In Happy Valley | Page 8

was so good-natured that anybody could banter him, but nobody ever carried it too far except a bully from an adjoining county one court day. Lum picked him up bodily and dashed him to the ground so that blood gushed from his nose and he lay there bewildered, white, and still. Lum rarely went to church, and he never talked religion, politics, or neighborhood gossip. He was really thought to be quite stupid, in spite of the fact that he could make lightning calculations about crops, hogs, and cattle in his head. However, one man knew better, but he was a "furriner," a geologist, a "rock-pecker" from the Bluegrass. To him Lum betrayed an uncanny eye in discovering coal signs and tracing them to their hidden beds, and wide and valuable knowledge of the same. Once the foreigner lost his barometer just when he was trying to locate a coal vein on the side of the mountain opposite. Two days later Lum pointed to a ravine across the valley.
"You'll find that coal not fer from the bottom o' that big poplar over thar." The geologist stared, but he went across and found the coal and came back mystified.
"How'd you do it?"
Lum led him up Wolf Run. Where the vein showed by the creek-side Lum had built a little dam, and when the water ran even with the mud-covered stones he had turned the stream aside. The geologist lay down, sighted across the surface of the water, and his eye caught the base of the big poplar.
"Hit's the Lord's own level," said Lum, and back he went to his work, the man looking after him and muttering:
"The Lord's own level."
Hardly knowing it, Lum waited for grinding day. There was the same exchange of "how-dyes" between him and the girl, going and coming, and Lum noted that the remaining hind shoe was gone from the old nag and that one of the front ones was going. This too was gone the next time she passed, and for the first time Lum spoke:
"Yo' hoss needs shoein'."
"She ain't wuth it," said the girl. Two hours later, when the girl came back, Lum took up the conversation again.
"Oh, yes, she is," he drawled, and the girl slid from her sack of meal and watched him, which she could do fearlessly, for Lum never looked at her. He had never asked her name and he did not ask her now.
"I'm Jeb Mullins's gal," she said. "Pap'll be comin' 'long hyeh some day an' pay ye."
"My name's Lum--Lum Chapman."
"They calls me Marthy."
He lifted her bag to the horse's bony withers with one hand, but he did not offer to help her mount. He watched her again as she rode away, and when she looked back he turned with a queer feeling into his shop. Two days later Jeb Mullins came by.
"Whad' I owe ye?" he asked.
"Nothin'," said Lum gruffly.
The next day the old man brought down a broken plough on his shoulder, and to the same question he got the same answer:
"Nothin'." So he went back and teased Martha, who blushed when she next passed the door of the shop, and this time Lum did not go out to watch her down the road.
Sunday following, Parson Small, the circuit-rider, preached in the open-air "meetin'-house," that had the sky for a roof and blossoming rhododendron for walls, and--wonder of wonders--Lum Chapman was there. In the rear he sat, and everybody turned to look at Lum. So simple was he that the reason of his presence was soon plain, for he could no more keep his eyes from the back of Martha Mullins's yellow head than a needle could keep its point from the North Pole. The circuit-rider on his next circuit would preach the funeral services of Uncle Billy Hall, who had been dead ten years, and Uncle Billy would be draped with all the virtues that so few men have when alive and that so few lack when dead. He would marry such couples as might to marriage be inclined. There were peculiar customs in Happy Valley, due to the "rider's" long absences, so that sometimes a baby might without shame be present at the wedding of its own parents. To be sure, Lum's eyes did swerve once when the preacher spoke of marriage--swerved from where the women sat to where sat the men--to young Jake Kilburn, called Devil Jake, a name of which he was rather proud; for Martha's eyes had swerved to him too, and Jake shot back a killing glance and began twisting his black mustache.
And then the preacher told about the woman whom folks once stoned.
Lum listened dully and waited helplessly around at the end of the meeting until he saw Martha and Jake go down the road together, Martha shy and conscious