The Call of the Cumberlands by Charles Neville Buck

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"Will ye git out, or hev I got ter drive ye?" interrupted the girl.
Her face paled, and her lips drew themselves into a taut line.

"Will ye go ter the party with me, Sally?" He came insolently over,
and stood waiting, ignoring her dismissal with the ease of braggart
effrontery. She, in turn, stood rigid, wordless, pointing his way
across the doorstep. Slowly, the drunken face lost its leering grin.
The eyes blackened into a truculent and venomous scowl. He stepped
over, and stood towering above the slight figure, which did not give
back a step before his advance. With an oath, he caught her savagely in
his arms, and crushed her to him, while his unshaven, whiskey-soaked
lips were pressed clingingly against her own indignant ones. Too
astonished for struggle, the girl felt herself grow faint in his
loathsome embrace, while to her ears came his panted words:

"I'll show ye. I wants ye, an' I'll git ye."

Adroitly, with a regained power of resistance and a lithe twist, she
slipped out of his grasp, hammering at his face futilely with her
clenched fists.

"I--I've got a notion ter kill ye!" she cried, brokenly. "Ef Samson
was hyar, ye wouldn't dare--" What else she might have said was shut
off in stormy, breathless gasps of humiliation and anger.

"Well," replied Tamarack, with drawling confidence, "ef Samson was
hyar, I'd show him, too--damn him! But Samson hain't hyar. He won't
never be hyar no more." His voice became deeply scornful, as he added:
"He's done cut an' run. He's down thar below, consortin' with
furriners, an' he hain't thinkin' nothin' 'bout you. You hain't good
enough fer Samson, Sally. I tells ye he's done left ye fer all time."

Sally had backed away from the man, until she stood trembling near the
hearth. As he spoke, Tamarack was slowly and step by step following her
up. In his eyes glittered the same light that one sees in those of a
cat which is watching a mouse already caught and crippled.

She half-reeled, and stood leaning against the rough stones of the
fireplace. Her head was bowed, and her bosom heaving with emotion. She
felt her knees weakening under her, and feared they would no longer
support her. But, as her cousin ended, with a laugh, she turned her
back to the wall, and stood with her downstretched hands groping
against the logs. Then, she saw the evil glint in Tamarack's blood-shot
eyes. He took one slow step forward, and held out his arms.

"Will ye come ter me?" he commanded, "or shall I come an' git ye?" The
girl's fingers at that instant fell against something cooling and
metallic. It was Samson's rifle.

With a sudden cry of restored confidence and a dangerous up-leaping of
light in her eyes, she seized and cocked it.

CHAPTER XVI

The girl stepped forward, and held the weapon finger on trigger, close
to her cousin's chest.

"Ye lies, Tam'rack," she said, in a very low and steady voice--a voice
that could not be mistaken, a voice relentlessly resolute and purposeful.

"Ye lies like ye always lies. Yore heart's black an' dirty. Ye're a
murderer an' a coward. Samson's a-comin' back ter me.... I'm a-goin'
ter be Samson's wife." The tensity of her earnestness might have told a
subtler psychologist than Tamarack that she was endeavoring to convince
herself. "He hain't never run away. He's hyar in this room right now."
The mountaineer started, and cast an apprehensive glance about him. The
girl laughed, with a deeply bitter note, then she went on:

"Oh, you can't see him, Tam'rack. Ye mout hunt all night, but wharever
I be, Samson's thar, too. I hain't nothin' but a part of Samson--an'
I'm mighty nigh ter killin' ye this minute--he'd do hit, I reckon."

"Come on now, Sally," urged the man, ingratiatingly. He was thoroughly
cowed, seeking compromise. A fool woman with a gun: every one knew it
was a dangerous combination, and, except for himself, no South had ever
been a coward. He knew a certain glitter in their eyes. He knew it was
apt to presage death, and this girl, trembling in her knees but holding
that muzzle against his chest so unwaveringly, as steady as granite,
had it in her pupils. Her voice held an inexorable monotony suggestive
of tolling bells. She was not the Sally he had known before, but a new
Sally, acting under a quiet sort of exaltation, capable of anything. He
knew that, should she shoot him dead there in her house, no man who
knew them both would blame her. His life depended on strategy. "Come
on, Sally," he whined, as his face grew ashen. "I didn't aim ter make
ye mad. I jest lost my head, an' made love ter ye. Hit hain't no sin
ter kiss a feller's own cousin." He was edging toward the door.

