The Call of the Cumberlands

Charles Neville Buck

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• Publié par: offo
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 18
• Langue: English

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by Charles Neville Buck
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Title: The Call of the CumberlandsAuthor: Charles Neville Buck
Release Date: March, 2005 [EBook #7776] [Yes,
we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on May 16, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG
EBOOK THE CALL OF THE CUMBERLANDS ***
Produced by Avinash Kothare, Tiffany Vergon,
Charles Aldarondo, Charles Franks and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team.THE CALL OF THE
CUMBERLANDS
BY
CHARLES NEVILLE BUCKCHAPTER I
Close to the serried backbone of the Cumberland
ridge through a sky of mountain clarity, the sun
seemed hesitating before its descent to the
horizon. The sugar-loaf cone that towered above a
creek called Misery was pointed and edged with
emerald tracery where the loftiest timber thrust up
its crest plumes into the sun. On the hillsides it
would be light for more than an hour yet, but
below, where the waters tossed themselves along
in a chorus of tiny cascades, the light was already
thickening into a cathedral gloom. Down there the
"furriner" would have seen only the rough course of
the creek between moss-velveted and shaded
bowlders of titanic proportions. The native would
have recognized the country road in these tortuous
twistings. Now there were no travelers, foreign or
native, and no sounds from living throats except at
intervals the clear "Bob White" of a nesting
partridge, and the silver confidence of the red
cardinal flitting among the pines. Occasionally, too,
a stray whisper of breeze stole along the creek-bed
and rustled the beeches, or stirred in the broad,
fanlike leaves of the "cucumber trees." A great
block of sandstone, to whose summit a man
standing in his saddle could scarcely reach his
fingertips, towered above the stream, with a
gnarled scrub oak clinging tenaciously to its apex.
Loftily on both sides climbed the mountains
cloaked in laurel and timber.Suddenly the leafage was thrust aside from above
by a cautious hand, and a shy, half-wild girl
appeared in the opening. For an instant she halted,
with her brown fingers holding back the brushwood,
and raised her face as though listening. Across the
slope drifted the call of the partridge, and with
perfect imitation she whistled back an answer. It
would have seemed appropriate to anyone who
had seen her that she should talk bird language to
the birds. She was herself as much a wood
creature as they, and very young. That she was
beautiful was not strange. The women of the
mountains have a morning-glory bloom—until
hardship and drudgery have taken toll of their
youth—and she could not have been more than
sixteen.
It was June, and the hills, which would be bleakly
forbidding barriers in winter, were now as blithely
young as though they had never known the
scourging of sleet or the blight of wind. The world
was abloom, and the girl, too, was in her early
June, and sentiently alive with the strength of its
full pulse-tide. She was slim and lithely resilient of
step. Her listening attitude was as eloquent of
pausing elasticity as that of the gray squirrel. Her
breathing was soft, though she had come down a
steep mountainside, and as fragrant as the breath
of the elder bushes that dashed the banks with
white sprays of blossom. She brought with her to
the greens and grays and browns of the
woodland's heart a new note of color, for her calico
dress was like the red cornucopias of the trumpet-
flower, and her eyes were blue like little scraps ofsky. Her heavy, brown-red hair fell down over her
shoulders in loose profusion. The coarse dress was
freshly briar-torn, and in many places patched; and
it hung to the lithe curves of her body in a fashion
which told that she wore little else. She had no hat,
but the same spirit of childlike whimsey that caused
her eyes to dance as she answered the partridge's
call had led her to fashion for her own crowning a
headgear of laurel leaves and wild roses. As she
stood with the toes of one bare foot twisting in the
gratefully cool moss, she laughed with the sheer
exhilaration of life and youth, and started out on
the table top of the huge rock. But there she halted
suddenly with a startled exclamation, and drew
instinctively back. What she saw might well have
astonished her, for it was a thing she had never
seen before and of which she had never heard.
Now she paused in indecision between going
forward toward exploration and retreating from new
and unexplained phenomena. In her quick
instinctive movements was something like the
irresolution of the fawn whose nostrils have dilated
to a sense of possible danger. Finally, reassured
by the silence, she slipped across the broad face
of the flat rock for a distance of twenty-five feet,
and paused again to listen.
At the far edge lay a pair of saddlebags, such as
form the only practical equipment for mountain
travelers. They were ordinary saddlebags, made
from the undressed hide of a brindle cow, and they
were fat with tight packing. A pair of saddlebags
lying unclaimed at the roadside would in
themselves challenge curiosity. But in this instancethey gave only the prefatory note to a stranger
story. Near them lay a tin box, littered with small
and unfamiliar-looking tubes of soft metal, all
grotesquely twisted and stained, and beside the
box was a strangely shaped plaque of wood,
smeared with a dozen hues. That this plaque was
a painter's sketching palette was a thing which she
could not know, since the ways of artists had to do
with a world as remote from her own as the life of
the moon or stars. It was one of those vague
mysteries that made up the wonderful life of "down
below." Even the names of such towns as
Louisville and Lexington meant nothing definite to
this girl who could barely spell out, "The cat caught
the rat," in the primer. Yet here beside the box and
palette stood a strange jointed tripod, and upon it
was some sort of sheet. What it all meant, and
what was on the other side of the sheet became a
matter of keenly alluring interest. Why had these
things been left here in such confusion? If there
was a man about who owned them he would
doubtless return to claim them. Possibly he was
wandering about the broken bed of the creek,
searching for a spring, and that would not take
long. No one drank creek water. At any moment he
might return and discover her. Such a contingency
held untold terrors for her shyness, and yet to turn
her back on so interesting a mystery would be
insupportable. Accordingly, she crept over, eyes
and ears alert, and slipped around to the front of
the queer tripod, with all her muscles poised in
readiness for flight.
A half-rapturous and utterly astonished cry brokefrom her lips. She stared a moment, then dropped
to the moss-covered rock, leaning back on her
brown hands and gazing intently. She sat there
forgetful of everything except the sketch which
stood on the collapsible easel.
"Hit's purty!" she approved, in a low, musical
murmur. "Hit's plumb dead beautiful!" Her eyes
were glowing with delighted approval.
She had never before seen a picture more worthy
than the chromos of advertising calendars and the
few crude prints that find their way into the
roughest places, and she was a passionate,
though totally unconscious, devotée of beauty.
Now she was sitting before a sketch, its paint still
moist, which more severe critics would have
pronounced worthy of accolade. Of course, it was
not a finished picture—merely a study of what lay
before her—but the hand that had placed these
brushstrokes on the academy board was the sure,
deft hand of a master of landscape, who had
caught the splendid spirit of the thing, and fixed it
immutably in true and glowing appreciation. Who
he was; where he had gone; why his work stood
there unfinished and abandoned, were details
which for the moment this half-savage child-woman
forgot to question. She was conscious only of a
sense of revelation and awe. Then she saw other
boards, like the one upon the easel, piled near the
paint -box. These were dry, and represented the