The Call of the Cumberlands by Charles Neville Buck

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She glanced inquiringly at Samson, who had not smiled, and who stood
looking puzzled.

"A penny for your thoughts, Mr. South, from down South," she challenged.

"I guess I'm sort of like Mr. Graddy," said the boy, slowly. "I was
just wondering how you do do it."

He spoke with perfect seriousness, and, after a moment, the girl broke
into a prolonged peal of laughter.

"Oh, you are delicious!" she exclaimed. "If I could do the
_ingénue_ like that, believe me, I'd make some hit." She came
over, and, laying a hand on each of the boy's shoulders, kissed him
lightly on the cheek. "That's for a droll boy!" she said. "That's the
best line I've heard pulled lately."

Farbish was smiling in quiet amusement. He tapped the mountaineer on
the shoulder.

"I've heard George Lescott speak of you," he said, genially. "I've
rather a fancy for being among the discoverers of men of talent. We
must see more of each other."

Samson left the party early, and with a sense of disgust. It was, at
the time of his departure, waxing more furious in its merriment. It
seemed to him that nowhere among these people was a note of sincerity,
and his thoughts went back to the parting at the stile, and the girl
whose artlessness and courage were honest.

Several days later, Samson was alone in Lescott's studio. It was
nearing twilight, and he had laid aside a volume of De Maupassant,
whose simple power had beguiled him. The door opened, and he saw the
figure of a woman on the threshold. The boy rose somewhat shyly from
his seat, and stood looking at her. She was as richly dressed as Miss
Starr had been, but there was the same difference as between the colors
of the sunset sky and the exaggerated daubs of Collasso's landscape.
She stood lithely straight, and her furs fell back from a throat as
smooth and slenderly rounded as Sally's. Her cheeks were bright with
the soft glow of perfect health, and her lips parted over teeth that
were as sound and strong as they were decorative. This girl did not
have to speak to give the boy the conviction that she was some one whom
he must like. She stood at the door a moment, and then came forward
with her hand outstretched.

"This is Mr. South, isn't it?" she asked, with a frank friendliness in
her voice.

"Yes, ma'am, that's my name."

"I'm Adrienne Lescott," said the girl. "I thought I'd find my brother
here. I stopped by to drive him up-town."

Samson had hesitatingly taken the gloved hand, and its grasp was firm
and strong despite its ridiculous smallness.

"I reckon he'll be back presently." The boy was in doubt as to the
proper procedure. This was Lescott's studio, and he was not certain
whether or not it lay in his province to invite Lescott's sister to
take possession of it. Possibly, he ought to withdraw. His ideas of
social usages were very vague.

"Then, I think I'll wait," announced the girl. She threw off her fur
coat, and took a seat before the open grate. The chair was large, and
swallowed her up.

Samson wanted to look at her, and was afraid that this would be
impolite. He realized that he had seen no real ladies, except on the
street, and now he had the opportunity. She was beautiful, and there
was something about her willowy grace of attitude that made the soft
and clinging lines of her gown fall about her in charming drapery
effects. Her small pumps and silk-stockinged ankles as she held them
out toward the fire made him say to himself:

"I reckon she never went barefoot in her life."

"I'm glad of this chance to meet you, Mr. South," said the girl with a
smile that found its way to the boy's heart. After all, there was
sincerity in "foreign" women. "George talks of you so much that I feel
as if I'd known you all the while. Don't you think I might claim
friendship with George's friends?"

Samson had no answer. He wished to say something equally cordial, but
the old instinct against effusiveness tied his tongue.

"I owe right smart to George Lescott," he told her, gravely.

"That's not answering my question," she laughed. "Do you consent to
being friends with me?"

"Miss--" began the boy. Then, realizing that in New York this form of
address is hardly complete, he hastened to add: "Miss Lescott, I've
been here over nine months now, and I'm just beginning to realize what
a rube I am. I haven't no--" Again, he broke off, and laughed at
himself. "I mean, I haven't any idea of proper manners, and so I'm, as
we would say down home, 'plumb skeered' of ladies."

As he accused himself, Samson was looking at her with unblinking
directness; and she met his glance with eyes that twinkled.

"Mr. South," she said, "I know all about manners, and you know all
about a hundred real things that I want to know. Suppose we begin
teaching each other?"

Samson's face lighted with the revolutionizing effect that a smile can
bring only to features customarily solemn.

