CHAPTER VIII

Henderson found Brother Fulkerson a preacher who, more by service and example and comforting the disconsolate than by pulpit oratory, held a strong influence upon his people, and commanded their deep devotion.

His quiet ministry had indeed been heard of beyond the hills and even in the black days of feudal hatred, dead lines had been wiped out for him so that he came and went freely among both factions, and no man doubted him.

Kindly, grave and steadfast, Henderson found him to be, and possessed of a natively shrewd brain, as well. Blossom was usually at the Fulkerson house when Jerry called, but she fitted silently in the background and her eyes regarded him with that shy gravity, in which he found an insurmountable barrier to better acquaintance.

One morning as he passed the Fulkerson abode he found the girl alone by the gate--and paused there.

The season's first tenderness of greenery along the slopes had ripened now to the sunburned and freckled warmth of midsummer, but the day was young enough for lingering drops of the heavy dew to remain on the petals of the morning-glories and the weed stalks along the roadside. Between the waxen delicacy and rich variety of the morning-glory petals and the bloom of the girl, Jerry fell musingly to tracing analogies.

The morning-glory is among the most plebeian of flowering things, boasting no nobility except a charm too fragile to endure long its coarse companionship with smart-weed and mullen, so that each day it comes confidently into being only to shrink shortly into disappointed death.

Blossom, too, would in the course of nature and environment, have a brief bloom and a swift fading--but just now her beauty was only enhanced by the pathos of its doom.

"Blossom," he smilingly suggested, "I'd like to be friends with you, just as I am with Turner. I'm not really an evil spirit you know, yet you seem always half afraid of me."

The girl's lashes drooped shyly, veiling her splendid eyes, but she made no immediate response to his amenities, and Henderson laughed.

"It's all the stranger," he said, "because I can't forget our first meeting. Then you were the spirit of warfare. I can still seem to see you standing there barring the path; your eyes ablaze and your nostrils aquiver with righteous wrath."

For an instant, in recollection of the incident, she forgot her timidity and there flashed into her face the swift illumination of a smile.

"Thet war when I 'lowed ye war an enemy. Folks don't show no--I mean don't show any--fear of thar enemies. Leastways--at least--mountain folks don't."

He understood that attitude, but he smiled, pretending to misconstrue it.

"Then I'm not dangerous as an enemy? It's only when I seek to be a friend that I need be feared?"

Her flush deepened into positive confusion and her reply was faltering.

"I didn't mean nothin' like thet. Hit's jest thet when I tries ter talk with ye, I feels so plumb ign'rant an'--an' benighted--thet--thet----" She broke off and the man leaning on the fence bent toward her.

"You mean that when you talk to me you think I'm comparing you with the girls I know down below, isn't that it?"

Blossom nodded her head and added, "With gals--girls I mean--that wears fancy fixin's an' talks grammar."

"Sit down there for a minute, Blossom," he commanded, and when she had enthroned herself on the square-hewn horse-block by the gate he seated himself, cross-legged at her feet.

"Grammar isn't so very hard to learn," he assured her. "And any woman who carries herself with your lance-like ease, starts out equipped with more than 'fancy fixin's.' I want to tell you about a dream I had the other night."

At once her face grew as absorbed as a child's at the promise of a fairy story.

"I dreamed that I went to a very grand ball in a city down below. The ladies were gorgeously dressed, but late in the evening an unknown girl came into the room and everybody turned to look at her, forgetting all the rest of the party." He paused a moment before adding, "I dreamed that that girl was you."

"What did they all hev ter say about me?" she eagerly demanded.

"To be perfectly frank--you see it was a dream--most of them just exclaimed: 'My God!'"

"I don't hardly censure 'em," admitted Blossom. "I reckon I cut a right sorry figger at that party."

Henderson laughed aloud.

"But don't you see, that wasn't it at all. They were all breathless with admiration. You had the things they would have given all their jewels for--things they can't buy."

For a little space she looked at him with serious, pained eyes, suspicious of ridicule, then the expression altered to bewilderment, and her question came in a lowered voice.

"Things I hev thet they lacks? What manner of things air them--I mean----those?"

"The very rare gifts of originality and an elfin personality," he assured her. "Besides that you have beauty of the freshest and most colorful sort."

For a moment Blossom flushed again shyly, then she lifted one hand and pointed across the road.

