there was a man about who owned them he would doubtless
return to claim them. Possibly he was wandering about the broken bed of
the creek, searching for a spring, and that would not take long. No one
drank creek water. At any moment he might return and discover her. Such
a contingency held untold terrors for her shyness, and yet to turn her
back on so interesting a mystery would be insupportable. Accordingly,
she crept over, eyes and ears alert, and slipped around to the front of
the queer tripod, with all her muscles poised in readiness for flight.
A half-rapturous and utterly astonished cry broke from her lips. She
stared a moment, then dropped to the moss-covered rock, leaning back on
her brown hands and gazing intently. She sat there forgetful of
everything except the sketch which stood on the collapsible easel.
"Hit's purty!" she approved, in a low, musical murmur. "Hit's plumb
dead _beautiful_!" Her eyes were glowing with delighted approval.
She had never before seen a picture more worthy than the chromos of
advertising calendars and the few crude prints that find their way into
the roughest places, and she was a passionate, though totally
unconscious, devotée of beauty. Now she was sitting before a sketch,
its paint still moist, which more severe critics would have pronounced
worthy of accolade. Of course, it was not a finished picture--merely a
study of what lay before her--but the hand that had placed these
brushstrokes on the academy board was the sure, deft hand of a master
of landscape, who had caught the splendid spirit of the thing, and
fixed it immutably in true and glowing appreciation. Who he was; where
he had gone; why his work stood there unfinished and abandoned, were
details which for the moment this half-savage child-woman forgot to
question. She was conscious only of a sense of revelation and awe. Then
she saw other boards, like the one upon the easel, piled near the paint
-box. These were dry, and represented the work of other days; but they
were all pictures of her own mountains, and in each of them, as in this
one, was something that made her heart leap.
To her own people, these steep hillsides and "coves" and valleys were
a matter of course. In their stony soil, they labored by day: and in
their shadows slept when work was done. Yet, someone had discovered
that they held a picturesque and rugged beauty; that they were not
merely steep fields where the plough was useless and the hoe must be
used. She must tell Samson: Samson, whom she held in an artless
exaltation of hero-worship; Samson, who was so "smart" that he thought
about things beyond her understanding; Samson, who could not only read
and write, but speculate on problematical matters.
Suddenly she came to her feet with a swift-darting impulse of alarm.
Her ear had caught a sound. She cast searching glances about her, but
the tangle was empty of humanity. The water still murmured over the
rocks undisturbed. There was no sign of human presence, other than
herself, that her eyes could discover--and yet to her ears came the
sound again, and this time more distinctly. It was the sound of a man's
voice, and it was moaning as if in pain. She rose and searched vainly
through the bushes of the hillside where the rock ran out from the
woods. She lifted her skirts and splashed her bare feet in the shallow
creek water, wading persistently up and down. Her shyness was
forgotten. The groan was a groan of a human creature in distress, and
she must find and succor the person from whom it came.
Certain sounds are baffling as to direction. A voice from overhead or
broken by echoing obstacles does not readily betray its source. Finally
she stood up and listened once more intently--her attitude full of
tense earnestness.
"I'm shore a fool," she announced, half-aloud. "I'm shore a plumb
fool." Then she turned and disappeared in the deep cleft between the
gigantic bowlder upon which she had been sitting and another--small
only by comparison. There, ten feet down, in a narrow alley littered
with ragged stones, lay the crumpled body of a man. It lay with the
left arm doubled under it, and from a gash in the forehead trickled a
thin stream of blood. Also, it was the body of such a man as she had
not seen before.
CHAPTER II
Although from the man in the gulch came a low groan mingled with his
breathing, it was not such a sound as comes from fully conscious lips,
but rather that of a brain dulled into coma. His lids drooped over his
eyes, hiding the pupils; and his cheeks were pallid, with outstanding
veins above the temples.
Freed from her fettering excess of shyness by his condition, the girl
stepped surely from foothold to foothold until she reached his side.
She stood for a moment with one hand on the dripping walls of rock,
looking down while her hair fell about her face. Then, dropping to her
knees, she shifted the doubled body into a leaning posture,
straightened the limbs, and began exploring with efficient fingers for
broken bones.
She was a slight girl, and not tall; but the curves of her young
figure were slimly rounded, and her firm muscles were capably strong.
