The Call of the Cumberlands

"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.