"See thet white flower? Thet's wild parsely. I always calls it the pore relation to the elder bush--but it's jest got to stay a pore relation--always--because it started out thet way."

Henderson, as the summer progressed, discovered an absurd thought lurking in his mind with annoying pertinacity. He could not for long banish the fanciful picture of Blossom Fulkerson transplanted--of Blossom as she might be with fuller opportunities for development. There is an undeniable fascination in building air-castles about the Cinderella theme of human transformations and the sight of her always teased his imagination into play.

That these fantasies bore any personal relation to himself he did not admit or even suspect. Readily enough, and satisfactorily enough he explained to himself that he, who was accustomed to a life of teeming

## activities, was here marooned in monotony. All things are measurable by

contrasts, and in her little world, Blossom stood out radiantly and exquisitely different from her colorless sisters. When he had crossed Cedar Mountain again and boarded a railroad train, more vital things would engage him, and he would promptly forget the beautiful little barbarian.

One hot afternoon in late July Jerry Henderson sat in the lounging-room of his club in Louisville. The windows were open and the street noises, after the still whispers of the mountains, seemed to beat on his senses with discordant insistence. Down the length of the broad, wainscoted hall he saw a party of young men in flannels and girls in soft muslins passing out and he growled testily.

"All cut to a single pattern!" he exclaimed. "All impeccably monotonous!" Then he irrelevantly added to himself, "I'm allowing myself to become absurd--I expect its the damned heat. Anyhow she's Bear Cat Stacy's gal!"

As Jerry sat alone he was, quite unconsciously, affording a theme of conversation for two fellow clubmen in the billiard-room.

"I see Jerry Henderson has reappeared in our midst," commented one. "I wonder what titanic enterprise is engaging his genius just now."

"Give it up," was the laconic reply. "But whatever it is, I'm ready to wager he'll emerge from it unscathed and that everybody who backs him will be ruined. That's the history of his buccaneer activities up to date."

"What's his secret? Why don't his creditors fall on him and destroy him?" inquired the first speaker and his companion yawned.

"It's the damned charm of the fellow, I suppose. He could hypnotize the Shah of Persia into Calvinism."

For a moment the speakers fell silent, watching a shot on the pool-table, then one of them spoke with languid interest.

"Whatever we may think of our friend Henderson, he's a picturesque figure, and he's running a most diverting race. He's always just a jump behind a billion dollars and just a jump ahead of the wolf and the constable."

While this conversation proceeded, a heavy-set and elderly gentleman, with determined eyes, entered the club. It was President Wallace of the C. and S-E Railways, and palpably something was on his mind.

Glancing in at the reading-room, and seeing Henderson there, he promptly disposed himself in a heavily cushioned chair at his side and inquired:

"Well, what have you to report?"

"Very little so far," rejoined Henderson with his suavest smile. "You see, there's a man up there who has an annoying capacity for seeing into things and through things. On the day of my arrival he put his finger on my actual purpose in coming."

"You mean Kinnard Towers, I presume." The railroad president drummed thoughtfully on the table-top with his fingers. "I was afraid he would try to hold us up."

Jerry nodded. "He pretends to be unalterably opposed to innovation, but I fancy he really wants to be let in on the ground floor. He has decided that unless he shares our loot, there is to be no plundering."

"Possibly," the railroad magnate spoke thoughtfully, "we'd better meet his terms. The damned outlaw has power up there and we stand to win--or lose--a little empire of wealth."

Henderson's closed fist fell softly but very firmly on the table. His tone was smooth and determined. "Please leave me in command for a while, Mr. Wallace. I mean to beat this highbinder at his own favorite game. If we yield to him he'll emasculate our profits. You gave me five years when we first discussed this thing. In that time I can accomplish it."

"Take seven if you need them. It's worth it."

Sitting in the smoking-car of the train that was transporting him again from civilization to "back of beyond," Jerry Henderson found himself absorbed in somewhat disquieting thoughts.

He gazed out with a dulled admiration on the fertility of blue-grass farms where the land rolled with as smooth and gracious a swell as a woman's bosom. Always heretofore the Central Kentucky mansions with their colonial dignity and quiet air of pride had brought an eager appreciation to his thoughts--the tribute of one who worships an aristocracy based on wealth.

