Books: The Heart Of The Hills

J >> John Fox, Jr. >> The Heart Of The Hills

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20

Around the corner of the yard fence a negro appeared leading a
prancing iron-gray horse, the front doors opened, a tall girl in a
black riding-habit came swiftly down the walk, and a moment later
the iron-gray was bearing her at a swift gallop toward the
turnpike gate. As she disappeared over a green summit, his heart
stood quite still. Could that tall woman be the little girl who,
with a tear, a tremor of the voice, and a touch of the hand, had
swerved him from the beaten path of a century? Mavis had grown, he
himself had grown--and, of course, Marjorie, too, had grown. He
began to wonder whether she would recollect him, would know him
when he met her face to face, would remember the promise she had
asked and he had given, and if she would be pleased to know that
he had kept it. In the passing years the boy had actually lost
sight of her as flesh and blood, for she had become enshrined
among his dreams by night and his dreams by day; among the visions
his soul had seen when he had sat under the old circuit rider and
heard pictured the glories of the blessed when mortals should
mingle with the shining hosts on high: and above even St. Hilda,
on the very pinnacle of his new-born and ever-growing ambitions,
Marjorie sat enthroned and alone. Light was all he remembered of
her--the light of her eyes and of her hair--yes, and that one
touch of her hand. His heart turned to water at the thought of
seeing her again and his legs were trembling when he rose to start
back through the fields. Another rabbit sprang from its bed in a
tuft of grass, but he scarcely paid any heed to it. When he
crossed the creek a muskrat was leisurely swimming for its hole in
the other bank, and he did not even pick up a stone to throw at
it, but walked on dreaming through the woods. As he was about to
emerge from them he heard voices ahead of him, high-pitched and
angry, and with the caution of his race he slipped forward and
stopped, listening. In a tobacco-patch on the edge of the woods
Steve Hawn had stopped work and was leaning on the fence. Seated
on it was one of the small farmers of the neighborhood. They were
not quarrelling, and the boy could hardly believe his ears.

"I tell you that fellow--they're callin' him the autocrat already-
-that fellow will have two of his judges to your one at every
election booth in the State. He'll steal every precinct and he'll
be settin' in the governor's chair as sure as you are standing
here. I'm a Democrat, but I've been half a Republican ever since
this free-silver foolishness came up, and I'm going to vote
against him. Now, all you mountain people are Republicans, but you
might as well all be Democrats. You haven't got a chance oh earth.
What are you goin' to do about it?"

Steve Hawn shook his head helplessly, but Jason saw his huge hand
grip his tobacco knife and his own blood beat indignantly at his
temples. The farmer threw one leg back over the fence.

"There'll be hell to pay when the day comes," he said, and he
strode away, while the mountaineer leaned motionless on the fence
with his grip on the knife unrelaxed.

Noiselessly the boy made his way through the edge of the woods,
out under the brow of a hill, and went on his restless way up the
bank of the creek toward Steve's home. When he turned toward the
turnpike he found that he had passed the house a quarter of a
mile, so he wheeled back down the creek, and where the mouth of
the lane opened from the road he dropped in a spot of sunlight on
the crest of a little cliff, his legs weary but his brain still
tirelessly at work. These people of the Blue-grass were not only
robbing him and his people of their lands, but of their political
birthright as well. The fact that the farmer was on his side but
helped make the boy know it was truth, and the resentments that
were always burning like a bed of coals deep within him sprang
into flames again. The shadows lengthened swiftly about him and
closed over him, and then the air grew chill. Abruptly he rose and
stood rigid, for far up the lane, and coming over a little hill,
he saw the figure of a man leading a black horse and by his side
the figure of a woman--both visible for a moment before they
disappeared behind the bushes that lined the lane. When they were
visible again Jason saw that they were a boy and girl, and when
they once more came into view at a bend of the lane and stopped he
saw that the girl, with her face downcast, was Mavis. While they
stood the boy suddenly put his arm around her, but she eluded him
and fled to the fence, and with a laugh he climbed on his horse
and came down the lane. In a burning rage Jason started to slide
down the cliff and pull the intruder, whoever he was, from his
horse, and then he saw Mavis, going swiftly through the fields,
turn and wave her hand. That stopped him still--he could not
punish where there was apparently no offence--so with sullen eyes
he watched the mouth of the lane give up a tall lad on a black
thoroughbred, his hat in his hand and his handsome face still
laughing and still turned for another glimpse of the girl. Another
hand-wave came from Mavis at the edge of the woods, and glowering
Jason stood in full view unseen and watched Gray Pendleton go
thundering past him down the road.