"Stand where ye're at," ordered Sally, in a voice of utter loathing,
and he halted. "Hit wasn't jest kissin' me--" She broke off, and
shuddered again. "I said thet Samson was in this here room. Ef ye moves
twell I tells ye ye kin, ye'll hear him speak ter ye, an' ef he speaks
ye won't never hear nothin' more. This here is Samson's gun. I reckon
he'll tell me ter pull the trigger terectly!"

"Fer God's sake, Sally!" implored the braggart. "Fer God's sake, look
over what I done. I knows ye're Samson's gal. I----"

"Shet up!" she said, quietly; and his voice died instantly.

"Yes, I'm Samson's gal, an' I hain't a-goin' ter kill ye this time,
Tam'rack, unlessen ye makes me do hit. But, ef ever ye crosses that
stile out thar ag'in, so help me God, this gun air goin' ter shoot."

Tamarack licked his lips. They had grown dry. He had groveled before a
girl--but he was to be spared. That was the essential thing.

"I promises," he said, and turned, much sobered, to the door.

Sally stood for a while, listening until she heard the slopping hoof-
beats of his retreat, then she dropped limply into the shaky shuck-
bottomed chair, and sat staring straight ahead, with a dazed and almost
mortal hurt in her eyes. It was a trance-like attitude, and the gesture
with which she several times wiped her calico sleeve across the lips
his kisses had defiled, seemed subconscious. At last, she spoke aloud,
but in a far-away voice, shaking her head miserably.

"I reckon Tam'rack's right," she said. "Samson won't hardly come back.
Why would he come back?"

* * * * *

The normal human mind is a reservoir, which fills at a rate of speed
regulated by the number and calibre of its feed pipes. Samson's mind
had long been almost empty, and now from so many sources the waters of
new things were rushing in upon it that under their pressure it must
fill fast, or give away.

He was saved from hopeless complications of thought by a sanity which
was willing to assimilate without too much effort to analyze. That
belonged to the future. Just now, all was marvelous. What miracles
around him were wrought out of golden virtue, and what out of brazen
vice, did not as yet concern him. New worlds are not long new worlds.
The boy from Misery was presently less bizarre to the eye than many of
the unkempt bohemians he met in the life of the studios: men who
quarreled garrulously over the end and aim of Art, which they spelled
with a capital A--and, for the most part, knew nothing of. He retained,
except within a small circle of intimates, a silence that passed for
taciturnity, and a solemnity of visage that was often construed into
surly egotism.

He still wore his hair long, and, though his conversation gradually
sloughed off much of its idiom and vulgarism, enough of the mountaineer
stood out to lend to his personality a savor of the crudely picturesque.

Meanwhile, he drew and read and studied and walked and every day's
advancement was a forced march. The things that he drew began by
degrees to resolve themselves into some faint similitude to the things
from which he drew them. The stick of charcoal no longer insisted on
leaving in the wake of its stroke smears like soot. It began to be
governable. But it was the fact that Samson saw things as they were and
insisted on trying to draw them just as he saw them, which best pleased
his sponsor. During those initial months, except for his long tramps,
occupied with thoughts of the hills and the Widow Miller's cabin, his
life lay between Lescott's studio and the cheap lodgings which he had
taken near by. Sometimes while he was bending toward his easel there
would rise before his imagination the dark unshaven countenance of Jim
Asberry. At such moments, he would lay down the charcoal, and his eyes
would cloud into implacable hatred. "I hain't fergot ye, Pap," he would
mutter, with the fervor of a renewed vow. With the speed of a clock's
minute hand, too gradual to be seen by the eye, yet so fast that it
soon circles the dial, changes were being wrought in the raw material
called Samson South. One thing did not change. In every crowd, he found
himself searching hungrily for the face of Sally, which he knew he
could not find. Always, there was the unadmitted, yet haunting, sense
of his own rawness. For life was taking off his rough edges--and there
were many--and life went about the process in workmanlike fashion, with
sandpaper. The process was not enjoyable, and, though the man's soul
was made fitter, it was also rubbed raw. Lescott, tremendously
interested in his experiment, began to fear that the boy's too great
somberness of disposition would defeat the very earnestness from which
it sprang. So, one morning, the landscape-maker went to the telephone,
and called for the number of a friend whom he rightly believed to be
the wisest man, and the greatest humorist, in New York. The call
brought no response, and the painter dried his brushes, and turned up
Fifth Avenue to an apartment hotel in a cross street, where on a
certain door he rapped with all the elaborate formula of a secret code.
Very cautiously, the door opened, and revealed a stout man with a
humorous, clean-shaven face. On a table lay a scattered sheaf of rough
and yellow paper, penciled over in a cramped and interlined hand. The
stout man's thinning hair was rumpled over a perspiring forehead.
Across the carpet was a worn stretch that bespoke much midnight pacing.
The signs were those of authorship.

