The Call of the Cumberlands

Climbing fleetly up through steep and tangled slopes, and running as

fleetly down; crossing a brawling little stream on a slender trunk of

fallen poplar; the girl hastened on her mission. Her lungs drank the

clear air in regular tireless draughts. Once only, she stopped and drew

back. There was a sinister rustle in the grass, and something glided

into her path and lay coiled there, challenging her with an ominous

rattle, and with wicked, beady eyes glittering out of a swaying, arrow

-shaped head. Her own eyes instinctively hardened, and she glanced

quickly about for a heavy piece of loose timber. But that was only for

an instant, then she took a circuitous course, and left her enemy in

undisputed possession of the path.

"I hain't got no time ter fool with ye now, old rattlesnake," she

called back, as she went. "Ef I wasn't in sech a hurry, I'd shore bust

yer neck."

At last, she came to a point where a clearing rose on the mountainside

above her. The forest blanket was stripped off to make way for a fenced-

in and crazily tilting field of young corn. High up and beyond, close

to the bald shoulders of sandstone which threw themselves against the

sky, was the figure of a man. As the girl halted at the foot of the

field, at last panting from her exertions, he was sitting on the rail

fence, looking absently down on the outstretched panorama below him. It

is doubtful whether his dreaming eyes were as conscious of what he saw

as of other things which his imagination saw beyond the haze of the

last far rim. Against the fence rested his abandoned hoe, and about him

a number of lean hounds scratched and dozed in the sun. Samson South

had little need of hounds; but, in another century, his people, turning

their backs on Virginia affluence to invite the hardships of pioneer

life, had brought with them certain of the cavaliers' instincts. A

hundred years in the stagnant back-waters of the world had brought to

their descendants a lapse into illiteracy and semi-squalor, but through

it all had fought that thin, insistent flame of instinct. Such a

survival was the boy's clinging to his hounds. Once, they had

symbolized the spirit of the nobility; the gentleman's fondness for his

sport with horse and dog and gun. Samson South did not know the origin

of his fondness for this remnant of a pack. He did not know that in the

long ago his forefathers had fought on red fields with Bruce and the

Stuarts. He only knew that through his crudities something indefinable,

yet compelling, was at war with his life, filling him with great and

shapeless longings. He at once loved and resented these ramparts of

stone that hemmed in his hermit race and world.