The Call of the Cumberlands

The day of painting was followed by others like it. The disabling of

Lescott's left hand made the constant companionship of the boy a matter

that needed no explanation or apology, though not a matter of approval

to his uncle.

Another week had passed without the reappearance of Tamarack Spicer.

One afternoon, Lescott and Samson were alone on a cliff-protected

shelf, and the painter had just blocked in with umber and neutral tint

the crude sketch of his next picture. In the foreground was a steep

wall, rising palisade-like from the water below. A kingly spruce-pine

gave the near note for a perspective which went away across a valley of

cornfields to heaping and distant mountains. Beyond that range, in a

slender ribbon of pale purple, one saw the ridge of a more remote and

mightier chain.

The two men had lost an hour huddled under a canopy beneath the

cannonading of a sudden storm. They had silently watched titanic

battallions of thunder-clouds riding the skies in gusty puffs of gale,

and raking the earth with lightning and hail and water. The crags had

roared back echoing defiance, and the great trees had lashed and bent

and tossed like weeds in the buffeting. Every gully had become a

stream, and every gulch-rock a waterfall. Here and there had been a

crashing of spent timber, and now the sun had burst through a rift in

the west, and flooded a segment of the horizon with a strange, luminous

field of lesson. About this zone of clarity were heaped masses of gold-

rimmed and rose-edged clouds, still inky at their centers.

"My God!" exclaimed the mountain boy abruptly. "I'd give 'most

anything ef I could paint that."

Lescott rose smilingly from his seat before the easel, and surrendered

his palette and sheaf of brushes.

"Try it," he invited.

For a moment, Samson stood hesitant and overcome with diffidence;

then, with set lips, he took his place, and experimentally fitted his

fingers about a brush, as he had seen Lescott do. He asked no advice.

He merely gazed for awhile, and then, dipping a brush and experimenting

for his color, went to sweeping in his primary tones.

The painter stood at his back, still smiling. Of course, the brush-

stroke was that of the novice. Of course, the work was clumsy and

heavy. But what Lescott noticed was not so much the things that went on

canvas as the mixing of colors on the palette, for he knew that the

palette is the painter's heart, and its colors are the elements of his

soul. What a man paints on canvas is the sum of his acquirement; but

the colors he mixes are the declarations of what his soul can see, and

no man can paint whose eyes are not touched with the sublime. At that

moment, Lescott knew that Samson had such eyes.