"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.