With his father's death Samson's schooling had ended. His
responsibility now was farm work and the roughly tender solicitude of a
young stoic for his mother. His evenings before the broad fireplace he
gave up to a devouring sort of study, but his books were few.
When, two years later, he laid the body of the Widow South beside that
of his father in the ragged hillside burying-ground, he turned his
nag's head away from the cabin where he had been born, and rode over to
make his home at his Uncle Spicer's place. He had, in mountain
parlance, "heired" a farm of four hundred acres, but a boy of twelve
can hardly operate a farm, even if he be so stalwart a boy as Samson.
His Uncle Spicer wanted him, and he went, and the head of the family
took charge of his property as guardian; placed a kinsman there to till
it, on shares, and faithfully set aside for the boy what revenue came
from the stony acres.
He knew that they would be rich acres when men
began to dig deeper than the hoe could scratch, and opened the veins
where the coal slept its unstirring sleep. The old man had not set such
store by learning as had Samson's father, and the little shaver's
education ended, except for what he could wrest from stinted sources
and without aid. His mission of "killing Hollmans" was not forgotten.
There had years ago been one general battle at a primary, when the two
factions fought for the control that would insure the victors safety
against "law trouble," and put into their hands the weapons of the
courts.
Samson was far too young to vote, but he was old enough to fight, and
the account he had given of himself, with the inherited rifle smoking,
gave augury of fighting effectiveness. So sanguinary had been this
fight, and so dangerously had it focused upon the warring clans the
attention of the outside world, that after its indecisive termination,
they made the compact of the present truce. By its terms, the Hollmans
held their civil authority, and the Souths were to be undisturbed
dictators beyond Misery. For some years now, the peace had been
unbroken save by sporadic assassinations, none of which could be
specifically enough charged to the feud account to warrant either side
in regarding the contract as broken. Samson, being a child, had been
forced to accept the terms of this peace bondage.
The day would come
when the Souths could agree to no truce without his consent. Such was,
in brief, the story that the artist heard while he painted and rested
that day on the rock. Had he heard it in New York, he would have
discounted it as improbable and melodramatic. Now, he knew that it was
only one of many such chapters in the history of the Cumberlands. The
native point of view even became in a degree acceptable. In a system of
trial by juries from the vicinage, fair and bold prosecutions for crime
were impossible, and such as pretended to be so were bitterly tragic
farces. He understood why the families of murdered fathers and brothers
preferred to leave the punishment to their kinsmen in the laurel,
rather than to their enemies in the jury-box.