"Miss Lescott," he said, "let's call that a trade--but you're gettin'
all the worst of it. To start with, you might give me a lesson right
now in how a feller ought to act, when he's talkin' to a lady--how I
ought to act with you!"

Her laugh made the situation as easy as an old shoe.

Ten minutes later, Lescott entered.

"Well," he said, with a smile, "shall I Introduce you people, or have
you already done it for yourselves?"

"Oh," Adrienne assured him, "Mr. South and I are old friends." As she
left the room, she turned and added: "The second lesson had better be at
my house. If I telephone you some day when we can have the school-room
to ourselves, will you come up?"

Samson grinned, and forgot to be bashful as he replied:

"I'll come a-kitin'!"

CHAPTER XVIII

Early that year, the touch of autumn came to the air. Often, returning
at sundown from the afternoon life class, Samson felt the lure of its
melancholy sweetness, and paused on one of the Washington Square
benches, with many vague things stirring in his mind. Some of these
things were as subtly intangible as the lazy sweetness that melted the
façades of the walls into the soft colors of a dream city. He found
himself loving the Palisades of Jersey, seen through a powdery glow at
evening, and the red-gold glare of the setting sun on high-swung gilt
signs. He felt with a throb of his pulses that he was in the Bagdad of
the new world, and that every skyscraper was a minaret from which the
muezzin rang toward the Mecca of his Art. He felt with a stronger throb
the surety of young, but quickening, abilities within himself. Partly,
it was the charm of Indian summer, partly a sense of growing with the
days, but, also, though he had not as yet realized that, it was the new
friendship into which Adrienne had admitted him, and the new experience
of frank _camaraderie_ with a woman not as a member of an inferior
sex, but as an equal companion of brain and soul. He had seen her
often, and usually alone, because he shunned meetings with strangers.
Until his education had advanced further, he wished to avoid social
embarrassments. He knew that she liked him, and realized that it was
because he was a new and virile type, and for that reason a diversion
--a sort of human novelty. She liked him, too, because it was rare for a
man to offer her friendship without making love, and she was certain he
would not make love. He liked her for the same many reasons that every
one else did--because she was herself. Of late, too, he had met a
number of men at Lescott's clubs. He was modestly surprised to find
that, though his attitude on these occasions was always that of one
sitting in the background, the men seemed to like him, and, when they
said, "See you again," at parting, it was with the convincing manner of
real friendliness. Sometimes, even now, his language was ungrammatical,
but so, for the matter of that, was theirs.... The great writer smiled
with his slow, humorous lighting of the eyes as he observed to Lescott:

"We are licking our cub into shape, George, and the best of it is
that, when he learns to dance ragtime to the organ, he isn't going to
stop being a bear. He's a grizzly!"

One wonderful afternoon in October, when the distances were mist-hung,
and the skies very clear, Samson sat across the table from Adrienne
Lescott at a road-house on the Sound. The sun had set through great
cloud battalions massed against the west, and the horizon was fading
into darkness through a haze like ash of roses. She had picked him up
on the Avenue, and taken him into her car for a short spin, but the
afternoon had beguiled them, luring them on a little further, and still
a little further. When they were a score of miles from Manhattan, the
car had suddenly broken down. It would, the chauffeur told them, be the
matter of an hour to effect repairs, so the girl, explaining to the boy
that this event gave the affair the aspect of adventure, turned and led
the way, on foot, to the nearest road-house.

"We will telephone that we shall be late, and then have dinner," she
laughed. "And for me to have dinner with you alone, unchaperoned at a
country inn, is by New York standards delightfully unconventional. It
borders on wickedness." Then, since their attitude toward each other
was so friendly and innocent, they both laughed. They had dined under
the trees of an old manor house, built a century ago, and now converted
into an inn, and they had enjoyed themselves because it seemed to them
pleasingly paradoxical that they should find in a place seemingly so
shabby-genteel a _cuisine_ and service of such excellence. Neither
of them had ever been there before, and neither of them knew that the
reputation of this establishment was in its own way wide--and unsavory.
They had no way of knowing that, because of several thoroughly bruited
scandals which had had origin here, it was a tabooed spot, except for
persons who preferred a semi-shady retreat; and they passed over
without suspicion the palpable surprise of the head waiter when they
elected to occupy a table on the terrace instead of a _cabinet
particulier_.

