The Call of the Cumberlands

The coming of the kinsmen, who would stay until the present danger

passed, had filled the house. The four beds in the cabin proper were

full, and some slept on floor mattresses. Lescott, because a guest and

wounded, was given a small room aside. Samson, however, shared his

quarters in order to perform any service that an injured man might

require. It had been a full and unusual day for the painter, and its

incidents crowded in on him in retrospect and drove off the possibility

of sleep. Samson, too, seemed wakeful, and in the isolation of the dark

room the two men fell into conversation, which almost lasted out the

night. Samson went into the confessional. This was the first human

being he had ever met to whom he could unburden his soul.

The thirst to taste what knowledge lay beyond the hills; the unnamed

wanderlust that had at times brought him a restiveness so poignant as

to be agonizing; the undefined attuning of his heart to the beauty of

sky and hill; these matters he had hitherto kept locked in guilty

silence. To the men of his clan these were eccentricities bordering on

the abnormal; frailties to be passed over with charity, as one would

pass over the infirmities of an afflicted child. To Samson they looked

as to a sort of feud Messiah. His destiny was stern, and held no place

for dreams. For him, they could see only danger in an insatiable hunger

for learning. In a weak man, a school-teacher or parson sort of a man,

that might be natural, but this young cock of their walk was being

reared for the pit--for conflict. What was important in him was

stamina, and sharp strength of spur. These qualities he had proven from

infancy. Weakening proclivities must be eliminated.

So, the boy had been forced to keep throttled impulses that, for being

throttled, had smoldered and set on fire the inner depths of his soul.

During long nights, he had secretly digested every available book. Yet,

in order to vindicate himself from the unspoken accusation of growing

weak, of forgetting his destiny, he had courted trouble, and sought

combat. He was too close to his people's point of view for perspective.

He shared their idea that the thinking man weakens himself as a

fighting man. He had never heard of a Cyrano de Bergerac, or an Aramis.

Now had come some one with whom he could talk: a man who had traveled

and followed, without shame, the beckoning of Learning and Beauty. At

once, the silent boy found himself talking intimately, and the artist

found himself studying one of the strangest human paradoxes he had yet

seen.