That was a concession to the Federal power, which could no longer be
successfully fought. State power was still largely a weapon in
factional hands, and in his country the Hollmans were the
officeholders. To the Hollmans, he could make no concessions. In
Samson, born to be the fighting man, reared to be the fighting man,
equipped by nature with deep hatreds and tigerish courage, there had
cropped out from time to time the restless spirit of the philosopher
and a hunger for knowledge. That was a matter in which the old man
found his bitterest and most secret apprehension.
It was at this house that George Lescott, distinguished landscape
painter of New York and the world-at-large, arrived in the twilight.
His first impression was received in shadowy evening mists that gave a
touch of the weird. The sweep of the stone-guarded well rose in a yard
tramped bare of grass. The house itself, a rambling structure of logs,
with additions of undressed lumber, was without lights. The cabin,
which had been the pioneer nucleus, still stood windowless and with mud
-daubed chimney at the center. About it rose a number of tall poles
surmounted by bird-boxes, and at its back loomed the great hump of the
mountain.
Whatever enemy might have to be met to-morrow, old Spicer South
recognized as a more immediate call upon his attention the wounded
guest of to-day. One of the kinsmen proved to have a rude working
knowledge of bone-setting, and before the half-hour had passed,
Lescott's wrist was in a splint, and his injuries as well tended as
possible, which proved to be quite well enough.
By that time, Sally's voice was heard shouting from the stile, and
Sally herself appeared with the announcement that she had found and
brought in the lost mule.
As Lescott looked at her, standing slight and willowy in the
thickening darkness, among the big-boned and slouching figures of the
clansmen, she seemed to shrink from the stature of a woman into that of
a child, and, as she felt his eyes on her, she timidly slipped farther
back into the shadowy door of the cabin, and dropped down on the sill,
where, with her hands clasped about her knees, she gazed curiously at
himself. She did not speak, but sat immovable with her thick hair
falling over her shoulders. The painter recognized that even the
interest in him as a new type could not for long keep her eyes from
being drawn to the face of Samson, where they lingered, and in that
magnetism he read, not the child, but the woman.
Samson was plainly restive from the moment of her arrival, and, when a
monosyllabic comment from the taciturn group threatened to reveal to
the girl the threatened outbreak of the feud, he went over to her, and
inquired: "Sally, air ye skeered ter go home by yeself?"