"Why didn't you answer your 'phone?" smiled Lescott, though he knew.

The stout man shrugged his shoulders and pointed to the wall, where
the disconnected receiver was hanging down. "Necessary precaution
against creditors," he explained. "I am out--except to you."

"Busy?" interrogated Lescott. "You seem to have a manuscript in the
making."

"No." The stout man's face clouded with black foreboding. "I shall
never write another story. I'm played out." He turned, and restively
paced the worn carpet, pausing at the window for a despondent glance
across the roofs and chimney pots of the city. Lescott, with the
privilege of intimacy, filled his pipe from the writer's tobacco jar.

"I want your help. I want you to meet a friend of mine, and take him
under your wing in a fashion. He needs you."

The stout man's face again clouded. A few years ago, he had been
peddling his manuscripts with the heart-sickness of unsuccessful middle
age. To-day, men coupled his name with those of Kipling and De
Maupassant. One of his antipathies was meeting people who sought to
lionize him. Lescott read the expression, and, before his host had time
to object, swept into his recital.

At the end he summarized:

"The artist is much like the setter-pup. If it's in him, it's as
instinctive as a dog's nose. But to become efficient he must go a-field
with a steady veteran of his own breed."

"I know!" The great man, who was also the simple man, smiled
reminiscently. "They tried to teach me to herd sheep when my nose was
itching for bird country. Bring on your man; I want to know him."

Samson was told nothing of the benevolent conspiracy, but one evening
shortly later he found himself sitting at a café table with his sponsor
and a stout man, almost as silent as himself. The stout man responded
with something like churlish taciturnity to the half-dozen men and
women who came over with flatteries. But later, when the trio was left
alone, his face brightened, and he turned to the boy from Misery.

"Does Billy Conrad still keep store at Stagbone?"

Samson started, and his gaze fell in amazement. At the mention of the
name, he saw a cross-roads store, with rough mules hitched to fence
palings. It was a picture of home, and here was a man who had been
there! With glowing eyes, the boy dropped unconsciously back into the
vernacular of the hills.

"Hev ye been thar, stranger?"

The writer nodded, and sipped his whiskey.

"Not for some years, though," he confessed, as he drifted into
reminiscence, which to Samson was like water to a parched throat.

When they left the café, the boy felt as though he were taking leave of
an old and tried friend. By homely methods, this unerring diagnostician
of the human soul had been reading him, liking him, and making him feel
a heart-warming sympathy. The man who shrunk from lion-hunters, and who
could return the churl's answer to the advances of sycophant and
flatterer, enthusiastically poured out for the ungainly mountain boy all
the rare quality and bouquet of his seasoned personal charm. It was a
vintage distilled from experience and humanity. It had met the ancient
requirement for the mellowing and perfecting of good Madeira, that it
shall "voyage twice around the world's circumference," and it was a
thing reserved for his friends.

"It's funny," commented the boy, when he and Lescott were alone, "that
he's been to Stagbone."

"My dear Samson," Lescott assured him, "if you had spoken of Tucson,
Arizona, or Caracas or Saskatchewan, it would have been the same. He
knows them all."

It was not until much later that Samson realized how these two really
great men had adopted him as their "little brother," that he might have
their shoulder-touch to march by. And it was without his realization,
too, that they laid upon him the imprint of their own characters and
philosophy. One night at Tonelli's table-d'hôte place, the latest
diners were beginning to drift out into Tenth Street. The faded
soprano, who had in better days sung before a King, was wearying as she
reeled out ragtime with a strong Neapolitan accent. Samson had been
talking to the short-story writer about his ambitions and his hatreds.
He feared he was drifting away from his destiny--and that he would in
the end become too softened. The writer leaned across the table, and
smiled.

"Fighting is all right," he said; "but a man should not be just the
fighter." He mused a moment in silence, then quoted a scrap of verse:

"'Test of the man, if his worth be,
"'In accord with the ultimate plan,
"'That he be not, to his marring,
"'Always and utterly man;
"'That he bring out of the battle
"'Fitter and undefiled,
"'To woman the heart of a woman,
"'To children the heart of a child.'"

Samson South offered no criticism. He had known life from the stoic's
view-point. He had heard the seductive call of artistic yearnings. Now,
it dawned on him in an intensely personal fashion, as it had begun
already to dawn in theory, that the warrior and the artist may meet on
common and compatible ground, where the fighting spirit is touched and
knighted with the gentleness of chivalry. He seemed to be looking from
a new and higher plane, from which he could see a mellow softness on
angles that had hitherto been only stern and unrelieved.