But the repairs did not go as smoothly as the chauffeur had expected,
and, when he had finished, he was hungry. So, eleven o'clock found them
still chatting at their table on the lighted lawn. After awhile, they
fell silent, and Adrienne noticed that her companion's face had become
deeply, almost painfully set, and that his gaze was tensely focused on
herself.

"What is it, Mr. South?" she demanded.

The young man began to speak, in a steady, self-accusing voice.

"I was sitting here, looking at you," he said, bluntly. "I was
thinking how fine you are in every way; how there is as much difference
in the texture of men and women as there is in the texture of their
clothes. From that automobile cap you wear to your slippers and
stockings, you are clad in silk. From your brain to the tone of your
voice, you are woven of human silk. I've learned lately that silk isn't
weak, but strong. They make the best balloons of it." He paused and
laughed, but his face again became sober. "I was thinking, too, of your
mother. She must be sixty, but she's a young woman. Her face is smooth
and unwrinkled, and her heart is still in bloom. At that same age,
George won't be much older than he is now."

The compliment was so obviously not intended as compliment at all that
the girl flushed with pleasure.

"Then," went on Samson, his face slowly drawing with pain, "I was
thinking of my own people. My mother was about forty when she died. She
was an old woman. My father was forty-three. He was an old man. I was
thinking how they withered under their drudgery--and of the monstrous
injustice of it all."

Adrienne Lescott nodded. Her eyes were sweetly sympathetic.

"It's the hardship of the conditions," she said, softly. "Those
conditions will change."

"But that's not all I was thinking," went on the boy.

"I was watching you lift your coffee-cup awhile ago. You did it
unconsciously, but your movement was dainty and graceful, as though an
artist had posed you. That takes generations, and, in my imagination, I
saw my people sitting around an oil-cloth on a kitchen table, pouring
coffee into their saucers."

"'There are five and twenty ways
"'Of writing tribal lays,'"

quoted the girl, smilingly,

"'And every single one of them is right.'"

"And a horrible thought came to me," continued Samson. He took out his
handkerchief, and mopped his forehead, then tossed back the long lock
that fell over it. "I wondered"--he paused, and then went on with a set
face--"I wondered if I were growing ashamed of my people."

"If I thought that," said Miss Lescott, quietly, "I wouldn't have much
use for you. But I know there's no danger."

"If I thought there was," Samson assured her, "I would go back there
to Misery, and shoot myself to death.... And, yet, the thought came to
me."

"I'm not afraid of your being a cad," she repeated.

"And yet," he smiled, "I was trying to imagine you among my people.
What was that rhyme you used to quote to me when you began to teach me
manners?"

She laughed, and fell into nonsense quotation, as she thrummed lightly
on the table-cloth with her slim fingers.

"'The goops they lick their fingers,
"'The goops eat with their knives,
"'They spill their broth on the table-cloth,
"'And lead disgusting lives.'"

"My people do all those things," announced Samson, though he said it
rather in a manner of challenge than apology, "except spilling their
broth on the table-cloth.... There are no table-cloths. What would you
do in such company?"

"I," announced Miss Lescott, promptly, "should also lick my fingers."

Samson laughed, and looked up. A man had come out onto the verandah
from the inside, and was approaching the table. He was immaculately
groomed, and came forward with the deference of approaching a throne,
yet as one accustomed to approaching thrones. His smile was that of
pleased surprise.

The mountaineer recognized Farbish, and, with a quick hardening of the
face, he recalled their last meeting. If Farbish should presume to renew
the acquaintanceship under these circumstances, Samson meant to rise
from his chair, and strike him in the face. George Lescott's sister
could not be subjected to such meetings. Yet, it was a tribute to his
advancement in good manners that he dreaded making a scene in her
presence, and, as a warning, he met Farbish's pleasant smile with a look
of blank and studied lack of recognition. The circumstances out of which
Farbish might weave unpleasant gossip did not occur to Samson. That they
were together late in the evening, unchaperoned, at a road-house whose
reputation was socially dubious, was a thing he did not realize. But
Farbish was keenly alive to the possibilities of the situation. He chose
to construe the Kentuckian's blank expression as annoyance at being
discovered, a sentiment he could readily understand. Adrienne Lescott,
following her companion's eyes, looked up, and to the boy's astonishment
nodded to the new-comer, and called him by name.

"Mr. Farbish," she laughed, with mock confusion and total innocence of
the fact that her words might have meaning, "don't tell on us."

