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South," she said, "I know all about manners, and you know all about a hundred real things that I want to know. Suppose we begin teaching each other?" Samson's face lighted with the revolutionizing effect that a smile can bring only to features customarily solemn. "Miss Lescott," he said, "let's call that a trade but you're gettin' all the worst of it.
For the first time in his life, Samson felt a tremor of something like terror, terror of a great, vague thing, too vast and intangible to combat, and possessed of the measureless power of many hurricanes. Then, he saw the smiling face of Lescott, and Lescott's extended hand.
Lescott felt as though he had struck her; as though he had ruthlessly blighted the irresponsible joyousness which had a few minutes before sung from her lips with the blitheness of a mocking- bird. He went over and softly laid a hand on her shoulder. "Miss Sally " he began. She suddenly turned on him a tear-stained, infuriated face, stormy with blazing eyes and wet cheeks and trembling lips.
"Then, ye needn't tell me, because I already knows hit," came her prompt and confident announcement. Lescott shook his head, dubiously. "Samson is a genius," he said. "What's thet?" "He has great gifts great abilities to become a figure in the world." She nodded her head, in prompt and full corroboration. "I reckon Samson'll be the biggest man in the mountings some day."
Tamarack Spicer did not at once reappear, and, when one of the Souths met another in the road, the customary dialogue would be: "Heered anything of Tamarack?" ... "No, hev you?" ... "No, nary a word." As Lescott wandered through the hills, his unhurt right hand began crying out for action and a brush to nurse.
The sun rose on the morning after Lescott arrived, the mists lifted, and the cabin of the Widow Miller stood revealed. Against its corners several hogs scraped their bristled backs with satisfied grunts. A noisy rooster cocked his head inquiringly sidewise before the open door, and, hopping up to the sill, invaded the main room.
It was at this house that George Lescott, distinguished landscape painter of New York and the world-at-large, arrived in the twilight. His first impression was received in shadowy evening mists that gave a touch of the weird. The sweep of the stone-guarded well rose in a yard tramped bare of grass.
"Do you find it anything like the thing expected?" No New Yorker can allow a stranger to be unimpressed with that sky-line. "I didn't have no notion what to expect." Samson's voice was matter-of- fact. "I 'lowed I'd jest wait and see." He followed Lescott out to the foot of Twenty-third Street, and stepped with him into the tonneau of the painter's waiting car.
Sally sat mountain fashion behind him, facing straight to the side. So they came along the creek bed and into the sight of the man who still sat propped against the mossy rock. As Lescott looked up, he closed the case of his watch, and put it back into his pocket with a smile. "Snappy work, that!" he called out. "Just thirty-three minutes. I didn't believe it could be done."
This furriner is a visitor here to-day, an' we don't 'low ter hurt him but he's got ter go. We don't want him round hyar no longer." He turned to Lescott. "We're a-givin' ye fair warnin', stranger. Ye hain't our breed. Atter this, ye stays on Misery at yore own risk an' hit's a-goin' ter be plumb risky. That thar's final."
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