CHAPTER XVII

"I have come, not to quarrel with you, but to try to dissuade you."
The Honorable Mr. Wickliffe bit savagely at his cigar, and gave a
despairing spread to his well-manicured hands. "You stand in danger of
becoming the most cordially hated man in New York--hated by the most
powerful combinations in New York."

Wilfred Horton leaned back in a swivel chair, and put his feet up on
his desk. For a while, he seemed interested in his own silk socks.

"It's very kind of you to warn me," he said, quietly.

The Honorable Mr. Wickliffe rose in exasperation, and paced the floor.
The smoke from his black cigar went before him in vicious puffs.
Finally, he stopped, and leaned glaring on the table.

"Your family has always been conservative. When you succeeded to the
fortune, you showed no symptoms of this mania. In God's name, what has
changed you?"

"I hope I have grown up," explained the young man, with an unruffled
smile. "One can't wear swaddling clothes forever, you know."

The attorney for an instant softened his manner as he looked into the
straight-gazing, unafraid eyes of his client.

"I've known you from your babyhood. I advised your father before you
were born. You have, by the chance of birth, come into the control of
great wealth. The world of finance is of delicate balance. Squabbles in
certain directorates may throw the Street into panic. Suddenly, you
emerge from decent quiet, and run amuck in the china-shop, bellowing
and tossing your horns. You make war on those whose interests are your
own. You seem bent on hari-kari. You have toys enough to amuse you. Why
couldn't you stay put?"

"They weren't the right things. They were, as you say, toys." The
smile faded and Horton's chin set itself for a moment, as he added:

"If you don't think I'm going to stay put--watch me."

"Why do you have to make war--to be chronically insurgent?"

"Because"--the young man, who had waked up, spoke slowly--"I am
reading a certain writing on the wall. The time is not far off when,
unless we regulate a number of matters from within, we shall be
regulated from without. Then, instead of giving the financial body a
little griping in its gold-lined tummy, which is only the salutary
effect of purging, a surgical operation will be required. It will be
something like one they performed on the body politic of France not so
long ago. Old Dr. Guillotine officiated. It was quite a successful
operation, though the patient failed to rally."

"Take for instance this newspaper war you've inaugurated on the
police," grumbled the corporation lawyer. "It's less dangerous to the
public than these financial crusades, but decidedly more so for
yourself. You are regarded as a dangerous agitator, a marplot! I tell
you, Wilfred, aside from all other considerations the thing is perilous
to yourself. You are riding for a fall. These men whom you are whipping
out of public life will turn on you."

"So I hear. Here's a letter I got this morning--unsigned. That is, I
thought it was here. Well, no matter. It warns me that I have less than
three months to live unless I call off my dogs."

The Honorable Mr. Wickliffe's face mirrored alarm.

"Let me have it," he demanded. "You shouldn't treat such matters
lightly. Men are assassinated in New York. I'll refer it to the police."

Horton laughed.

"That would be in the nature of referring back, wouldn't it? I fancy
it came from some one not so remote from police sympathy."

"What are you going to do about it?"

"I'm going to stay put. If I can convict certain corrupt members of
the department, I'm going to nail brass-buttoned hides all over the
front of the city hall."

"Have you had any other threats?"

"No, not exactly, but I've had more touching recognition than that.
I've been asked to resign from several very good clubs."

The attorney groaned.

"You will be a Pariah. So will your allies."

It is said that the new convert is ever the most extreme fanatic.
Wilfred Horton had promised to put on his working clothes, and he had
done it with reckless disregard for consequences. At first, he was
simply obeying Adrienne's orders; but soon he found himself playing the
game for the game's sake. Men at the clubs and women whom he took into
dinner chaffed him over his sudden disposition to try his wings. He was
a man riding a hobby, they said. In time, it began to dawn that he,
with others, whom he had drawn to his standards, meant serious war on
certain complacent evils in the world of finance and politics. Sleeping
dogs of custom began to stir and growl. Political overlords, assailed
as unfaithful servants, showed their teeth. From some hidden, but
unfailing, source terribly sure and direct evidence of guilt was being
gathered. For Wilfred Horton, who was demanding a day of reckoning and
spending great sums of money to get it, there was a prospect of things
doing.

Adrienne Lescott was in Europe. Soon, she would return, and Horton
meant to show that he had not buried his talent.

