A Pagan of the Hills | Page 7

Charles Neville Buck
forces of Nature. Yet he had built up a modest
competency after a life time of struggle. With a few more years of
industry he might have claimed material victory. In the homely

parlance of his kind he had things "hung-up," which signified such
prosperity had come to him as came to the pioneer woodsmen who
faced the famine times of winter with smoked hams hanging from their
nails, and tobacco and pepper and herbs strung along the ceiling rafters.
Aaron McGivins had not progressed to this modestly enviable estate
without the driving of shrewd bargains and the taking of bold chances.
It followed that men called him hard, though few men called him other
than just. To his door came disputants who preferred his arbitration on
tangled issues to the dubious chances of litigation, for he was also
accounted wise.
His repute among his neighbors was that of a man devoted to peace, but
one upon whom it was unsafe to impose. Those few who had stirred his
slow anger into eruption, had found him one as distinctly to be feared
as trusted.
Had political aspiration been in the pattern of Aaron's thought he might
have gone down to the world below to sit in the state assembly. From
there in due time he might have gained promotion to the augmented
dignities of Congress, but he had persistently waved aside the whispers
of such temptation. "He hain't a wishful feller nohow," the stranger was
always told, "despite thet he knows hist'ry an' sich like lore in an' out
an' back'ards an' forrards."
Now Aaron lay wounded with a pistol ball, and many problems of vital
interest to himself remained unsolved. Whether he would live or die
was guess work--a gamble. Whether the timber which he had felled
would free him from his last debt and leave his two children
independent, or be ravished from him by the insatiable appetite of the
flood was a question likewise unanswered. Whether or not the daughter,
who was the man of the family after himself, would return in time to
comfort his last moments was a doubt which troubled him most of all.
He had sent her away as unequivocally as a stricken captain sends his
first officer to the bridge, but he wanted her as a man, shipwrecked and
starving, wants the sight of a sail or of a smoke-stack on an empty
horizon.

And his boy--the boy who had given him small strength upon which to
lean, was absent. He had gone idly and thoughtlessly before the
emergency arose, and the man lying on the four-poster bed tried to
argue for him, in extenuation, that he would have returned had he
known the need. But in his bruised and doubting heart he knew that had
it been Alexander, she would have read the warning in the first brook
that she saw creeping into an augmented stream, and would have
hastened home.
About the room moved the self-taught doctor, who was also the local
Evangelist. Two neighbor women were there too, called from adjacent
cabins to take the place of the daughter he had sent away. They were
ignorant women, hollow-chested and wrinkled like witches because
they had spent lives against dun-colored backgrounds, but they were
wise in the matter of "yarbs" and simple nursing.
All night Aaron McGivins had lain there, restive and unable to sleep.
With him had been those matters which obtrude themselves, with
confusing multiplicity, upon the mind of a man who was yesterday
strong and unthreatened and who to-day faces the requirement of
readjusting all his scheme from the clear and lighted ways of life to the
gathering mists of death. He had seen through a high-placed window
the gray of dawn grow into a clearer light, making visible rag-like
streamers of wet and scudding clouds. He had a glimpse of
mountain-sides sodden with thaw--the thaw to which he owed his
whole sum of sudden perplexities.
Then the door swung open.
Eagerly the bed-ridden man turned his eyes towards it; eagerly, too, the
doctor's gaze went that way, but the two women, glancing sidewise,
sniffed dubiously and stiffened a little. To them the anxiously awaited
daughter was an unsexed creature whom they could neither understand
nor approve. They had lived hard and intolerent lives, accepting
drudgery and perennial child-bearing as unquestioned mandates of
destiny. Accustomed to the curt word and to servile obedience they had
no understanding for a woman who asserted herself in positive terms of
personality. To them a "he-woman" who "wore pants" and admitted no

sex inferiority was at best a "hussy without shame." If such a woman
chanced also to be beautiful beyond comparison with her less favored
sisters, the conclusion was inescapable. They could read in her
self-claimed emancipation only the wildness of a filly
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