The Call of the Cumberlands

"I reckon now that ye're back, Samson," suggested McCager, "an' seein'

how yore Uncle Spicer is gettin' along all right, I'll jest let the two

of ye run things. I've done had enough." It was a simple fashion of

resigning a regency, but effectual.

Old Caleb, however, still insurgent and unconvinced, brought in a

minority report.

"We wants fightin' men," he grumbled, with the senile reiteration of

his age, as he spat tobacco and beat a rat-tat on the mill floor with

his long hickory staff. "We don't want no deserters."

"Samson ain't a deserter," defended Sally. "There isn't one of you fit

to tie his shoes." Sally and old Spicer South alone knew of her lover's

letter to the Circuit Judge, and they were pledged to secrecy.

"Never mind, Sally!" It was Samson himself who answered her. "I didn't

come back because I care what men like old Caleb think. I came back

because they needed me. The proof of a fighting man is his fighting, I

reckon. I'm willing to let 'em judge me by what I'm going to do."

So, Samson slipped back, tentatively, at least, into his place as clan

head, though for a time he found it a post without action. After the

fierce outburst of bloodshed, quiet had settled, and it was tacitly

understood that, unless the Hollman forces had some coup in mind which

they were secreting, this peace would last until the soldiers were

withdrawn.

"When the world's a-lookin'," commented Judge Hollman, "hit's a right

good idea to crawl under a log--an' lay still."

Purvy had been too famous a feudist to pass unsung. Reporters came as

far as Hixon, gathered there such news as the Hollmans chose to give

them, and went back to write lurid stories and description, from

hearsay, of the stockaded seat of tragedy. Nor did they overlook the

dramatic coincidence of the return of "Wildcat" Samson South from

civilization to savagery. They made no accusation, but they pointed an

inference and a moral--as they thought. It was a sermon on the triumph

of heredity over the advantages of environment. Adrienne read some of

these saffron misrepresentations, and they distressed her.

* * * * * Meanwhile, it came insistently to the ears of Captain Callomb that

some plan was on foot, the intricacies of which he could not fathom, to

manufacture a case against a number of the Souths, quite apart from

their actual guilt, or likelihood of guilt. Once more, he would be

called upon to go out and drag in men too well fortified to be taken by

the posses and deputies of the Hollman civil machinery. At this news,

he chafed bitterly, and, still rankling with a sense of shame at the

loss of his first prisoner, he formed a plan of his own, which he

revealed over his pipe to his First Lieutenant.