The Call of the Cumberlands

One day, Adrienne looked up from a sheaf of his very creditable

landscape studies to inquire suddenly: "Samson, are you a rich man, or a poor one?"

He laughed. "So rich," he told her, "that unless I can turn some of

this stuff into money within a year or two, I shall have to go back to

hoeing corn."

She nodded gravely.

"Hasn't it occurred to you," she demanded, "that in a way you are

wasting your gifts? They were talking about you the other evening

--several painters. They all said that you should be doing portraits."

The Kentuckian smiled. His masters had been telling him the same

thing. He had fallen in love with art through the appeal of the skies

and hills. He had followed its call at the proselyting of George

Lescott, who painted only landscape. Portraiture seemed a less-artistic

form of expression. He said so.

"That may all be very true," she conceded, "but you can go on with

your landscapes, and let your portraits pay the way. With your entrée,

you could soon have a very enviable clientèle."

"'So she showed me the way, to promotion and pay,

And I learned about women from her,'"

quoted Samson with a laugh.

"And," she added, "since I am very vain and moderately rich, I hereby

commission you to paint me, just as soon as you learn how."

Farbish had simply dropped out. Bit by bit, the truth of the

conspiracy had leaked, and he knew that his usefulness was ended, and

that well-lined pocketbooks would no longer open to his profligate

demands. The bravo and plotter whose measure has been taken is a broken

reed. Farbish made no farewells. He had come from nowhere and his going

was like his coming.

* * * * * Sally had started to school. She had not announced that she meant to

do so, but each day the people of Misery saw her old sorrel mare making

its way to and from the general direction of Stagbone College, and they

smiled. No one knew how Sally's cheeks flamed as she sat alone on

Saturdays and Sundays on the rock at the backbone's rift. She was

taking her place, morbidly sensitive and a woman of eighteen, among

little spindle-shanked girls in short skirts, and the little girls were

more advanced than she. But she, too, meant to have "l'arnin'"--as much

of it as was necessary to satisfy the lover who might never come. It

must be admitted that learning for its own sake did not make a clarion-

tongued appeal to the girl's soul. Had Samson been satisfied with her

untutored, she would have been content to remain untutored. He had said

that these things were of no importance in her, but that was before he

had gone forth into the world. If, she naïvely told herself, he should

come back of that same opinion, she would never "let on" that she had

learned things. She would toss overboard her acquirements as ruthlessly

as useless ballast from an over-encumbered boat. But, if Samson came

demanding these attainments, he must find her possessed of them. So

far, her idea of "l'arnin'" embraced the three R's only. And, yet, the

"fotched-on" teachers at the "college" thought her the most voraciously

ambitious pupil they had ever had, so unflaggingly did she toil, and

the most remarkably acquisitive, so fast did she learn. But her studies

had again been interrupted, and Miss Grover, her teacher, riding over

one day to find out why her prize scholar had deserted, met in the road

an empty "jolt-wagon," followed by a ragged cortège of mounted men and

women, whose faces were still lugubrious with the effort of recent

mourning. Her questions elicited the information that they were

returning from the "buryin'" of the Widow Miller.