The Call of the Cumberlands by Charles Neville Buck

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Stores opened, but only for a desultory pretense of business. Horsemen
led their mounts away from the more public racks, and tethered them to
back fences and willow branches in the shelter of the river banks,
where stray bullets would not find them.

The dawn that morning had still been gray when Samson South and
Captain Callomb had passed the Miller cabin. Callomb had ridden slowly
on around the turn of the road, and waited a quarter of a mile away. He
was to command the militia that day, if the High Sheriff should call
upon him. Samson went in and knocked, and instantly to the cabin door
came Sally's slender, fluttering figure. She put both arms about him,
and her eyes, as she looked into his face, were terrified, but tearless.

"I'm frightened, Samson," she whispered. "God knows I'm going to be
praying all this day."

"Sally," he said, softly, "I'm coming back to you--but, if I don't"--
he held her very close--"Uncle Spicer has my will. The farm is full of
coal, and days are coming when roads will take it out, and every ridge
will glow with coke furnaces. That farm will make you rich, if we win
to-day's fight."

"Don't!" she cried, with a sudden gasp. "Don't talk like that."

"I must," he said, gently. "I want you to make me a promise, Sally."

"It's made," she declared.

"If, by any chance I should not come back, I want you to hold Uncle
Spicer and old Wile McCager to their pledge. They must not privately
avenge me. They must still stand for the law. I want you, and this is
most important of all, to leave these mountains----"

Her hands tightened on his shoulders.

"Not that, Samson," she pleaded; "not these mountains where we've been
together."

"You promised. I want you to go to the Lescotts in New York. In a
year, you can come back--if you want to; but you must promise that."

"I promise," she reluctantly yielded.

It was half-past nine o'clock when Samson South and Sidney Callomb
rode side by side into Hixon from the east. A dozen of the older
Souths, who had not become soldiers, met them there, and, with no word,
separated to close about them in a circle of protection. As Callomb's
eyes swept the almost deserted streets, so silent that the strident
switching of a freight train could be heard down at the edge of town,
he shook his head. As he met the sullen glances of the gathering in the
court-house yard, he turned to Samson.

"They'll fight," he said, briefly.

Samson nodded.

"I don't understand the method," demurred the officer, with
perplexity. "Why don't they shoot you at once. What are they waiting
for?"

"They want to see," Samson assured him, "what tack I mean to take.
They want to let the thing play itself out, They're inquisitive--and
they're cautious, because now they are bucking the State and the world."

Samson with his escort rode up to the court-house door, and
dismounted. He was for the moment unarmed, and his men walked on each
side of him, while the onlooking Hollmans stood back in surly silence
to let him pass. In the office of the County Judge, Samson said briefly:

"I want to get my deputies sworn in."

"We've got plenty deputy sheriffs," was the quietly insolent rejoinder.

"Not now--we haven't any." Samson's voice was sharply incisive. "I'll
name my own assistants."

"What's the matter with these boys?" The County Judge waved his hand
toward two hold-over deputies.

"They're fired."

The County Judge laughed.

"Well, I reckon I can't attend to that right now."

"Then, you refuse?"

"Mebby you might call it that."

Samson leaned on the Judge's table, and rapped sharply with his
knuckles. His handful of men stood close, and Callomb caught his
breath, in the heavy air of storm-freighted suspense. The Hollman
partisans filled the room, and others were crowding to the doors.

"I'm High Sheriff of this County now," said Samson, sharply. "You are
County Judge. Do we coöperate--or fight?"

"I reckon," drawled the other, "that's a matter we'll work out as we
goes along. Depends on how obedient ye air."

"I'm responsible for the peace and quiet of this County," continued
Samson. "We're going to have peace and quiet."

The Judge looked about him. The indications did not appear to him
indicative of peace and quiet.

"Air we?" he inquired.

"I'm coming back here in a half-hour," said the new Sheriff. "This is
an unlawful and armed assembly. When I get back, I want to find the
court-house occupied only by unarmed citizens who have business here."

"When ye comes back," suggested the County Judge, "I'd advise that ye
resigns yore job. A half-hour is about es long as ye ought ter try ter
hold hit."

Samson turned and walked through the scowling crowd to the court-house
steps.

"Gentlemen," he said, in a clear, far-carrying voice, "there is no
need of an armed congregation at this court-house. I call on you in the
name of the law to lay aside your arms or scatter."