Mavis had not gone to see Marjorie--she had sneaked away to meet
Gray; his lips curled contemptuously--Mavis was a sneak, and so
was Gray Pendleton. Then a thought struck him--why was Mavis
behaving like a brush-girl this way, and why didn't Gray go to see
her in her own home, open and above-board, like a man? The curl of
the boy's lips settled into a straight, grim line, and once more
he turned slowly down the stream that he might approach Steve's
house from another direction. Half an hour later, when he climbed
the turnpike fence, he heard the gallop of iron-shod feet and he
saw bearing down on him an iron-gray horse. It was Marjorie. He
knew her from afar; he gripped the rail beneath him with both
hands and his heart seemed almost to stop. She was looking him
full in the face now, and then, with a nod and a smile she would
have given a beggar or a tramp, she swept him by.

XVII

There was little about Jason and his school career that John
Burnham had not heard from his friend St. Hilda, for she kept
sending at intervals reports of him, so that Burnham knew how
doggedly the lad had worked in school and out; what a leader he
was among his fellows, and how, that he might keep out of the
feud, he had never gone to his grandfather's even during
vacations, except for a day or two, but had hired himself out to
some mountain farmer and had toiled like a slave, always within
St. Hilda's reach. She had won Jason's heart from the start, so
that he had told her frankly about his father's death, the coming
of the geologist, the sale of his home, the flight of his mother
and Steve Hawn, his shooting at Babe Honeycutt, and his own flight
after them, but at the brink of one confession he always balked.
Never could St. Hilda learn just why he had given up the manly
prerogatives of pistol, whiskey-jug, and a deadly purpose of
revenge, to accept in their place, if need be, the despised duties
of women-folks. But his grim and ready willingness for the
exchange appealed to St. Hilda so strongly that she had always
saved him as much of these duties as she could.

The truth was that the school-master had slyly made a diplomatic
use of their mutual interest in Jason that was masterly. There had
been little communication between them since the long-ago days
when she had given him her final decision and gone on her mission
to the mountains, until Jason had come to be an important link
between them. Gradually, after that, St. Hilda had slowly come to
count on the school-master's sympathy and understanding, and more
than once she had written not only for his advice but for his help
as well. And wisely, through it all, Burnham had never sounded the
personal note, and smilingly he had noted the passing of all
suspicion on her part, the birth of her belief that he was cured
of his love for her and would bother her no more, and now, in her
last letter announcing Jason's coming to the Blue-grass, there was
a distinct personal atmosphere that almost made him chuckle. St.
Hilda even wondered whether he might not care, during some
vacation, to come down and see with his own eyes the really
remarkable work he knew she was doing down there. And when he
wrote during the summer that he had been called to the suddenly
vacated chair of geology in the college Jason had been prepared
for, her delight thrilled him, though he had to wonder how much of
it might be due to the fact that her protege would thus be near
him for help and counsel.

