The Call of the Cumberlands by Charles Neville Buck

C >> Charles Neville Buck >> The Call of the Cumberlands

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21

The flutter of her heart was like that of a rapturous bird, and the
play of her breath on his face like the fragrance of the elder blossoms.

These were their stars twinkling overhead. These were their hills, and
their moon was smiling on their tryst.

He had gone and seen the world that lured him: he had met its
difficulties, and faced its puzzles. He had even felt his feet
wandering at the last from the path that led back to her, and now, with
her lithe figure close held in his embrace, and her red-brown hair
brushing his temples, he marveled how such an instant of doubt could
have existed. He knew only that the silver of the moon and the kiss of
the breeze and the clasp of her soft arms about his neck were all parts
of one great miracle. And she, who had waited and almost despaired, not
taking count of what she had suffered, felt her knees grow weak, and
her head grow dizzy with sheer happiness, and wondered if it were not
too marvelous to be true. And, looking very steadfastly into his eyes,
she saw there the gleam that once had frightened her; the gleam that
spoke of something stronger and more compelling than his love. It no
longer frightened her, but made her soul sing, though it was more
intense than it had ever been before, for now she knew that it was She
herself who brought it to his pupils--and that nothing would ever be
stronger.

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

"Did ye think I wasn't a-comin' back, Sally?" he questioned, softly.
At that moment, he had no realization that his tongue had ever
fashioned smoother phrases. And she, too, who had been making war on
crude idioms, forgot, as she answered:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As they talked, sitting on the stile, Sally held the rifle across her
knees. Except for their own voices and the soft chorus of night sounds,
the hills were wrapped in silence--a silence as soft as velvet.
Suddenly, in a pause, there came to the girl's ears the cracking of a
twig in the woods. With the old instinctive training of the mountains,
she leaped noiselessly down, and for an instant stood listening with
intent ears. Then, in a low, tense whisper, as she thrust the gun into
the man's hands, she cautioned:

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

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

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

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

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

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

After a moment's pause, Samson added:

"Jesse Purvy's dead."

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

So, smarting under his impotency, Captain Callomb came out of his tent
one morning, and strolled across the curved bridge to the town proper.
He knew that the Grand Jury was convening, and he meant to sit as a
spectator in the court-house and study proceedings when they were
instructed.

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

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

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

"Heered the news, stranger?"

"What news?"

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

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

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

CHAPTER XXVII

The Honorable Asa Smithers was not the regular Judge of the Circuit
which numbered Hixon among its county-seats. The elected incumbent was
ill, and Smithers had been named as his pro-tem. successor. Callomb
climbed to the second story of the frame bank building, and pounded
loudly on a door, which bore the boldly typed shingle:

"ASA SMITHERS, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW."

The temporary Judge admitted a visitor in uniform, whose countenance
was stormy with indignant protest. The Judge himself was placid and
smiling. The lawyer, who was for the time being exalted to the bench,
hoped to ascend it more permanently by the votes of the Hollman
faction, since only Hollman votes were counted. He was a young man of
powerful physique with a face ruggedly strong and honest.

It was such an honest and fearless face that it was extremely valuable
to its owner in concealing a crookedness as resourceful as that of a
fox, and a moral cowardice which made him a spineless tool in evil
hands. A shock of tumbled red hair over a fighting face added to the
appearance of combative strength. The Honorable Asa was conventionally
dressed, and his linen was white, but his collar was innocent of a
necktie. Callomb stood for a moment inside the door, and, when he
spoke, it was to demand crisply:

"Well, what are you going to do about it?"

"About what, Captain?" inquired the other, mildly.

"Is it possible you haven't heard? Since yesterday noon, two more
murders have been added to the holocaust. You represent the courts of
law. I represent the military arm of the State. Are we going to stand
by and see this go on?"

The Judge shook his head, and his visage was sternly thoughtful and
hypocritical. He did not mention that he had just come from conference
with the Hollman leaders. He did not explain that the venire he had
drawn from the jury drum had borne a singularly solid Hollman compaction.

"Until the Grand Jury acts, I don't see that we can take any steps."

"And," stormed Captain Callomb, "the Grand Jury will, like former
Grand Juries, lie down in terror and inactivity. Either there are no
courageous men in your county, or these panels are selected to avoid
including them."

Judge Smithers' face darkened. If he was a moral coward, he was at
least a coward crouching behind a seeming of fearlessness.

"Captain," he said, coolly, but with a dangerous hint of warning, "I
don't see that your duties include contempt of court."

"No!" Callomb was now thoroughly angered, and his voice rose. "I am
sent down here subject to your orders, and it seems you are also
subject to orders. Here are two murders in a day, capping a climax of
twenty years of bloodshed. You have information as to the arrival of a
man known as a desperado with a grudge against the two dead men, yet
you know of no steps to take. Give me the word, and I'll go out and
bring that man, and any others you name, to your bar of justice--if it
is a bar of justice! For God's sake, give me something else to do than
to bring in prisoners to be shot down in cold blood."