There was murmur which for an instant threatened to become a roar, but
trailed into a chorus of derisive laughter.

Samson went to the hotel, accompanied by Callomb. A half-hour later,
the two were back at the court-house, with a half-dozen companions. The
yard was empty. Samson carried his father's rifle. In that half-hour a
telegram, prepared in advance, had flashed to Frankfort.

"Mob holds court-house--need troops."

And a reply had flashed back:

"Use local company--Callomb commanding." So that form of law was met.

The court-house doors were closed, and its windows barricaded. The
place was no longer a judicial building. It was a fortress. As Samson's
party paused at the gate, a warning voice called:

"Don't come no nigher!"

The body-guard began dropping back to shelter.

"I demand admission to the court-house to make arrests," shouted the
new Sheriff. In answer, a spattering of rifle reports came from the
jail windows. Two of the Souths fell. At a nod from Samson, Callomb
left on a run for the hotel. The Sheriff himself took his position in a
small store across the street, which he reached unhurt under a
desultory fire.

Then, again, silence settled on the town, to remain for five minutes
unbroken. The sun glared mercilessly on clay streets, now as empty as a
cemetery. A single horse incautiously hitched at the side of the
courthouse switched its tail against the assaults of the flies.
Otherwise, there was no outward sign of life. Then, Callomb's newly
organized force of ragamuffin soldiers clattered down the street at
double time. For a moment or two after they came into sight, only the
massed uniforms caught the eyes of the intrenched Hollmans, and an
alarmed murmur broke from the court-house. They had seen no troops
detrain, or pitch camp. These men had sprung from the earth as
startlingly as Jason's crop of dragon's teeth. But, when the command
rounded the shoulder of a protecting wall to await further orders, the
ragged stride of their marching, and the all-too-obvious bearing of the
mountaineer proclaimed them native amateurs. The murmur turned to a
howl of derision and challenge. They were nothing more nor less than
South, masquerading in the uniforms of soldiers.

"What orders?" inquired Callomb briefly, joining Samson in the store.

"Demand surrender once more--then take the courthouse and jail," was
the short reply.

There was little conversation in the ranks of the new company, but
their faces grew black as they listened to the jeers and insults across
the way, and they greedily fingered their freshly issued rifles. They
would be ready when the command of execution came. Callomb himself went
forward with the flag of truce. He shouted his message, and a bearded
man came to the court-house door.

"Tell 'em," he said without redundancy, "thet we're all here. Come an'
git us."

The officer went back, and distributed his forces under such cover as
offered itself, about the four walls. Then, a volley was fired over the
roof, and instantly the two buildings in the public square awoke to a
volcanic response of rifle fire.

All day, the duel between the streets and county buildings went on
with desultory intervals of quiet and wild outbursts of musketry. The
troops were firing as sharpshooters, and the court-house, too, had its
sharpshooters. When a head showed itself at a barricaded window, a
report from the outside greeted it. Samson was everywhere, his rifle
smoking and hot-barreled. His life seemed protected by a talisman. Yet,
most of the firing, after the first hour, was from within. The troops
were, except for occasional pot shots, holding their fire. There was
neither food nor water inside the building, and at last night closed
and the cordon drew tighter to prevent escape. The Hollmans, like rats
in a trap, grimly held on, realizing that it was to be a siege. On the
following morning, a detachment of F Company arrived, dragging two
gatling guns. The Hollmans saw them detraining, from their lookout in
the courthouse cupola, and, realizing that the end had come, resolved
upon a desperate sortie. Simultaneously, every door and lower window of
the court-house burst open to discharge a frenzied rush of men, firing
as they came. They meant to eat their way out and leave as many hostile
dead as possible in their wake. Their one chance now was to scatter
before the machine-guns came into action. They came like a flood of
human lava, and their guns were never silent, as they bore down on the
barricades, where the single outnumbered company seemed insufficient to
hold them. But the new militiamen, looking for reassurance not so much
to Callomb as to the granite-like face of Samson South, rallied, and
rose with a yell to meet them on bayonet and smoking muzzle. The rush
wavered, fell back, desperately rallied, then broke in scattered
remnants for the shelter of the building.

Old Jake Hollman fell near the door, and his grandson, rushing out,
picked up his fallen rifle, and sent farewell defiance from it, as he,
too, threw up both arms and dropped.

Then, a white flag wavered at a window, and, as the newly arrived
troops halted in the street, the noise died suddenly to quiet. Samson
went out to meet a man who opened the door, and said shortly:

"We lays down."

