The Call of the Cumberlands

Compliment came hardly and awkwardly to Samson's lips. He reached for

the girl's hand, and whispered: "I reckon I won't see no gals thet's as purty as you be, Sally. I

reckon ye knows, whether I goes or stays, we're a-goin' ter git married."

She drew her hand away, and laughed, a little bitterly. In the last day,

she had ceased to be a child, and become a woman with all the soul-aching

possibilities of a woman's intuitions.

"Samson," she said, "I hain't askin' ye ter make me no promises. When

ye sees them other gals--gals thet kin read an' write--I reckon mebby

ye'll think diff'rent. I can't hardly spell out printin' in the fust

reader."

Her lover's voice was scornful of the imagined dangers, as a recruit

may be of the battle terrors--before he has been under fire. He slipped

his arm about her and drew her over to him.

"Honey," he said, "ye needn't fret about thet. Readin' an' writin'

can't make no difference fer a woman. Hit's mighty important fer a man,

but you're a gal."

"You're a-goin' ter think diff'rent atter awhile," she insisted. "When

ye goes, I hain't a-goin' ter be expectin' ye ter come back ... But"

--the resolution in her voice for a moment quavered as she added--"but

God knows I'm a-goin' ter be hopin'!"

"Sally!" The boy rose, and paced up and down in the road. "Air ye

goin' ter be ag'inst me, too? Don't ye see that I wants ter have a

chanst? Can't ye trust me? I'm jest a-tryin' to amount to something.

I'm plumb tired of bein' ornery an' no 'count."

She nodded.

"I've done told ye," she said, wearily, "thet I thinks ye ought ter do

hit."

He stood there in the road looking down at her and the twisted smile

that lifted only one corner of her lips, while the other drooped. The

moonlight caught her eyes; eyes that were trying, like the lips, to

smile, but that were really looking away into the future, which she saw

stripped of companionship and love, and gray with the ashiness of

wretched desolation. And, while he was seeing the light of the

simulated cheeriness die out in her face, she was seeing the strange,

exalted glow, of which she was more than half-afraid, kindle in his

pupils. It was as though she were giving up the living fire out of her

own heart to set ablaze the ambition and anticipation in his own.

That glow in Samson's eyes she feared and shrank from, as she might

have flinched before the blaze of insanity. It was a thing which her

mountain superstition could not understand, a thing not wholly normal;

a manifestation that came to the stoic face and transformed it, when

the eyes of the brain and heart were seeing things which she herself

could not see. It was the proclamation of the part of Samson which she

could not comprehend, as though he were looking into a spirit world of

weird and abnormal things. It was the light of an enthusiasm such as

his love for her could not bring to his eyes--and it told her that the

strongest and deepest part of Samson did not belong to her. Now, as the

young man stood there before her, and her little world of hope and

happiness seemed crumbling into ruins, and she was steeling her soul to

sacrifice herself and let him go, he was thinking, not of what it was

costing her in heart-break, but seeing visions of all the great world

held for him beyond the barriers of the mountains. The light in his

eyes seemed to flaunt the victory of the enthusiasms that had nothing

to do with her.