"I reckon now that ye're back, Samson," suggested McCager, "an' seein'
how yore Uncle Spicer is gettin' along all right, I'll jest let the two
of ye run things. I've done had enough." It was a simple fashion of
resigning a regency, but effectual.
Old Caleb, however, still insurgent and unconvinced, brought in a
minority report.
"We wants fightin' men," he grumbled, with the senile reiteration of
his age, as he spat tobacco and beat a rat-tat on the mill floor with
his long hickory staff. "We don't want no deserters."
"Samson ain't a deserter," defended Sally. "There isn't one of you fit
to tie his shoes." Sally and old Spicer South alone knew of her lover's
letter to the Circuit Judge, and they were pledged to secrecy.
"Never mind, Sally!" It was Samson himself who answered her. "I didn't
come back because I care what men like old Caleb think. I came back
because they needed me. The proof of a fighting man is his fighting, I
reckon. I'm willing to let 'em judge me by what I'm going to do."
So, Samson slipped back, tentatively, at least, into his place as clan
head, though for a time he found it a post without action. After the
fierce outburst of bloodshed, quiet had settled, and it was tacitly
understood that, unless the Hollman forces had some coup in mind which
they were secreting, this peace would last until the soldiers were
withdrawn.
"When the world's a-lookin'," commented Judge Hollman, "hit's a right
good idea to crawl under a log--an' lay still."
Purvy had been too famous a feudist to pass unsung. Reporters came as
far as Hixon, gathered there such news as the Hollmans chose to give
them, and went back to write lurid stories and description, from
hearsay, of the stockaded seat of tragedy. Nor did they overlook the
dramatic coincidence of the return of "Wildcat" Samson South from
civilization to savagery. They made no accusation, but they pointed an
inference and a moral--as they thought. It was a sermon on the triumph
of heredity over the advantages of environment. Adrienne read some of
these saffron misrepresentations, and they distressed her.
* * * * * Meanwhile, it came insistently to the ears of Captain Callomb that
some plan was on foot, the intricacies of which he could not fathom, to
manufacture a case against a number of the Souths, quite apart from
their actual guilt, or likelihood of guilt. Once more, he would be
called upon to go out and drag in men too well fortified to be taken by
the posses and deputies of the Hollman civil machinery. At this news,
he chafed bitterly, and, still rankling with a sense of shame at the
loss of his first prisoner, he formed a plan of his own, which he
revealed over his pipe to his First Lieutenant.