The Call of the Cumberlands

"Jove!" exclaimed Lescott, admiringly. "That was neat work. He was

partly behind the limb--at a hundred yards."

"Hit warn't nothin'," said Samson, modestly. "Hit's a good gun." He

brought back his quarry, and affectionately picked up the rifle. It was

a repeating Winchester, carrying a long steel-jacketed bullet of

special caliber, but it was of a pattern fifteen years old, and fitted

with target sights.

"That gun," Samson explained, in a lowered and reverent voice, "was my

pap's. I reckon there hain't enough money in the world ter buy hit off

en me."

Slowly, in a matter-of-fact tone, he began a story without decoration

of verbiage--straightforward and tense in its simplicity. As the

painter listened, he began to understand; the gall that had crept into

this lad's blood before his weaning became comprehensible.... Killing

Hollmans was not murder.... It was duty. He seemed to see the smoke-

blackened cabin and the mother of the boy sitting, with drawn face, in

dread of the hours. He felt the racking nerve-tension of a life in

which the father went forth each day leaving his family in fear that he

would not return. Then, under the spell of the unvarnished recital, he

seemed to witness the crisis when the man, who had dared repudiate the

lawless law of individual reprisal, paid the price of his insurgency.

A solitary friend had come in advance to break the news. His face,

when he awkwardly commenced to speak, made it unnecessary to put the

story into words. Samson told how his mother had turned pallid, and

stretched out her arm gropingly for support against the door-jamb. Then

the man had found his voice with clumsy directness.

"They've got him."

The small boy had reached her in time to break her fall as she

fainted, but, later, when they brought in the limp, unconscious man,

she was awaiting them with regained composure. An expression came to

her face at that moment, said the lad, which had never left it during

the remaining two years of her life. For some hours, "old" Henry South,

who in a less-wasting life would hardly have been middle-aged, had

lingered. They were hours of conscious suffering, with no power to

speak, but before he died he had beckoned his ten-year-old son to his

bedside, and laid a hand on the dark, rumpled hair. The boy bent

forward, his eyes tortured and tearless, and his little lips tight

pressed. The old man patted the head, and made a feeble gesture toward

the mother who was to be widowed. Samson had nodded.