Call of the Cumberlands

Call of the Cumberlands, by
Charles Neville Buck

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Title: The Call of the Cumberlands
Author: Charles Neville Buck
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THE CALL OF THE CUMBERLANDS
BY
CHARLES NEVILLE BUCK
CHAPTER I
Close to the serried backbone of the Cumberland ridge through a sky of
mountain clarity, the sun seemed hesitating before its descent to the
horizon. The sugar-loaf cone that towered above a creek called Misery
was pointed and edged with emerald tracery where the loftiest timber
thrust up its crest plumes into the sun. On the hillsides it would be light
for more than an hour yet, but below, where the waters tossed
themselves along in a chorus of tiny cascades, the light was already
thickening into a cathedral gloom. Down there the "furriner" would
have seen only the rough course of the creek between moss-velveted
and shaded bowlders of titanic proportions. The native would have
recognized the country road in these tortuous twistings. Now there were
no travelers, foreign or native, and no sounds from living throats except
at intervals the clear "Bob White" of a nesting partridge, and the silver

confidence of the red cardinal flitting among the pines. Occasionally,
too, a stray whisper of breeze stole along the creek-bed and rustled the
beeches, or stirred in the broad, fanlike leaves of the "cucumber trees."
A great block of sandstone, to whose summit a man standing in his
saddle could scarcely reach his fingertips, towered above the stream,
with a gnarled scrub oak clinging tenaciously to its apex. Loftily on
both sides climbed the mountains cloaked in laurel and timber.
Suddenly the leafage was thrust aside from above by a cautious hand,
and a shy, half-wild girl appeared in the opening. For an instant she
halted, with her brown fingers holding back the brushwood, and raised
her face as though listening. Across the slope drifted the call of the
partridge, and with perfect imitation she whistled back an answer. It
would have seemed appropriate to anyone who had seen her that she
should talk bird language to the birds. She was herself as much a wood
creature as they, and very young. That she was beautiful was not
strange. The women of the mountains have a morning-glory
bloom--until hardship and drudgery have taken toll of their youth--and
she could not have been more than sixteen.
It was June, and the hills, which would be bleakly forbidding barriers in
winter, were now as blithely young as though they had never known
the scourging of sleet or the blight of wind. The world was abloom, and
the girl, too, was in her early June, and sentiently alive with the
strength of its full pulse-tide. She was slim and lithely resilient of step.
Her listening attitude was as eloquent of pausing elasticity as that of the
gray squirrel. Her breathing was soft, though she had come down a
steep mountainside, and as fragrant as the breath of the elder bushes
that dashed the banks with white sprays of blossom. She brought with
her to the greens and grays and browns of the woodland's heart a new
note of color, for her calico dress was like the red cornucopias of the
trumpet-flower, and her eyes were blue like little scraps of sky. Her
heavy, brown-red hair fell down over her shoulders in loose profusion.
The coarse dress was freshly briar-torn, and in many places patched;
and it hung to the lithe curves of her body in a fashion which told that
she wore little else. She