Judge Hollman, who had not participated, turned from the slit in his
shuttered window, through which he had since the beginning been
watching the conflict.

"That ends it!" he said, with a despairing shrug of his shoulders. He
picked up a magazine pistol which lay on his table, and, carefully
counting down his chest to the fifth rib, placed the muzzle against his
breast.

CHAPTER XXX

Before the mountain roads were mired with the coming of the rains, and
while the air held its sparkle of autumnal zestfulness, Samson South
wrote to Wilfred Horton that, if he still meant to come to the hills
for his inspection of coal and timber, the time was ripe. Soon, men
would appear bearing transit and chain, drawing a line which a railroad
was to follow to Misery and across it to the heart of untouched forests
and coal-fields. With that wave of innovation would come the
speculators. Besides, Samson's fingers were itching to be out in the
hills with a palette and a sheaf of brushes in the society of George
Lescott.

For a while after the battle at Hixon, the county had lain in a torpid
paralysis of dread. Many illiterate feudists on each side remembered
the directing and exposed figure of Samson South seen through eddies of
gun smoke, and believed him immune from death. With Purvy dead and
Hollman the victim of his own hand, the backbone of the murder
syndicate was broken. Its heart had ceased to beat. Those Hollman
survivors who bore the potentialities for leadership had not only
signed pledges of peace, but were afraid to break them; and the
triumphant Souths, instead of vaunting their victory, had subscribed to
the doctrine of order, and declared the war over. Souths who broke the
law were as speedily arrested as Hollmans. Their boys were drilling as
militiamen, and--wonder of wonders!--inviting the sons of the enemy to
join them. Of course, these things changed gradually, but the
beginnings of them were most noticeable in the first few months, just
as a newly painted and renovated house is more conspicuous than one
that has been long respectable.

Hollman's Mammoth Department Store passed into new hands, and
trafficked only in merchandise, and the town was open to the men and
women of Misery as well as those of Crippleshin.

These things Samson had explained in his letters to the Lescotts and
Horton. Men from down below could still find trouble in the wink of an
eye, by seeking it, for under all transformation the nature of the
individual remained much the same; but, without seeking to give
offense, they could ride as securely through the hills as through the
streets of a policed city--and meet a readier hospitality.

And, when these things were discussed and the two men prepared to
cross the Mason-and-Dixon line and visit the Cumberlands, Adrienne
promptly and definitely announced that she would accompany her brother.
No argument was effective to dissuade her, and after all Lescott, who
had been there, saw no good reason why she should not go with him. He
had brought Samson North. He had made a hazardous experiment which
subsequent events had more than vindicated, and yet, in one respect, he
feared that there had been failure. He had promised Sally that her
lover would return to her with undeflected loyalty. Had he done so?
Lescott had been glad that his sister should have undertaken the part
of Samson's molding, which only a woman's hand could accomplish, and he
had been glad of the strong friendship that had grown between them.
But, if that friendship had come to mean something more sentimental,
his experiment had been successful at the cost of unsuccess. He had
said little, but watched much, and he had known that, after receiving a
certain letter from Samson South, his sister had seemed strangely quiet
and distressed. These four young persons had snarled their lives in
perplexity. They could definitely find themselves and permanently
adjust themselves, only by meeting on common ground. Perhaps, Samson
had shone in an exaggerated high-light of fascination by the strong
contrast into which New York had thrown him. Wilfred Horton had the
right to be seen also in contrast with mountain life, and then only
could the girl decide for all time and irrevocably. The painter learns
something of confused values.

Horton himself had seen small reason for a growth of hope in these
months, but he, like Lescott, felt that the matter must come to issue,
and he was not of that type which shrinks from putting to the touch a
question of vital consequence. He knew that her happiness as well as
his own was in the balance. He was not embittered or deluded, as a
narrower man might have been, into the fallacy that her treatment of
him denoted fickleness. Adrienne was merely running the boundary line
that separates deep friendship from love, a boundary which is often
confusing. When she had finally staked out the disputed frontier, it
would never again be questioned. But on which side he would find
himself, he did not know.

At Hixon, they found that deceptive air of serenity which made the
history of less than three months ago seem paradoxical and
fantastically unreal. Only about the court-house square where numerous
small holes in frame walls told of fusillades, and in the interior of
the building itself where the woodwork was scarred and torn, and the
plaster freshly patched, did they find grimly reminiscent evidence.