"I never tell things, my dear lady," said the newcomer. "I have dwelt
too long in conservatories to toss pebbles. I'm afraid, Mr. South, you
have forgotten me. I'm Farbish, and I had the pleasure of meeting you"
--he paused a moment, then with a pointed glance added--"at the Manhattan
Club, was it not?"

"It was not," said Samson, promptly. Farbish looked his surprise, but
was resolved to see no offense, and, after a few moments of affable
and, it must be acknowledged, witty conversation, withdrew to his own
table.

"Where did you meet that man?" demanded Samson, fiercely, when he and
the girl were alone again.

"Oh, at any number of dinners and dances. His sort is tolerated for
some reason." She paused, then, looking very directly at the
Kentuckian, inquired, "And where did you meet him?"

"Didn't you hear him say the Manhattan Club?"

"Yes, and I knew that he was lying."

"Yes, he was!" Samson spoke, contemptuously. "Never mind where it was.
It was a place I got out of when I found out who were there."

The chauffeur came to announce that the car was ready, and they went
out. Farbish watched them with a smile that had in it a trace of the
sardonic.

The career of Farbish had been an interesting one in its own peculiar
and unadmirable fashion. With no advantages of upbringing, he had
nevertheless so cultivated the niceties of social usage that his one
flaw was a too great perfection. He was letter-perfect where one to the
manor born might have slurred some detail.

He was witty, handsome in his saturnine way, and had powerful friends
in the world of fashion and finance. That he rendered services to his
plutocratic patrons, other than the repartee of his dinner talk, was a
thing vaguely hinted in club gossip, and that these services were not
to his credit had more than once been conjectured.

When Horton had begun his crusade against various abuses, he had cast
a suspicious eye on all matters through which he could trace the trail
of William Farbish, and now, when Farbish saw Horton, he eyed him with
an enigmatical expression, half-quizzical and half-malevolent.

After Adrienne and Samson had disappeared, he rejoined his companion,
a stout, middle-aged gentleman of florid complexion, whose cheviot
cutaway and reposeful waistcoat covered a liberal embonpoint. Farbish
took his cigar from his lips, and studied its ascending smoke through
lids half-closed and thoughtful.

"Singular," he mused; "very singular!"

"What's singular?" impatiently demanded his companion. "Finish, or
don't start."

"That mountaineer came up here as George Lescott's protégé," went on
Farbish, reflectively. "He came fresh from the feud belt, and landed
promptly in the police court. Now, in less than a year, he's pairing
off with Adrienne Lescott--who, every one supposed, meant to marry
Wilfred Horton. This little party to-night is, to put it quite mildly,
a bit unconventional."

The stout gentleman said nothing, and the other questioned, musingly:

"By the way, Bradburn, has the Kenmore Shooting Club requested Wilfred
Horton's resignation yet?"

"Not yet. We are going to. He's not congenial, since his hand is
raised against every man who owns more than two dollars." The speaker
owned several million times that sum. This meeting at an out-of-the-way
place had been arranged for the purpose of discussing ways and means of
curbing Wilfred's crusades.

"Well, don't do it."

"Why the devil shouldn't we? We don't want anarchists in the Kenmore."

After awhile, they sat silent, Farbish smiling over the plot he had
just devised, and the other man puffing with a puzzled expression at
his cigar.

"That's all there is to it," summarized Mr. Farbish, succinctly. "If
we can get these two men, South and Horton, together down there at the
shooting lodge, under the proper conditions, they'll do the rest
themselves, I think. I'll take care of South. Now, it's up to you to
have Horton there at the same time."

"How do you know these two men have not already met--and amicably?"
demanded Mr. Bradburn.

"I happen to know it, quite by chance. It is my business to know
things--quite by chance!"

CHAPTER XIX

Indian summer came again to Misery, flaunting woodland banners of
crimson and scarlet and orange, but to Sally the season brought only
heart-achy remembrances of last autumn, when Samson had softened his
stoicism as the haze had softened the horizon. He had sent her a few
brief letters--not written, but plainly printed. He selected short
words--as much like the primer as possible, for no other messages could
she read. There were times in plenty when he wished to pour out to her
torrents of feeling, and it was such feeling as would have carried
comfort to her lonely little heart. He wished to tell frankly of what a
good friend he had made, and how this friendship made him more able to
realize that other feeling--his love for Sally. There was in his mind
no suspicion--as yet--that these two girls might ever stand in conflict
as to right-of-way. But the letters he wished to write were not the
sort he cared to have read to the girl by the evangelist-doctor or the
district-school teacher, and alone she could have made nothing of them.
However, "I love you" are easy words--and those he always included.