* * * * *

For eight months Samson's life had run in the steady ascent of gradual
climbing, but, in the four months from the first of August to the first
of December, the pace of his existence suddenly quickened. He left off
drawing from plaster casts, and went into a life class. His shyness
secretly haunted him. The nudity of the woman posing on the model
throne, the sense of his own almost as naked ignorance, and the dread
of the criticism to come, were all keen embarrassments upon him.

In this period, Samson had his first acquaintanceship with women,
except those he had known from childhood--and his first
acquaintanceship with the men who were not of his own art world. Of the
women, he saw several sorts. There were the aproned and frowsy
students, of uncertain age, who seemed to have no life except that
which existed under studio skylights. There were, also, a few younger
girls, who took their art life with less painful solemnity; and, of
course, the models in the "partially draped" and the "altogether."

Tony Collasso was an Italian illustrator, who lodged and painted in
studio-apartments in Washington Square, South. He had studied in the
Julian School and the Beaux Arts, and wore a shock of dark curls, a
Satanic black mustache, and an expression of Byronic melancholy. The
melancholy, he explained to Samson, sprang from the necessity of
commercializing his divine gift. His companions were various, numbering
among them a group of those pygmy celebrities of whom one has never
heard until by chance he meets them, and of whom their intimates speak
as of immortals.

To Collasso's studio, Samson was called one night by telephone. He had
sometimes gone there before to sit for an hour, chiefly as a listener,
while the man from Sorrento bewailed fate with his coterie, and
denounced all forms of government, over insipid Chianti. Sometimes, an
equally melancholy friend in soiled linen and frayed clothes took up
his violin, and, as he improvised, the noisy group would fall silent.
At such moments, Samson would ride out on the waves of melody, and see
again the velvet softness of the mountain night, with stars hanging
intimately close, and hear the ripple of Misery and a voice for which
he longed.

But, to-night, he entered the door to find himself in the midst of a
gay and boisterous party. The room was already thickly fogged with
smoke, and a dozen men and women, singing snatches of current airs,
were interesting themselves over a chafing dish. The studio of Tony
Collasso was of fair size, and adorned with many unframed paintings,
chiefly his own, and a few good tapestries and bits of bric-à-brac
variously jettisoned from the sea of life in which he had drifted. The
crowd itself was typical. A few very minor writers and artists, a model
or two, and several women who had thinking parts in current Broadway
productions.

At eleven o'clock the guests of honor arrived in a taxicab. They were
Mr. William Farbish and Miss Winifred Starr. Having come, as they
explained, direct from the theater where Miss Starr danced in the first
row, they were in evening dress. Samson mentally acknowledged, though,
with instinctive disfavor for the pair, that both were, in a way,
handsome. Collasso drew him aside to whisper importantly:

"Make yourself agreeable to Farbish. He is received in the most
exclusive society, and is a connoisseur of art. He is a connoisseur in
all things," added the Italian, with a meaning glance at the girl.
"Farbish has lived everywhere," he ran on, "and, if he takes a fancy to
you, he will put you up at the best clubs. I think I shall sell him a
landscape."

The girl was talking rapidly and loudly. She had at once taken the
center of the room, and her laughter rang in free and egotistical peals
above the other voices.

"Come," said the host, "I shall present you."

The boy shook hands, gazing with his usual directness into the show
-girl's large and deeply-penciled eyes. Farbish, standing at one side
with his hands in his pockets, looked on with an air of slightly bored
detachment.

His dress, his mannerisms, his bearing, were all those of the man who
has overstudied his part. They were too perfect, too obviously
rehearsed through years of social climbing, but that was a defect
Samson was not yet prepared to recognize.

Some one had naïvely complimented Miss Starr on the leopard-skin cloak
she had just thrown from her shapely shoulders, and she turned promptly
and vivaciously to the flatterer.

"It is nice, isn't it?" she prattled. "It may look a little up-stage
for a girl who hasn't got a line to read in the piece, but these days
one must get the spot-light, or be a dead one. It reminds me of a
little run-in I had with Graddy--he's our stage-director, you know."
She paused, awaiting the invitation to proceed, and, having received
it, went gaily forward. "I was ten minutes late, one day, for
rehearsal, and Graddy came up with that sarcastic manner of his, and
said: 'Miss Starr, I don't doubt you are a perfectly nice girl, and all
that, but it rather gets my goat to figure out how, on a salary of
fifteen dollars a week, you come to rehearsals in a million dollars'
worth of clothes, riding in a limousine--_and_ ten minutes late!'"
She broke off with the eager little expression of awaiting applause,
and, having been satisfied, she added: "I was afraid that wasn't going
to get a laugh, after all."

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