But now when he saw again the tangled underbrush and outcropping rock of the first foothills, something in him cried out, for the first time since boyhood, "I'm going home!" When the altitudes began to clamber into the loftiness of peaks, with wet streamers of cloud along their slopes, the feeling grew. The sight of an eagle circling far overhead almost excited him.

Jerry Henderson was a soldier of fortune, with Napoleonic dreams, and finance was his terrain of conquest. To its overweening ambition he had subordinated everything else. To that attainment he had pointed his whole training, cultivating himself not only in the practicalities of life but also in its refinements, until his bearing, his speech, his manners were possibly a shade too meticulously perfect; too impeccably starched.

Where other men had permitted themselves mild adventures in love and moderate indulgence in drink, he had set upon his conduct a rigid censorship.

His heart, like his conduct, had been severely schooled, for upon marriage, as upon all else, he looked with an opportunist's eye.

His wife must come as an ally, strengthening his position socially and financially. She must be a lady of the old aristocracy, bringing to his house cultivated charm and the power of wealth. She must be fitted, when he took his place among the financially elect, to reign with him.

So it was strange that as he sat here in the smoking-car he should be thinking of an unlettered girl across Cedar Mountain, and acknowledging with a boyish elation that on the way to Lone Stacy's house he would pass her cabin, see her--hear the lilting music of her laugh.

And when Cedar Mountain itself rose before him he swung his way with buoyant stride, up one side and down the other of the range.

Blossom was not in sight when at last he reached the Fulkerson cabin, but the door stood open and Henderson approached it stealthily. He paused for a moment, pondering how conspicuously the small house contrasted with the shabbiness of its neighborhood. It was as trim as a Swiss chalet, reflecting the personality of its mistress. Door frames and window casings were neatly painted--and he knew that was Bear Cat's labor of love. The low hickory-withed chairs on the porch were put together with an approach to a craftsman's skill--and he knew that, too, was Bear Cat's labor of love.

As he reached the porch he saw the girl herself sitting just within, and a broad shaft of sun fell across her, lighting the exquisite quality of her cheeks and the richness of her hair. She was bending studiously over a book, and her lips were drooping with an unconscious wistfulness.

Then, as his shadow fell, Blossom looked up and, in the sudden delight with which she came to her feet, she betrayed her secret of a welcome deeper than that accorded to a friendly but casual stranger.

They were still very much engrossed in each other when half an hour later Bear Cat Stacy appeared without warning in the door. For just a moment he halted on the threshold with pained eyes, before he entered.

The two men walked home together and, along the way, the younger was unaccountably silent. His demeanor had relapsed into that shadow of sullenness which it had often worn before Henderson's coming.

Finally Jerry smilingly demanded an explanation and Bear Cat Stacy turned upon him a face which had suddenly paled. He spoke with a dead evenness.

"We've been honest with each other up to now, Mr. Henderson, an' I demands thet ye be honest with me still."

"I aim to be, Turner. What is it?"

The younger man gulped down a lump which had suddenly risen in his throat, and jerked his head toward the house they had just left.

"Hit's Blossom. Does ye aim ter--ter co'te her?"

"Court her! What put such an idea into your head?"

"Never mind what put hit thar. I've got ter know! Blossom hain't never promised ter wed me, yit, but----" He broke off and for a little while could not resume though his face was expressive enough of his wretchedness. Finally he echoed: "I've got to know! Ef she'd rather marry _you_, she's got a license ter choose a-tween us. Only I hadn't never thought of thet--an'----." Once more he fell silent.

"My God, Turner," exclaimed Jerry, with a sudden realization of the absurdity of such an idea, "I could have no thought of marrying her."

"Why couldn't ye?" For an instant the gray eyes narrowed and into them came a dangerous gleam. "Hain't she good enough--fer you or any other man?"

Jerry Henderson nodded with grave assent.

"She's good enough for any man alive," he declared. "But I can't think of marriage at all now. All my plans of life prohibit that." Bear Cat Stacy drank in the clear air in a long breath of joyous relief.

"That's all I needs ter know," he said with entire sincerity. "Only," his voice dropped and he spoke very gently, "only, I reckon ye don't realize how much yore eddycation counts with us thet wants hit an' hain't got hit. Don't let her misunderstand ye none, Mr. Henderson. I don't want ter see her hurt."

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