The Judge sat balancing a pencil on his extended forefinger as though
it were a scale of justice.

"You have been heated in your language, sir," he said, sternly, "but
it is a heat arising from an indignation which I share. Consequently, I
pass it over. I cannot instruct you to arrest Samson South before the
Grand Jury has accused him. The law does not contemplate hasty or
unadvised action. All men are innocent until proven guilty. If the
Grand Jury wants South, I'll instruct you to go and get him. Until
then, you may leave my part of the work to me."

His Honor rose from his chair.

"You can at least give this Grand Jury such instructions on murder as
will point out their duty. You can assure them that the militia will
protect them. Through your prosecutor, you can bring evidence to their
attention, you----"

"If you will excuse me," interrupted His Honor, drily, "I'll judge of
how I am to charge my Grand Jury. I have been in communication with the
family of Mr. Purvy, and it is not their wish at the present time to
bring this case before the panel."

Callomb laughed ironically.

"No, I could have told you that before you conferred with them. I
could have told you that they prefer to be their own courts and
executioners, except where they need you. They also preferred to have
me get a man they couldn't take themselves, and then to assassinate him
in my hands. Who in the hell do you work for, Judge-for-the-moment
Smithers? Are you holding a job under the State of Kentucky, or under
the Hollman faction of this feud? I am instructed to take my orders
from you. Will you kindly tell me my master's real name?"

Smithers turned pale with anger, his fighting face grew as truculent
as a bulldog's, while Callomb stood glaring back at him like a second
bulldog, but the Judge knew that he was being honestly and fearlessly
accused. He merely pointed to the door. The Captain turned on his heel,
and stalked out of the place, and the Judge came down the steps, and
crossed the street to the court-house. Five minutes later, he turned to
the shirt-sleeved man who was leaning on the bench, and said in his
most judicial voice:

"Mr. Sheriff, open court."

The next day the mail-carrier brought in a note for the temporary
Judge. His Honor read it at recess, and hastened across to Hollman's
Mammoth Department Store. There, in council with his masters, he asked
instructions. This was the note:

"THE HON. ASA SMITHERS.

"SIR: I arrived in this county yesterday, and am prepared, if called
as a witness, to give to the Grand Jury full and true particulars of
the murder of Jesse Purvy and the killing of Aaron Hollis. I am willing
to come under escort of my own kinsmen, or of the militiamen, as the
Court may advise.

"The requirement of any bodyguard, I deplore, but in meeting my legal
obligations, I do not regard it as necessary or proper to walk into a
trap.

"Respectfully, SAMSON SOUTH."

Smithers looked perplexedly at Judge Hollman.

"Shall I have him come?" he inquired.

Hollman threw the letter down on his desk with a burst of blasphemy:

"Have him come?" he echoed. "Hell and damnation, no! What do we want
him to come here and spill the milk for? When we get ready, we'll
indict him. Then, let your damned soldiers go after him--as a criminal,
not a witness. After that, we'll continue this case until these
outsiders go away, and we can operate to suit ourselves. We don't fall
for Samson South's tricks. No, sir; you never got that letter! It
miscarried. Do you hear? You never got it."

Smithers nodded grudging acquiescence. Most men would rather be
independent officials than collar-wearers.

Out on Misery Samson South had gladdened the soul of his uncle with
his return. The old man was mending, and, for a long time, the two had
talked. The failing head of the clan looked vainly for signs of
degeneration in his nephew, and, failing to find them, was happy.

"Hev ye decided, Samson," he inquired, "thet ye was right in yer
notion 'bout goin' away?"

Samson sat reflectively for a while, then replied:

"We were both right, Uncle Spicer--and both wrong. This is my place,
but if I'm to take up the leadership it must be in a different fashion.
Changes are coming. We can't any longer stand still."

Spicer South lighted his pipe. He, too, in these last years, had seen
in the distance the crest of the oncoming wave. He, too, recognized
that, from within or without, there must be a regeneration. He did not
welcome it, but, if it must come, he preferred that it come not at the
hands of conquerors, but under the leadership of his own blood.

"I reckon there's right smart truth to that," he acknowledged. "I've
been studyin' 'bout hit consid'able myself of late. Thar's been sev'ral
fellers through the country talkin' coal an' timber an' railroads--an'
sich like."

Sally went to mill that Saturday, and with her rode Samson. There,
besides Wile McCager, he met Caleb Wiley and several others. At first,
they received him sceptically, but they knew of the visit to Purvy's
store, and they were willing to admit that in part at least he had
erased the blot from his escutcheon. Then, too, except for cropped hair
and a white skin, he had come back as he had gone, in homespun and
hickory. There was nothing highfalutin in his manners. In short, the
impression was good.

