It dawned upon him that to be
known as a friend of the poor held more allurement for gray-haired age
than to be known as a master of assassins. It would be pleasant to sit
undisturbed, and see his grandchildren grow up, and he recognized, with
a sudden ferocity of repugnance, that he did not wish them to grow up
as feud fighters. Purvy had not reformed, but, other things being
equal, he would prefer to live and let live. He had reached that stage
to which all successful villains come at some time, when he envied the
placid contentment of respected virtues. Ordering Samson shot down was
a last resort--one to be held in reserve until the end.
So, along Misery and Crippleshin, the men of the factions held their
fire while the summer spent itself, and over the mountain slopes the
leaves began to turn, and the mast to ripen.
Lescott had sent a box of books, and Samson had taken a team over to
Hixon, and brought them back. It was a hard journey, attended with much
plunging against the yokes and much straining of trace chains. Sally
had gone with him. Samson was spending as much time as possible in her
society now. The girl was saying little about his departure, but her
eyes were reading, and without asking she knew that his going was
inevitable. Many nights she cried herself to sleep, but, when he saw
her, she was always the same blithe, bird-like creature that she had
been before. She was philosophically sipping her honey while the sun
shone.
Samson read some of the books aloud to Sally, who had a child's
passion for stories, and who could not have spelled them out for
herself. He read badly, but to her it was the flower of scholastic
accomplishment, and her untrained brain, sponge-like in its
acquisitiveness, soaked up many new words and phrases which fell again
quaintly from her lips in talk. Lescott had spent a week picking out
those books. He had wanted them to argue for him; to feed the boy's
hunger for education, and give him some forecast of the life that
awaited him. His choice had been an effort to achieve multum in
parvo, but Samson devoured them all from title page to finis
line, and many of them he went back to, and digested again.
He wrestled long and gently with his uncle, struggling to win the old
man's consent to his departure. But Spicer South's brain was no longer
plastic. What had been good enough for the past was good enough for the
future. He sought to take the most tolerant view, and to believe that
Samson was acting on conviction and not on an ingrate's impulse, but
that was the best he could do, and he added to himself that Samson's
was an abnormal and perverted conviction. Nevertheless, he arranged
affairs so that his nephew should be able to meet financial needs, and
to go where he chose in a fashion befitting a South. The old man was
intensely proud, and, if the boy were bent on wasting himself, he
should waste like a family head, and not appear a pauper among strangers.