The day of painting was followed by others like it. The disabling of
Lescott's left hand made the constant companionship of the boy a matter
that needed no explanation or apology, though not a matter of approval
to his uncle.
Another week had passed without the reappearance of Tamarack Spicer.
One afternoon, Lescott and Samson were alone on a cliff-protected
shelf, and the painter had just blocked in with umber and neutral tint
the crude sketch of his next picture. In the foreground was a steep
wall, rising palisade-like from the water below. A kingly spruce-pine
gave the near note for a perspective which went away across a valley of
cornfields to heaping and distant mountains. Beyond that range, in a
slender ribbon of pale purple, one saw the ridge of a more remote and
mightier chain.
The two men had lost an hour huddled under a canopy beneath the
cannonading of a sudden storm. They had silently watched titanic
battallions of thunder-clouds riding the skies in gusty puffs of gale,
and raking the earth with lightning and hail and water. The crags had
roared back echoing defiance, and the great trees had lashed and bent
and tossed like weeds in the buffeting. Every gully had become a
stream, and every gulch-rock a waterfall. Here and there had been a
crashing of spent timber, and now the sun had burst through a rift in
the west, and flooded a segment of the horizon with a strange, luminous
field of lesson. About this zone of clarity were heaped masses of gold-
rimmed and rose-edged clouds, still inky at their centers.
"My God!" exclaimed the mountain boy abruptly. "I'd give 'most
anything ef I could paint that."
Lescott rose smilingly from his seat before the easel, and surrendered
his palette and sheaf of brushes.
"Try it," he invited.
For a moment, Samson stood hesitant and overcome with diffidence;
then, with set lips, he took his place, and experimentally fitted his
fingers about a brush, as he had seen Lescott do. He asked no advice.
He merely gazed for awhile, and then, dipping a brush and experimenting
for his color, went to sweeping in his primary tones.
The painter stood at his back, still smiling. Of course, the brush-
stroke was that of the novice. Of course, the work was clumsy and
heavy. But what Lescott noticed was not so much the things that went on
canvas as the mixing of colors on the palette, for he knew that the
palette is the painter's heart, and its colors are the elements of his
soul. What a man paints on canvas is the sum of his acquirement; but
the colors he mixes are the declarations of what his soul can see, and
no man can paint whose eyes are not touched with the sublime. At that
moment, Lescott knew that Samson had such eyes.