"I reckon now that ye're back, Samson," suggested McCager, "an' seein'
how yore Uncle Spicer is gettin' along all right, I'll jest let the two
of ye run things. I've done had enough." It was a simple fashion of
resigning a regency, but effectual.

Old Caleb, however, still insurgent and unconvinced, brought in a
minority report.

"We wants fightin' men," he grumbled, with the senile reiteration of
his age, as he spat tobacco and beat a rat-tat on the mill floor with
his long hickory staff. "We don't want no deserters."

"Samson ain't a deserter," defended Sally. "There isn't one of you fit
to tie his shoes." Sally and old Spicer South alone knew of her lover's
letter to the Circuit Judge, and they were pledged to secrecy.

"Never mind, Sally!" It was Samson himself who answered her. "I didn't
come back because I care what men like old Caleb think. I came back
because they needed me. The proof of a fighting man is his fighting, I
reckon. I'm willing to let 'em judge me by what I'm going to do."

So, Samson slipped back, tentatively, at least, into his place as clan
head, though for a time he found it a post without action. After the
fierce outburst of bloodshed, quiet had settled, and it was tacitly
understood that, unless the Hollman forces had some coup in mind which
they were secreting, this peace would last until the soldiers were
withdrawn.

"When the world's a-lookin'," commented Judge Hollman, "hit's a right
good idea to crawl under a log--an' lay still."

Purvy had been too famous a feudist to pass unsung. Reporters came as
far as Hixon, gathered there such news as the Hollmans chose to give
them, and went back to write lurid stories and description, from
hearsay, of the stockaded seat of tragedy. Nor did they overlook the
dramatic coincidence of the return of "Wildcat" Samson South from
civilization to savagery. They made no accusation, but they pointed an
inference and a moral--as they thought. It was a sermon on the triumph
of heredity over the advantages of environment. Adrienne read some of
these saffron misrepresentations, and they distressed her.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, it came insistently to the ears of Captain Callomb that
some plan was on foot, the intricacies of which he could not fathom, to
manufacture a case against a number of the Souths, quite apart from
their actual guilt, or likelihood of guilt. Once more, he would be
called upon to go out and drag in men too well fortified to be taken by
the posses and deputies of the Hollman civil machinery. At this news,
he chafed bitterly, and, still rankling with a sense of shame at the
loss of his first prisoner, he formed a plan of his own, which he
revealed over his pipe to his First Lieutenant.

"There's a nigger in the woodpile, Merriwether," he said. "We are
simply being used to do the dirty work up here, and I'm going to do a
little probing of my own. I guess I'll turn the company over to you for
a day or two."

"What idiocy are you contemplating now?" inquired the second in command.

"I'm going to ride over on Misery, and hear what the other side has to
say. I've usually noticed that one side of any story is pretty good
until the other's told."

"You mean you are going to go over there where the Souths are
intrenched, where every road is guarded?" The Lieutenant spoke
wrathfully and with violence. "Don't be an ass, Callomb. You went over
there once before, and took a man away--and he's dead. You owe them a
life, and they collect their dues. You will be supported by no warrant
of arrest, and can't take a sufficient detail to protect you."

"No," said Callomb, quietly; "I go on my own responsibility and I go
by myself."

"And," stormed Merriwether, "you'll never come back."

"I think," smiled Callomb, "I'll get back. I owe an old man over there
an apology, and I want to see this desperado at first hand."

"It's sheer madness. I ought to take you down to this infernal crook
of a Judge, and have you committed to a strait-jacket."

"If," said Callomb, "you are content to play the cats-paw to a bunch
of assassins, I'm not. The mail-rider went out this morning, and he
carried a letter to old Spicer South. I told him that I was coming
unescorted and unarmed, and that my object was to talk with him. I
asked him to give me a safe-conduct, at least until I reached his
house, and stated my case. I treated him like an officer and a
gentleman, and, unless I'm a poor judge of men, he's going to treat me
that way."

The Lieutenant sought vainly to dissuade Callomb, but the next day the
Captain rode forth, unaccompanied. Curious stares followed him, and
Judge Smithers turned narrowing and unpleasant eyes after him, but at
the point where the ridge separated the territory of the Hollmans from
that of the Souths, he saw waiting in the road a mounted figure,
sitting his horse straight, and clad in the rough habiliments of the
mountaineer.

As Callomb rode up he saluted, and the mounted figure with perfect
gravity and correctness returned that salute as one officer to another.
The Captain was surprised. Where had this mountaineer with the steady
eyes and the clean-cut jaw learned the niceties of military etiquette?

"I am Captain Callomb of F Company," said the officer. "I'm riding
over to Spicer South's house. Did you come to meet me?"

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21