His face was almost aglow when he drove out through the gate that
morning on his way to the duties of his first day. The
neighborhood children were already on their way to school, but
they were mostly the children of tobacco tenants, and when he
passed the school-house he saw a young woman on the porch--two
facts that were significant. The neighborhood church was going,
the neighborhood school was going, the man-teacher was gone--and
he himself was perhaps the last of the line that started in
coonskin caps and moccasins. The gentleman farmers who had made
the land distinct and distinguished were renting their acres to
tobacco tenants on shares and were moving to town to get back
their negro servants and to provide their children with proper
schooling. And those children of the gentle people, it seemed,
were growing more and more indifferent to education and culture,
and less and less marked by the gentle manners that were their
birthright. And when he thought of the toll-gate war, the
threatened political violence almost at hand, and the tobacco
troubles which he knew must some day come, he wondered with a sick
heart if a general decadence was not going on in the land for
which he would have given his life in peace as readily as in war.
In the mountains, according to St. Hilda, the people had awakened
from a sleep of a hundred years. Lawlessness was on the decrease,
the feud was disappearing, railroads were coming in, the hills
were beginning to give up the wealth of their timber, iron, and
coal. County schools were increasing, and the pathetic eagerness
of mountain children to learn and the pathetic hardships they
endured to get to school and to stay there made her heart bleed
and his ache to help them. And in his own land, what a contrast!
Three years before, the wedge of free silver had split the State
in twain. Into this breach had sprung that new man with the new
political method that threatened disaster to the commonwealth. To
his supporters, he was the enemy of corporations, the friend of
widows and orphans, the champion of the poor--this man; to his
enemies, he was the most malign figure that had ever thrust head
above the horizon of Kentucky politics--and so John Burnham
regarded him; to both he was the autocrat, cold, exacting,
imperious, and his election bill would make him as completely
master of the commonwealth as Diaz in Mexico or Menelik in
Abyssinia. The dazed people awoke and fought, but the autocrat had
passed his bill. It was incredible, but could he enforce it? No
one knew, but the midsummer convention for the nomination of
governor came, and among the candidates he entered it, the last in
public preference. But he carried that convention at the pistol's
point, came out the Democratic nominee, and now stood smilingly
ready to face the most terrible political storm that had ever
broken over Kentucky. The election was less than two months away,
the State was seething as though on the trembling crisis of a
civil war, and the division that John Burnham expected between
friend and friend, brother and brother, and father and son had
come. The mountains were on fire and there might even be an
invasion from those black hills led by the spirit of the Picts and
Scots of old, and aided and abetted by the head, hand, and tongue
of the best element of the Blue-grass. The people of the Blue-
grass had known little and cared less about these shadowy
hillsmen, but it looked to John Burnham as though they might soon
be forced to know and care more than would be good for the peace
of the State and its threatened good name.

A rattle-trap buggy was crawling up a hill ahead of him, and when
he passed it Steve Hawn was flopping the reins, and by him was
Mavis with a radiant face and sparkling eyes.

"Where's Jason?" John Burnham called, and the girl's face grew
quickly serious.

"Gone on, afoot," laughed Steve loudly. "He started 'bout crack o'
day."

The school-master smiled. On the slope of the next hill, two
carriages, each drawn by a spanking pair of trotters, swept by
him. From one he got a courteous salute from Colonel Pendleton and
a happy shout from Gray, and from the other a radiant greeting
from Marjorie and her mother. Again John Burnham smiled
thoughtfully. For him the hope of the Blue-grass was in the joyous
pair ahead of him, the hope of the mountains was in the girl
behind and the sturdy youth streaking across the dawn-wet fields,
and in the four the hope of his State; and his smile was pleased
and hopeful.

Soon on his left were visible the gray lines of the old
Transylvania University where Jefferson Davis had gone to college
while Abraham Lincoln was splitting rails and studying by
candlelight a hundred miles away, and its campus was dotted with
swiftly moving figures of boys and girls on their way to the
majestic portico on the hill. The streets were filled with eager
young faces, and he drove on through them to the red-brick walls
of the State University, on the other side of the town, where his
labors were to begin. And when, half an hour later, he turned into
the campus afoot, he found himself looking among the boys who
thronged the walk, the yard, and the entrances of the study halls
for the face of Jason Hawn.

Tremblingly the boy had climbed down from the fence after Marjorie
galloped by him the day before, had crossed the pike slowly, sunk
dully at the foot of an oak in the woods beyond, and sat there,
wide-eyed and stunned, until dark. Had he been one of the
followers of the star of Bethlehem, and had that star vanished
suddenly from the heavens, he could hardly have known such
darkness, such despair. For the time Mavis and Gray passed quite
out of the world while he was wrestling with that darkness, and it
was only when he rose shakily to his feet at last that they came
back into it again. Supper was over when he reached the house, but
Mavis had kept it for him, and while she waited on him she tried
to ask him questions about his school-life in the mountains, to
tell him of her own in the Blue-grass--tried to talk about the
opening of college next day, but he sat silent and sullen, and so,
puzzled and full of resentment, she quietly withdrew. After he was
through, he heard her cleaning the dishes and putting them away,
and he saw her that night no more. Next morning, without a word to
her or to his mother, he went out to the barn where Steve was
feeding.

"If you'll bring my things on in the buggy, I reckon I'll just be
goin' on."

"Why, we can all three git in the buggy."

Jason shook his head.

"I hain't goin' to be late."

Steve laughed.