This man was, in comparison with those rugged types she knew,
effeminately delicate. His slim, long-fingered hands reminded her of a
bird's claws. The up-rolled sleeves of a blue flannel shirt disclosed
forearms well-enough sinewed, but instead of being browned to the hue
of a saddle-skirt, they were white underneath and pinkly red above.
Moreover, they were scaling in the fashion of a skin not inured to
weather beating. Though the man had thought on setting out from
civilization that he was suiting his appearance to the environment, the
impression he made on this native girl was distinctly foreign. The
flannel shirt might have passed, though hardly without question, as
native wear, but the khaki riding-breeches and tan puttees were utterly
out of the picture, and at the neck of his shirt was a soft-blue tie!
--had he not been hurt, the girl must have laughed at that.
A felt hat lay in a puddle of water, and, except for a blond mustache,
the face was clean shaven and smooth of skin. Long locks of brown hair
fell away from the forehead. The helplessness and pallor gave an
exaggerated seeming of frailty.
Despite an ingrained contempt for weaklings, the girl felt, as she
raised the head and propped the shoulders, an intuitive friendliness
for the mysterious stranger.
She had found the left arm limp above the wrist, and her fingers had
diagnosed a broken bone. But unconsciousness must have come from the
blow on the head, where a bruise was already blackening, and a gash
still trickled blood.
She lifted her skirt, and tore a long strip of cotton from her single
petticoat. Then she picked her barefooted way swiftly to the creek-bed,
where she drenched the cloth for bathing and bandaging the wound. It
required several trips through the littered cleft, for the puddles
between the rocks were stale and brackish; but these journeys she made
with easy and untrammeled swiftness. When she had done what she could
by way of first aid, she stood looking down at the man, and shook her
head dubiously.
"Now ef I jest had a little licker," she mused. "Thet air what he
needs--a little licker!"
A sudden inspiration turned her eyes to the crest of the rock. She did
not go round by the path, but pulled herself up the sheer face by
hanging roots and slippery projections, as easily as a young squirrel.
On the flat surface, she began unstrapping the saddlebags, and, after a
few moments of rummaging among their contents, she smiled with
satisfaction. Her hand brought out a leather-covered flask with a
silver bottom. She held the thing up curiously, and looked at it. For a
little time, the screw top puzzled her. So, she sat down cross-legged,
and experimented until she had solved its method of opening.
Then, she slid over the side again, and at the bottom held the flask
up to the light. Through the side slits in the alligator-skin covering,
she saw the deep color of the contents; and, as she lifted the nozzle,
she sniffed contemptuously. Then, she took a sample draught herself--to
make certain that it was whiskey.
She brushed her lips scornfully with the back of her hand.
"Huh!" she exclaimed. "Hit hain't nothin' but red licker, but maybe
hit mout be better'n nuthin'." She was accustomed to seeing whiskey
freely drunk, but the whiskey she knew was colorless as water, and
sweetish to the palate.
She knew the "mountain dew" which paid no revenue tax, and which, as
her people were fond of saying, "mout make a man drunk, but couldn't
git him wrong." After tasting the "fotched-on" substitute, she gravely,
in accordance with the fixed etiquette of the hills, wiped the mouth of
the bottle on the palm of her hand, then, kneeling once more on the
stones, she lifted the stranger's head in her supporting arm, and
pressed the flask to his lips. After that, she chafed the wrist which
was not hurt, and once more administered the tonic. Finally, the man's
lids fluttered, and his lips moved. Then, he opened his eyes. He opened
them waveringly, and seemed on the point of closing them again, when he
became conscious of a curved cheek, suddenly coloring to a deep flush,
a few inches from his own. He saw in the same glance a pair of wide
blue eyes, a cloud of brown-red hair that fell down and brushed his
face, and he felt a slender young arm about his neck and shoulders.
"Hello!" said the stranger, vaguely. "I seem to have----" He broke
off, and his lips smiled. It was a friendly, understanding smile, and
the girl, fighting hard the shy impulse to drop his shoulders, and flee
into the kind masking of the bushes, was in a measure reassured.
"You must hev fell offen the rock," she enlightened.
"I think I might have fallen into worse circumstances," replied the
unknown.
"I reckon you kin set up after a little."
"Yes, of course." The man suddenly realized that although he was quite
comfortable as he was, he could scarcely expect to remain permanently
in the support of her bent arm. He attempted to prop himself on his
hurt hand, and relaxed with a twinge of extreme pain. The color, which
had begun to creep back into his cheeks, left them again, and his lips
compressed themselves tightly to bite off an exclamation of suffering.