Samson had not met them at the town, because he wished their first
impressions of his people to reach them uninfluenced by his escort. It
was a form of the mountain pride--an honest resolve to soften nothing,
and make no apologies. But they found arrangements made for horses and
saddlebags, and the girl discovered that for her had been provided a
mount as evenly gaited as any in her own stables.

When she and her two companions came out to the hotel porch to start,
they found a guide waiting, who said he was instructed to take them as
far as the ridge, where the Sheriff himself would be waiting, and the
cavalcade struck into the hills. Men at whose houses they paused to ask
a dipper of water, or to make an inquiry, gravely advised that they
"had better light, and stay all night." In the coloring forests,
squirrels scampered and scurried out of sight, and here and there on
the tall slopes they saw shy-looking children regarding them with
inquisitive eyes.

The guide led them silently, gazing in frank amazement, though
deferential politeness, at this girl in corduroys, who rode cross-
saddle, and rode so well. Yet, it was evident that he would have
preferred talking had not diffidence restrained him. He was a young man
and rather handsome in a shaggy, unkempt way. Across one cheek ran a
long scar still red, and the girl, looking into his clear, intelligent
eyes, wondered what that scar stood for. Adrienne had the power of
melting masculine diffidence, and her smile as she rode at his side,
and asked, "What is your name?" brought an answering smile to his grim
lips.

"Joe Hollman, ma'am," he answered; and the girl gave an involuntary
start. The two men who caught the name closed up the gap between the
horses, with suddenly piqued interest.

"Hollman!" exclaimed the girl. "Then, you--" She stopped and flushed.
"I beg your pardon," she said, quickly.

"That's all right," reassured the man. "I know what ye're a-thinkin',
but I hain't takin' no offense. The High Sheriff sent me over. I'm one
of his deputies."

"Were you"--she paused, and added rather timidly--"were you in the
court-house?"

He nodded, and with a brown forefinger traced the scar on his cheek.

"Samson South done that thar with his rifle-gun," he enlightened.
"He's a funny sort of feller, is Samson South."

"How?" she asked.

"Wall, he licked us, an' he licked us so plumb damn hard we was
skeered ter fight ag'in, an' then, 'stid of tramplin' on us, he turned
right 'round, an' made me a deputy. My brother's a corporal in this
hyar newfangled milishy. I reckon this time the peace is goin' ter
last. Hit's a mighty funny way ter act, but 'pears like it works all
right."

Then, at the ridge, the girl's heart gave a sudden bound, for there at
the highest point, where the road went up and dipped again, waited the
mounted figure of Samson South, and, as they came into sight, he waved
his felt hat, and rode down to meet them.

"Greetings!" he shouted. Then, as he leaned over and took Adrienne's
hand, he added: "The Goops send you their welcome." His smile was
unchanged, but the girl noted that his hair had again grown long.

Finally, as the sun was setting, they reached a roadside cabin, and
the mountaineer said briefly to the other men:

"You fellows ride on. I want Drennie to stop with me a moment. We'll
join you later."

Lescott nodded. He remembered the cabin of the Widow Miller, and
Horton rode with him, albeit grudgingly.

Adrienne sprang lightly to the ground, laughingly rejecting Samson's
assistance, and came with him to the top of a stile, from which he
pointed to the log cabin, set back in its small yard, wherein geese and
chickens picked industriously about in the sandy earth.

A huge poplar and a great oak nodded to each other at either side of
the door, and over the walls a clambering profusion of honeysuckle vine
contended with a mass of wild grape, in joint effort to hide the white
chinking between the dark logs. From the crude milk-benches to the
sweep of the well, every note was one of neatness and rustic charm.
Slowly, he said, looking straight into her eyes:

"This is Sally's cabin, Drennie."

He watched her expression, and her lips curved up in the same
sweetness of smile that had first captivated and helped to mold him.

"It's lovely!" she cried, with frank delight. "It's a picture."

"Wait!" he commanded. Then, turning toward the house, he sent out the
long, peculiarly mournful call of the whippoorwill, and, at the signal,
the door opened, and on the threshold Adrienne saw a slender figure.
She had called the cabin with its shaded dooryard a picture, but now
she knew she had been wrong. It was only a background. It was the girl
herself who made and completed the picture. She stood there in the wild
simplicity that artists seek vainly to reproduce in posed figures. Her
red calico dress was patched, but fell in graceful lines to her slim
bare ankles, though the first faint frosts had already fallen.