"Well, you'll shore be on time if you start now. Why, Mavis says--
"

But Jason had started swiftly on, and Steve, puzzled, did not try
to stop him. Mavis came out on the porch, and he pointed out the
boy's figure going through the dim fields. "Jason's gone on," he
said, "afeerd he'll be late. That boy's plum' quar."

Jason was making a bee-line for more than the curve of the pike,
for more than the college--he was making it now for everything in
his life that was ahead of him, and he meant now to travel it
without help or hindrance, unswervingly and alone. With St. Hilda,
each day had started for him at dawn, and whether it started that
early at the college in town he did not ask himself or anybody
else. He would wait now for nothing--nobody. The time had come to
start, so he had started on his own new way, stout in body, heart,
and soul, and that was all.

Soft mists of flame were shooting up the eastern horizon, soft
dew-born mists were rising from little hollows and trailing
through the low trees. There had been a withering drought lately,
but the merciful rain had come, the parched earth had drunk deep,
and now under its mantle of rich green it seemed to be heaving
forth one vast long sigh of happy content. The corn was long ready
for the knife, green sprouts of winter wheat were feathering their
way above the rich brown soil, and the cut upturned tobacco
stalks, but dimly seen through the mists, looked like little
hunchbacked witches poised on broomsticks, and ready for flight at
dawn. Vast deviltry those witches had done, for every cut field,
every poor field, recovering from the drastic visit of years
before was rough, weedy, shaggy, unkempt, and worn. The very face
of the land showed decadence, and, in the wake of the witches,
white top, dockweed, ragweed, cockle burr, and sweet fern had up-
leaped like some joyous swarm of criminals unleashed from the hand
of the law, while the beautiful pastures and grassy woodlands,
their dignity outraged, were stretched here and there between
them, helpless, but breathing in the very mists their scorn.

When he reached the white, dusty road, the fires of his ambition
kept on kindling with every step, and his pace, even in the cool
of the early morning, sent his hat to his hand, and plastered his
long lank hair to his temples and the back of his sturdy sunburnt
neck. The sun was hardly star-pointing the horizon when he saw the
luminous smoke-cloud over the town. He quickened his step, and in
his dark eyes those fires leaped into steady flames. The town was
wakening from sleep. The driver of a milk-cart pointed a general
direction for him across the roof-tops, but when he got into the
wilderness of houses he lost that point of the compass and knew
not which way to turn. On a street corner he saw a man in a cap
and a long coat with brass buttons on it, a black stick in his
hand, and something bulging at his hip, and light dawned for
Jason.

"Air you the constable?" he asked, and the policeman grinned
kindly.

"I'm one of 'em," he said.

"Well, how do I git to the college I'm goin' to?"

The officer grinned good-naturedly again, and pointed with his
stick.

"Follow that street, and hurry up or you'll get a whippin'."

"Thar now," thought Jason, and started into a trot up the hill,
and the officer, seeing the boy's suddenly anxious face, called to
him to take it easy, but Jason, finding the pavements rather
uneven, took to the middle of the street, and without looking back
sped on. It was a long run, but Jason never stopped until he saw a
man standing at the door of a long, low, brick building with the
word "Tobacco" painted in huge letters above its closed doors, and
he ran across the street to him.

"Whar's the college?"

The man pointed across the street to an entrance between two gray
stone pillars with pyramidal tops, and Jason trotted back, and
trotted on through them, and up the smooth curve of the road. Not
a soul was in sight, and on the empty steps of the first building
he came to Jason dropped, panting.

XVIII

The campus was thick with grass and full of trees, there were
buildings of red brick everywhere, and all were deserted. He began
to feel that the constable had made game of him, and he was
indignant. Nobody in the mountains would treat a stranger that
way; but he had reached his goal, and, no matter when "school took
up," he was there.

Still, he couldn't help rising restlessly once, and then with a
deep breath he patiently sat down again and waited, looking
eagerly around meanwhile. The trees about him were low and young--
they looked like maples--and multitudinous little gray birds were
flitting and chattering around him, and these he did not know, for
the English sparrow has not yet captured the mountains. Above the
closed doors of the long brick building opposite the stone-guarded
gateway he could see the word "Tobacco" printed in huge letters,
and farther away he could see another similar sign, and somehow he
began wondering why Steve Hawn had talked so much about the
troubles that were coming over tobacco, and seemed to care so
little about the election troubles that had put the whole State on
the wire edge of quivering suspense. Half an hour passed and Jason
was getting restless again, when he saw an old negro shuffling
down the stone walk with a bucket in one hand, a mop in the other,
and trailing one leg like a bird with a broken wing.