"Thet thar left arm air busted," announced the young woman, quietly.
"Ye've got ter be heedful."
Had one of her own men hurt himself, and behaved stoically, it would
have been mere matter of course; but her eyes mirrored a pleased
surprise at the stranger's good-natured nod and his quiet refusal to
give expression to pain. It relieved her of the necessity for contempt.
"I'm afraid," apologized the painter, "that I've been a great deal of
trouble to you."
Her lips and eyes were sober as she replied.
"I reckon thet's all right."
"And what's worse, I've got to be more trouble. Did you see anything
of a brown mule?"
She shook her head.
"He must have wandered off. May I ask to whom I'm indebted for this
first aid to the injured?"
"I don't know what ye means."
She had propped him against the rocks, and sat near-by, looking into
his face with almost disconcerting steadiness; her solemn-pupiled eyes
were unblinking, unsmiling. Unaccustomed to the gravity of the
mountaineer in the presence of strangers, he feared that he had
offended her. Perhaps his form of speech struck her as affected.
"Why, I mean who are you?" he laughed.
"I hain't nobody much. I jest lives over yon."
"But," insisted the man, "surely you have a name."
She nodded.
"Hit's Sally."
"Then, Miss Sally, I want to thank you."
Once more she nodded, and, for the first time, let her eyes drop,
while she sat nursing her knees. Finally, she glanced up, and asked
with plucked-up courage:
"Stranger, what mout yore name be?"
"Lescott--George Lescott."
"How'd ye git hurt?"
He shook his head.
"I was painting--up there," he said; "and I guess I got too absorbed
in the work. I stepped backward to look at the canvas, and forgot where
the edge was. I stepped too far."
"Hit don't hardly pay a man ter walk backward in these hyar
mountings," she told him. The painter looked covertly up to see if at
last he had discovered a flash of humor. He had the idea that her lips
would shape themselves rather fascinatingly in a smile, but her pupils
mirrored no mirth. She had spoken in perfect seriousness.
The man rose to his feet, but he tottered and reeled against the wall
of ragged stone. The blow on his head had left him faint and dizzy. He
sat down again.
"I'm afraid," he ruefully admitted, "that I'm not quite ready for
discharge from your hospital."
"You jest set where yer at." The girl rose, and pointed up the
mountainside. "I'll light out across the hill, and fotch Samson an' his
mule."
"Who and where is Samson?" he inquired. He realized that the bottom of
the valley would shortly thicken into darkness, and that the way out,
unguided, would become impossible. "It sounds like the name of a strong
man."
"I means Samson South," she enlightened, as though further description
of one so celebrated would be redundant. "He's over thar 'bout three
quarters."
"Three quarters of a mile?"
She nodded. What else could three quarters mean?
"How long will it take you?" he asked.
She deliberated. "Samson's hoein' corn in the fur-hill field. He'll
hev ter cotch his mule. Hit mout tek a half-hour."
Lescott had been riding the tortuous labyrinths that twisted through
creek bottoms and over ridges for several days. In places two miles an
hour had been his rate of speed, though mounted and following so-called
roads. She must climb a mountain through the woods. He thought it
"mout" take longer, and his scepticism found utterance.
"You can't do it in a half-hour, can you?"
"I'll jest take my foot in my hand, an' light out." She turned, and
with a nod was gone. The man rose, and made his way carefully over to a
mossy bank, where he sat down with his back against a century-old tree
to wait.
The beauty of this forest interior had first lured him to pause, and
then to begin painting. The place had not treated him kindly, as the
pain in his wrist reminded.
No, but the beauty was undeniable. A clump of rhododendron, a little
higher up, dashed its pale clusters against a background of evergreen
thicket, and a catalpa tree loaned the perfume of its white blossoms
with their wild little splashes of crimson and purple and orange to the
incense which the elder bushes were contributing.
Climbing fleetly up through steep and tangled slopes, and running as
fleetly down; crossing a brawling little stream on a slender trunk of
fallen poplar; the girl hastened on her mission. Her lungs drank the
clear air in regular tireless draughts. Once only, she stopped and drew
back. There was a sinister rustle in the grass, and something glided
into her path and lay coiled there, challenging her with an ominous
rattle, and with wicked, beady eyes glittering out of a swaying, arrow
-shaped head. Her own eyes instinctively hardened, and she glanced
quickly about for a heavy piece of loose timber. But that was only for
an instant, then she took a circuitous course, and left her enemy in
undisputed possession of the path.