The Widow Miller had been ailing for months, and, though the local
physician diagnosed the condition as being "right porely," he knew that
the specter of tuberculosis which stalks through these badly lighted
and ventilated houses was stretching out its fingers to touch her
shrunken chest. This had meant that Sally had to forego the evening
hours of study, because of the weariness that followed the day of
nursing and household drudgery. Autumn seemed to bring to her mother a
slight improvement, and Sally could again sometimes steal away with her
slate and book, to sit alone on the big bowlder, and study. But,
oftentimes, the print on the page, or the scrawl on the slate, became
blurred. Nowadays, the tears came weakly to her eyes, and, instead of
hating herself for them and dashing them fiercely away, as she would
have done a year ago, she sat listlessly, and gazed across the flaring
hills.

Even the tuneful glory of the burgundy and scarlet mountains hurt her
into wincing--for was it not the clarion of Beauty that Samson had
heard--and in answer to which he had left her? So, she would sit, and
let her eyes wander, and try to imagine the sort of picture those same
very hungry eyes would see, could she rip away the curtain of purple
distance, and look in on him--wherever he was. And, in imagining such a
picture, she was hampered by no actual knowledge of the world in which
he lived--it was all a fairy-tale world, one which her imagination
shaped and colored fantastically. Then, she would take out one of his
occasional letters, and her face would grow somewhat rapt, as she
spelled out the familiar, "I love you," which was to her the soul of
the message. The rest was unimportant. She would not be able to write
that Christmas. letter. There had been too many interruptions in the
self-imparted education, but some day she would write. There would
probably be time enough. It would take even Samson a long while to
become an artist. He had said so, and the morbid mountain pride forbade
that she should write at all until she could do it well enough to give
him a complete surprise. It must be a finished article, that letter--or
nothing at all!

One day, as she was walking homeward from her lonely trysting place,
she met the battered-looking man who carried medicines in his
saddlebags and the Scriptures in his pocket, and who practised both
forms of healing through the hills. The old man drew down his nag, and
threw one leg over the pommel.

"Evenin', Sally," he greeted.

"Evenin', Brother Spencer. How air ye?"

"Tol'able, thank ye, Sally." The body-and-soul mender studied the girl
awhile in silence, and then said bluntly:

"Ye've done broke right smart, in the last year. Anything the matter
with ye?"

She shook her head, and laughed. It was an effort to laugh merrily,
but only the ghost of the old instinctive blitheness rippled into it.

"I've jest come from old Spicer South's," volunteered the doctor.
"He's ailin' pretty consid'able, these days."

"What's the matter with Unc' Spicer?" demanded the girl, in genuine
anxiety. Every one along Misery called the old man Unc' Spicer.

"I can't jest make out." Her informer spoke slowly, and his brow
corrugated into something like sullenness. "He hain't jest to say sick.
Thet is, his organs seems all right, but he don't 'pear to have no
heart fer nothin', and his victuals don't tempt him none. He's jest
puny, thet's all."

"I'll go over thar, an' see him," announced the girl. "I'll cook a
chicken thet'll tempt him."

The physician's mind was working along some line which did not seem to
partake of cheerfulness. Again, he studied the girl, still upright and
high-chinned, but, somehow, no longer effervescent with wild, resilient
strength.

"Hit sometimes 'pears to me," he said, gruffly, "thet this here thing
of eddication costs a sight more than hit comes to."

"What d'ye mean, Brother Spencer?"

"I reckon if Samson South hadn't a-took this hyar hankerin' atter
larnin', an' had stayed home 'stid of rainbow chasin', the old man would
still be able-bodied, 'stid of dyin' of a broken heart--an' you----"

The girl's cheeks flushed. Her violet eyes became deep with a loyal
and defensive glow.

"Ye mustn't say things like them, Brother Spencer." Her voice was very
firm and soft. "Unc' Spicer's jest gettin' old, an' es fer me, I wasn't
never better ner happier in my life." It was a lie, but a splendid lie,
and she told herself as well as Brother Spencer that she believed it.
"Samson would come back in a minit ef we sent fer him. He's smart, an'
he's got a right ter l'arnin'! He hain't like us folks; he's a--" She
paused, and groped for the word that Lescott had added to her
vocabulary, which she had half-forgotten. "He's a genius!"

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