"Good-mornin', son."

"Do you know whar John Burnham is?"

"Whut's dat--whut's dat?"

"I'm a-lookin' fer John Burnham."

"Look hyeh, chile, is you referrin' to Perfesser Burnham?"

"I reckon that's him."

"Well, if you is, you better axe fer him jes' that-a-way--
PerFESser PERfesser--Burnham. Well, PERFESSER Burnham won't
sanctify dis hall wid his presence fer quite a long while--quite a
long while. May I inquire, son, if yo' purpose is to attend dis
place o' learnin'?"

"I come to go to college."

"Yassuh, yassuh," said the old negro, and with no insolence
whatever he guffawed loudly.

"Well, suh, looks lak you come a long way, an' you sutinly got
hyeh on time--you sho did. Well, son, you jes' set hyeh as long as
you please an', walk aroun' an' come back an' den ef you set hyeh
long enough agin, you'se a-gwine to see Perfesser Burnham come
right up dese steps."

So Jason took the old man's advice, and strolled around the
grounds. A big pond caught his eye, and he walked along its grassy
bank and under the thick willows that fringed it. He pulled
himself to the top of a high board fence at the upper end of it,
peered over at a broad, smooth athletic-field, and he wondered
what the two poles that stood at each end with a cross-bar between
them could be, and why that tall fence ran all around it. He
stared at the big chimney of the powerhouse, as tall as the trunk
of a poplar in a "deadening" at home, and covered with vines to
the top, and he wondered what on earth that could be. He looked
over the gate at the president's house. Through the windows of one
building he saw hanging rings and all sorts of strange
paraphernalia, and he wondered about them, and, peering through
one ground-floor window, he saw three beds piled one on top of the
other, each separated from the other by the length of its legs. It
would take a step-ladder to get into the top bed--good Lord, did
people sleep that way in this college? Suppose the top boy rolled
out! And every building was covered with vines, and it was funny
that vines grew on houses, and why in the world didn't folks cut
'em off? It was all wonder--nothing but wonder--and he got tired
of wondering and went back to his steps and sat patiently down
again. It was not long now before windows began to bang up and
down in the dormitory near him. Cries and whistles began to
emanate from the rooms, and now and then a head would protrude,
and its eyes never failed, it seemed, to catch and linger on the
lonely, still figure clinging to the steps. Soon there was a rush
of feet downstairs, and a crowd of boys emerged and started
briskly for breakfast. Girls began to appear--short-skirted, with
and without hats, with hair up and hair down--more girls than he
had ever seen before--tall and short, fat and thin, and brunette
and blonde. Students began to stroll through the campus gates, and
now and then a buggy or a carriage would enter and whisk past him
to deposit its occupants in front of the building opposite from
where he sat. What was going on over there? He wanted to go over
and see, for school might be taking up over there, and, from being
too early, he might be too late after all; but he might miss John
Burnham, and if he himself were late, why lots of the boys and
girls about him would be late too, and surely if they knew, which
they must, they would not let that happen. So, all eyes, he sat
on, taking in everything, like the lens of a camera. Some of the
boys wore caps, or little white hats with the crown pushed in all
around, and, though it wasn't muddy and didn't look as though it
were going to rain, each one of them had his "britches" turned up,
and that puzzled the mountain boy sorely; but no matter why they
did it, he wouldn't have to turn his up, for they didn't come to
the tops of his shoes. Swiftly he gathered how different he
himself was, particularly in clothes, from all of them. Nowhere
did he see a boy who matched himself as so lonely and set apart,
but with a shake of his head he tossed off his inner plea for
sympathetic companionship, and the little uneasiness creeping over
him--proudly. There was a little commotion now in the crowd
nearest him, all heads turned one way, and Jason saw approaching
an old gentleman on crutches, a man with a thin face that was all
pure intellect and abnormally keen; that, centuries old in
thought, had yet the unquenchable soul-fire of youth. He stopped,
lifted his hat in response to the cheers that greeted him, and for
a single instant over that thin face played, like the winking eye
of summer lightning, the subtle humor that the world over is
always playing hide-and-seek in the heart of the Scot. A moment,
and Jason halted a passing boy with his eye.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20