Judith of the Cumberlands. MacGowan Alice

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СКАЧАТЬ Creed whistled over his work, he saw a shadowy train coming down the road, the people whom he should help, his people, to whose darkness he should bring light and counsel. They knew so little, and needed so much. True, his own knowledge was not great; but it was all freely at their service. His heart swelled with good-will as he prepared to open his modest campaign of usefulness.

      To come into leadership naturally a man should be the logical outgrowth of his class and time, and this Creed knew he was not. Yet he had pondered the matter deeply, and put it thus to himself: The peasant of Europe can only rise through stages of material prosperity to a point of development at which he craves intellectual attainment, or spiritual growth. But the mountaineer is always a thinker; he has even in his poverty a hearty contempt for luxury, for material gain at the expense of personality. With his disposition to philosophy, fostered by solitude and isolation, he readily overleaps those gradations, and would step at once from obscurity to the position of a man of culture were the means at hand.

      “Bonbright,” remonstrated Jephthah Turrentine, in the first conversation the two held upon the subject, “Ye cain’t give people what they ain’t ready to take. Ef our folks wanted law and order, don’t you reckon they’d make the move to get it?”

      “That’s it exactly, Mr. Turrentine,” responded Creed quickly. “They need to be taught what to want.”

      “Oh, they do, do they?” inquired Jephthah with a humorous twitch of the lips. “Well, ef you’re a-goin’ to set up to teach, hadn’t you better have a school-house, place of a jestice’s office?”

      “Maybe you’re right. I reckon you are—exactly right,” Creed assented thoughtfully. “I’d studied about that considerable. I reckon I’m a more suitable age for a schoolmaster than for a justice; and the children—but that would take a long time; and I wanted to give the help where it was worst needed.”

      “Oh, well, ’tain’t a hangin’ matter,” old Jephthah smiled at the younger man’s solemn earnestness. “Ef this new fangled buildin’ o’ yours don’t get used for a jestice’s office we can turn it into a school-house; we need one powerful bad.”

      The desultory, sardonic, deep-voiced, soft-footed, mountain carpenters who worked leisurely and fitfully with Creed were always mightily amused by the exactness of the “town feller’s” ideas.

      “Why lordy! Lookee hyer Creed,” remonstrated Doss Provine, over a question of matching boards and battening joints, “ef you git yo’ pen so almighty tight as that you won’t git no fresh air. Man’s bound to have ventilation. Course you can leave the do’ open all the time like we-all do; but when yo’re a-holdin’ co’t and sech-like maybe you’ll want to shet the do’ sometimes—and then whar’ll ye git breath to breathe?”

      “I reckon Creed knows his business,” put in the old man who was helping Doss, “but all these here glass winders is blame foolishness to me. Ef ye need light, open the do’. Ef somebody comes that you don’t want in, you can shet it and put up a bar. But saw the walls full o’ holes an’ set in glass winders, an’ any feller that’s got a mind to can pick ye off with a rifle ball as easy as not whilst ye set by the fire of a evenin’.”

      He shook a reprehending head, hoary with the snows of years, and containing therefore, presumably, wisdom. He had learned the necessary points of life in his environment, and as always occurs, the younger generation seemed to him lavishly reckless.

      It was only old Jephthah’s criticisms that Creed really minded.

      “Uh-huh,” allowed Jephthah, settling his hands on his hips and surveying the yellow pine structure tolerantly; “mighty sightly for them that likes that kind o’ thing. But I hold with a good log house, becaze it’s apt to be square. These here town doin’s that looks like a man with a bile on his ear never did ketch me. Ef ye hew out good oak or pine timber ye won’t be willin’ to cut short lengths for to make such foolishness.”

      Creed would often have explained to his critics that he did not expect to get into feuds and have neighbours pot-hunting him through his glass windows, that he needed the light from them to study or read, and that his little house was as square as any log hut ever constructed; but they lumped it all together and made an outsider of him—which hurt.

      Word went abroad to the farthest confines of the Turkey Track neighbourhoods, carried by herders who took sheep, hogs, or cows up into the high-hung inner valleys of Yellow Old Bald, or the natural meadows of Big Turkey Track to turn them loose for the season, recited where one or two met out salting cattle, discussed by many a chip pile, where the willing axe rested on the unsplit block while the wielder heard how Creed Bonbright had done sot up a jestice’s office and made peace between the Shallidays and the Bushareses.

      “But you know in reason hit ain’t a-goin’ to hold,” the old women at the hearthside would say, withdrawing their cob pipes to shake deprecating heads. “The Bushareses and Shallidays has been killin’ each other up sence my gran’pap was a little boy. They tell me the Injuns mixed into that there feud. I say Creed Bonbright! Nothin’ but a fool boy. He better l’arn something before he sets up to teach. He don’t know what he’s meddlin’ with.” All this with a pride in the vendetta as an ancient neighbourhood institution and monument.

      The office of the new justice never became, as he had hoped it would, a lounging place for his passing neighbours. He had expected them to drop in to visit with him, when he might sow the good seed in season without appearing to seek an occasion for so doing. But they were shy of him—he saw that. They went on past the little yellow pine office, on their mules, or their sorry nags, or in shackling waggons behind oxen, to lounge at Nancy Card’s gate as of old, or sit upon her porch to swap news and listen to her caustic comments on neighbourhood happenings. And only an occasional glance over the shoulder, a backward nod of the head, or jerk of the thumb, told the young justice that he was present in their recollection.

      But there was one element of the community which showed no disposition to hold aloof from the newcomer. About this time, by twos and threes—never one alone—the virgins of the mountain-top sought Nancy Card for flower seed, soft soap recipes, a charm to take off warts, or to learn exactly from her at what season a body had better divide the roots of day lilies.

      Old-fashioned roses begin blooming in the Cumberlands about the first of May, and when this time came round Nancy’s garden was a thing to marvel at. The spring flowers were past or nearly so, and the advent of the roses marked the floral beginning of summer. In the forest the dogwood petals now let go and fell silently one by one through the shadowed green. But over Nancy’s fence of weather-beaten, hand-rived palings tossed a snow of bloom so like that here they were not missed at all; and the mock orange adds to the dogwood’s simple beauty the soul of an exquisite odour. Small, heavily thorned roses, yellow as the daffodils they had succeeded, blushing Baltimore Belles, Seven Sisters all over the ricketty porch—one who loved such things might well have taken a day’s journey for sight of that dooryard in May.

      “Well, I vow!” said the old woman one day peering through her window that gave on the road, “ef here don’t come Huldy Spiller and the two Lusks. Look like to me I have a heap of gal company of late. Creed, you’re a mighty learned somebody, cain’t you tell me the whys of it?”

      Creed, sitting at a little table deep in some books and papers before him, heard no word of his friend’s teasing speech. It was Doss Provine, at the big fireplace heating a poker to burn a hole through his pulley-wheel, who turned toward his mother-in-law and grinned foolishly.

      “I reckon I know the answer to that,” he observed. “The boys is all a warnin’ me that a widower is mo’ СКАЧАТЬ