The Call of the Cumberlands

It dawned upon him that to be

known as a friend of the poor held more allurement for gray-haired age

than to be known as a master of assassins. It would be pleasant to sit

undisturbed, and see his grandchildren grow up, and he recognized, with

a sudden ferocity of repugnance, that he did not wish them to grow up

as feud fighters. Purvy had not reformed, but, other things being

equal, he would prefer to live and let live. He had reached that stage

to which all successful villains come at some time, when he envied the

placid contentment of respected virtues. Ordering Samson shot down was

a last resort--one to be held in reserve until the end.

So, along Misery and Crippleshin, the men of the factions held their

fire while the summer spent itself, and over the mountain slopes the

leaves began to turn, and the mast to ripen.

Lescott had sent a box of books, and Samson had taken a team over to

Hixon, and brought them back. It was a hard journey, attended with much

plunging against the yokes and much straining of trace chains. Sally

had gone with him. Samson was spending as much time as possible in her

society now. The girl was saying little about his departure, but her

eyes were reading, and without asking she knew that his going was

inevitable. Many nights she cried herself to sleep, but, when he saw

her, she was always the same blithe, bird-like creature that she had

been before. She was philosophically sipping her honey while the sun

shone.

Samson read some of the books aloud to Sally, who had a child's

passion for stories, and who could not have spelled them out for

herself. He read badly, but to her it was the flower of scholastic

accomplishment, and her untrained brain, sponge-like in its

acquisitiveness, soaked up many new words and phrases which fell again

quaintly from her lips in talk. Lescott had spent a week picking out

those books. He had wanted them to argue for him; to feed the boy's

hunger for education, and give him some forecast of the life that

awaited him. His choice had been an effort to achieve multum in

parvo, but Samson devoured them all from title page to finis

line, and many of them he went back to, and digested again.

He wrestled long and gently with his uncle, struggling to win the old

man's consent to his departure. But Spicer South's brain was no longer

plastic. What had been good enough for the past was good enough for the

future. He sought to take the most tolerant view, and to believe that

Samson was acting on conviction and not on an ingrate's impulse, but

that was the best he could do, and he added to himself that Samson's

was an abnormal and perverted conviction. Nevertheless, he arranged

affairs so that his nephew should be able to meet financial needs, and

to go where he chose in a fashion befitting a South. The old man was

intensely proud, and, if the boy were bent on wasting himself, he

should waste like a family head, and not appear a pauper among strangers.