"I hain't got no time ter fool with ye now, old rattlesnake," she
called back, as she went. "Ef I wasn't in sech a hurry, I'd shore bust
yer neck."
At last, she came to a point where a clearing rose on the mountainside
above her. The forest blanket was stripped off to make way for a fenced-
in and crazily tilting field of young corn. High up and beyond, close
to the bald shoulders of sandstone which threw themselves against the
sky, was the figure of a man. As the girl halted at the foot of the
field, at last panting from her exertions, he was sitting on the rail
fence, looking absently down on the outstretched panorama below him. It
is doubtful whether his dreaming eyes were as conscious of what he saw
as of other things which his imagination saw beyond the haze of the
last far rim. Against the fence rested his abandoned hoe, and about him
a number of lean hounds scratched and dozed in the sun. Samson South
had little need of hounds; but, in another century, his people, turning
their backs on Virginia affluence to invite the hardships of pioneer
life, had brought with them certain of the cavaliers' instincts. A
hundred years in the stagnant back-waters of the world had brought to
their descendants a lapse into illiteracy and semi-squalor, but through
it all had fought that thin, insistent flame of instinct. Such a
survival was the boy's clinging to his hounds. Once, they had
symbolized the spirit of the nobility; the gentleman's fondness for his
sport with horse and dog and gun. Samson South did not know the origin
of his fondness for this remnant of a pack. He did not know that in the
long ago his forefathers had fought on red fields with Bruce and the
Stuarts. He only knew that through his crudities something indefinable,
yet compelling, was at war with his life, filling him with great and
shapeless longings. He at once loved and resented these ramparts of
stone that hemmed in his hermit race and world.
He was not, strictly speaking, a man. His age was perhaps twenty. He
sat loose-jointed and indolent on the top rail of the fence, his hands
hanging over his knees: his hoe forgotten. His feet were bare, and his
jeans breeches were supported by a single suspender strap. Pushed well
to the back of his head was a battered straw hat, of the sort rurally
known as the "ten-cent jimmy." Under its broken brim, a long lock of
black hair fell across his forehead. So much of his appearance was
typical of the Kentucky mountaineer. His face was strongly individual,
and belonged to no type. Black brows and lashes gave a distinctiveness
to gray eyes so clear as to be luminous. A high and splendidly molded
forehead and a squarely blocked chin were free of that degeneracy which
marks the wasting of an in-bred people. The nose was straight, and the
mouth firm yet mobile. It was the face of the instinctive philosopher,
tanned to a hickory brown. In a stature of medium size, there was still
a hint of power and catamount alertness. If his attitude was at the
moment indolent, it was such indolence as drowses between bursts of
white-hot activity; a fighting man's aversion to manual labor which,
like the hounds, harked back to other generations. Near-by, propped
against the rails, rested a repeating rifle, though the people would
have told you that the truce in the "South-Hollman war" had been
unbroken for two years, and that no clansman need in these halcyon days
go armed afield.
CHAPTER III
Sally clambered lightly over the fence, and started on the last stage
of her journey, the climb across the young corn rows. It was a field
stood on end, and the hoed ground was uneven; but with no seeming of
weariness her red dress flashed steadfastly across the green spears,
and her voice was raised to shout: "Hello, Samson!"
The young man looked up and waved a languid greeting. He did not
remove his hat or descend from his place of rest, and Sally, who
expected no such attention, came smilingly on. Samson was her hero. It
seemed quite appropriate that one should have to climb steep
acclivities to reach him. Her enamored eyes saw in the top rail of the
fence a throne, which she was content to address from the ground level.
That he was fond of her and meant some day to marry her she knew, and
counted herself the most favored of women. The young men of the
neighboring coves, too, knew it, and respected his proprietary rights.
If he treated her with indulgent tolerance instead of chivalry, he was
merely adopting the accepted attitude of the mountain man for the
mountain woman, not unlike that of the red warrior for his squaw.
Besides, Sally was still almost a child, and Samson, with his twenty
years, looked down from a rank of seniority. He was the legitimate head
of the Souths, and some day, when the present truce ended, would be
their war-leader with certain blood debts to pay. Since his father had
been killed by a rifle shot from ambush, he had never been permitted to
forget that, and, had he been left alone, he would still have needed no
other mentor than the rankle in his heart.
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