Her red-brown hair hung loose and in masses about the oval of a face
in which the half-parted lips were dashes of scarlet, and the eyes
large violet pools. She stood with her little chin tilted in a half-
wild attitude of reconnoiter, as a fawn might have stood. One brown arm
and hand rested on the door frame, and, as she saw the other woman, she
colored adorably.

Adrienne thought she had never seen so instinctively and unaffectedly
lovely a face or figure. Then the girl came down the steps and ran
toward them.

"Drennie," said the man, "this is Sally. I want you two to love each
other." For an instant, Adrienne Lescott stood looking at the mountain
girl, and then she opened both her arms.

"Sally," she cried, "you adorable child, I do love you!"

The girl in the calico dress raised her face, and her eyes were
glistening.

"I'm obleeged ter ye," she faltered. Then, with open and wondering
admiration she stood gazing at the first "fine lady" upon whom her
glance had ever fallen.

Samson went over and took Sally's hand.

"Drennie," he said, softly, "is there anything the matter with her?"

Adrienne Lescott shook her head.

"I understand," she said.

"I sent the others on," he went on quietly, "because I wanted that
first we three should meet alone. George and Wilfred are going to stop
at my uncle's house, but, unless you'd rather have it otherwise, Sally
wants you here."

"Do I stop now?" the girl asked.

But the man shook his head.

"I want you to meet my other people first."

As they rode at a walk along the little shred of road left to them,
the man turned gravely.

"Drennie," he began, "she waited for me, all those years. What I was
helped to do by such splendid friends as you and your brother and
Wilfred, she was back here trying to do for herself. I told you back
there the night before I left that I was afraid to let myself question
my feelings toward you. Do you remember?"

She met his eyes, and her own eyes were frankly smiling.

"You were very complimentary, Samson," she told him. "I warned you
then that it was the moon talking."

"No," he said firmly, "it was not the moon. I have since then met that
fear, and analyzed it. My feeling for you is the best that a man can
have, the honest worship of friendship. And," he added, "I have
analyzed your feeling for me, too, and, thank God! I have that same
friendship from you. Haven't I?"

For a moment, she only nodded; but her eyes were bent on the road
ahead of her. The man waited in tense silence. Then, she raised her
face, and it was a face that smiled with the serenity of one who has
wakened out of a troubled dream.

"You will always have that, Samson, dear," she assured him.

"Have I enough of it, to ask you to do for her what you did for me? To
take her and teach her the things she has the right to know?"

"I'd love it," she cried. And then she smiled, as she added: "She will
be much easier to teach. She won't be so stupid, and one of the things
I shall teach her"--she paused, and added whimsically--"will be to make
you cut your hair again."

But, just before they drew up at the house of old Spicer South, she
said:

"I might as well make a clean breast of it, Samson, and give my vanity
the punishment it deserves. You had me in deep doubt."

"About what?"

"About--well, about us. I wasn't quite sure that I wanted Sally to
have you--that I didn't need you myself. I've been a shameful little
cat to Wilfred."

"But now--?" The Kentuckian broke off.

"Now, I know that my friendship for you and my love for him have both
had their acid test--and I am happier than I've ever been before. I'm
glad we've been through it. There are no doubts ahead. I've got you
both."

"About him," said Samson, thoughtfully. "May I tell you something
which, although it's a thing in your own heart, you have never quite
known?"

She nodded, and he went on.

"The thing which you call fascination in me was really just a proxy,
Drennie. You were liking qualities in me that were really his
qualities. Just because you had known him only in gentle guise, his
finish blinded you to his courage. Because he could turn 'to woman the
heart of a woman,' you failed to see that under it was the 'iron and
fire.' You thought you saw those qualities in me, because I wore my
bark as shaggy as that scaling hickory over there. When he was getting
anonymous threats of death every morning, he didn't mention them to
you. He talked of teas and dances. I know his danger was real, because
they tried to have me kill him--and if I'd been the man they took me
for, I reckon I'd have done it. I was mad to my marrow that night--for
a minute. I don't hold a brief for Wilfred, but I know that you liked
me first for qualities which he has as strongly as I--and more
strongly. He's a braver man than I, because, though raised to gentle
things, when you ordered him into the fight, he was there. He never
turned back, or flickered. I was raised on raw meat and gunpowder, but
he went in without training."

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