Читать книгу Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight - Mathew Joseph Holt - Страница 5

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After breakfast, at which the men were first served, Mr. Rogers, Cornwall, Mr. Saylor and Caleb, mounting their horses rode over Saylor's three hundred-acre survey and examined the two coal banks on the property; which only a short distance from the house had been opened and worked about twenty feet into the mountain, for home consumption. One was thirty-eight and the other fifty-two inches; the thick vein cropped out about twenty feet above the creek level, the other was at a higher level.

After their examination they returned to the house and taking seats on the wash bench near the well, talked about every thing but the land of which Mr. Rogers and Saylor were thinking. Finally Mr. Rogers having waited some time for Mr. Saylor to begin, said:

"If our company can buy the Brock and Helton surveys, we will give you thirty thousand dollars for your three hundred acres, or twenty thousand dollars for the mineral rights with timber and right-of-way privileges necessary to mine and remove the coal and such other minerals, oils and gas as may be found on the property."

"By heck! my survey is worth three times that. When your company planks down fifty thousand in cold cash we will trade—not before. Then I will buy one of them blue grass farms in sight of the distant blue mountains and an automobile and a pianny and give Caleb and little Susie a chance to go to the University at Lexington whar Tom Asher and that Hall boy goes. O Mandy! Mr. Rogers, hayr, just offered to gin me thirty thousand dollars for our old mountain home which we bought two year ago from old man Roberts for five thousand. I told him we would trade her off for fifty thousand; not such bad intrust for a mountain yahoo and his old woman, He! Mandy! When that trade goes through; and they are bound to take her, you can have one of them silk dresses what shows black and blue and red and green; and Mary all the books and pot flowers and pictures she wants. What do you say to that, Mary?" just as Mary stepped from the kitchen to fill the brass-hooped cedar bucket at the well.

Caleb lolled on the steps in such a way as to make it impossible for any one to descend.

"Caleb, please let me pass!"

"Oh, go round Mary, or jump down. What do yer bother a feller for?"

"Miss Mary, let me fill your bucket?"

"Thanks, Mr. Cornwall." (Caleb laughs.)

Cornwall took the bucket and twice let it down and brought it up without a quart in it, while Caleb looked on and laughed.

Finally Mary, smiling and blushing, took hold of the pole and helped to dip and draw up the bucket full to the brim. Then they laugh too; and the social ice is broken between Bear Grass and Straight Creek; between the city-bred young lawyer and Mary, the mountain girl.

Cornwall carried the bucket into the kitchen; at which Caleb, in surprise, called out: "Dad, look! That city feller is helping Mary get dinner."

After dinner, which Cornwall did not help get, rushing out of the kitchen as soon as he could let go of the bucket handle, having heard Caleb's remark; they rode over the Brock and Helton two hundred-acre surveys and called at their homes.

Mr. Rogers contracted to purchase their land at one hundred dollars an acre, the vendors executing bonds to convey, each receiving one thousand dollars on the purchase price; the balance to be paid after a survey and examination of their titles.

As they were riding home, Saylor saw a drunken man staggering down the mountain side. When he had gotten out of sight, he dismounted and began trailing him back up the mountain. Mr. Rogers called out, "The man went the other way."

"Oh, I know that! I want to find out where he came from."

Saylor returned in a few minutes, his face beaming with a ruddy, contented smile.

Then, in his usually talkative mood, he expressed his opinion of his neighbors and the transaction in reference to their land. "There are two more dang fools, who will move down in the blue grass and buy a farm and be as much at home as a hoot owl on a dead snag in the noon day sun with a flock of crows cawing at him. In about two years they will sell out to some sharper and move back to some mountain cove or crick bottom and start all over again; or when they gits their money they will hop the train cars for Kansas and settle on a government claim twenty miles from a drap of water; then mosey back here in about five years with nothing but their kids, the old woman, two bony horses, a prairie schooner and a yaller dog."

As they came in the door, Mary was just completing preparation for supper. The table was made more attractive by a red figured table cloth instead of the brown and white oil cloth one. In the center was a pot of delicate ferns. The regular fare of corn bread, hog meat, corn field beans, potatoes, sorghum and coffee, had been supplemented by some nicely browned chicken, a roll of butter, biscuits and a dish of yellow apples and red plums.

As they came to supper, a gentle rain began falling which continued long into the night.

Cornwall, standing by his chair and noticing again that places were prepared for the men only, said; "Mrs. Saylor, the rain makes it so cozy and home-like, you, Miss Mary and Susie fix places and eat with us; I am sure we will all have a better time."

Saylor stopped eating long enough to add;—"Do, it will seem like a Christmas dinner in the summertime."

While Caleb remarked;—"He's coming along right peart."

Mary, with a laugh and blush and an appreciative smile at Mr. Cornwall, added a place for her mother and Susie, while she served the supper.

Cornwall, who had paid little attention to the girl, furtively watching her, was impressed by her competence and winsomeness. She was a healthy sun-browned brunette of eighteen; had attended the Pineville graded school for three years and the summer before passed the examination and qualified as a teacher. She had been given the school at the forks of the creek and was paid a salary of thirty-five dollars a month, most of which went to pay her father's taxes and for books.

The children of her school were of divers ages and sizes. There were lank boys taller than Mary and little girls that needed to be cuddled and mothered. The native children, mostly a tow-headed lot, were easily distinguished from the children of the families at the mines, whose parents were from Naples or Palermo.

Not even the girls from Southern Italy had blacker hair or more dreamy eyes than Mary's. Hers was a seeming nature and appearance made of a composite of the girls of her school; natives of the hills and the aliens of the blue Mediterranean.

Some of the foreign boys who knew little English were carefully grounded in mathematics and certain physical sciences. Their proficiency made it a difficult task for their immature teacher. She was aware of her limitations and struggled faithfully to overcome them, spending many hours to qualify herself in mathematics and as a grammarian.

That night, as the others were grouped about the door, talking or listening to the rain, she sat near a table on which burned a small unshaded oil lamp, studying out some grievous problems to her, in the third arithmetic.

Cornwall, noting her worried expression and how persistently she applied a slate rag, asked Susie, who sat near the table, to change places with him, and moving the chair near Mary's took the slate and by a few suggestions gave just the needed assistance; and in such a concise way that the quick though untrained mind of the girl found no further difficulties in solving the other problems of the lesson.

"Thanks, Mr. Cornwall, for helping me. At least tomorrow I will have the best of those big boys. It is surprising how easy the seemingly hard things are after you have learned to do them."

Shortly after sunrise the following morning, Mr. Rogers and Cornwall said good-bye to their host and his family and rode off down the creek.

They had gone but a short distance when they overtook Mary and Susie on their way to school. They rode slowly keeping pace with the walking girls.

"Mr. Cornwall and I feel we should make our excuses for the additional labor our visit has caused you."

"We are glad you stopped over at our home. The life is lonely at times and the face and talk of a stranger break the monotony. Besides Mr. Cornwall helped me with my studies. I hope when you pass this way you will find time to stop again."

"I doubt if I shall come, but Mr. Cornwall, who is to be our local attorney at Harlan, must return in a week or so to supervise the Brock and Helton surveys and will be making occasional trips to Pineville. After he becomes a better horseman you may see him occasionally riding on his own saddle horse, comfortably seated on a hard saddle and carrying his clothing and papers in a pair of saddle bags. Now he finds the trip tiresome, later he will find the ride exhilarating and your house a convenient resting place; am I right Cornwall?"

"I desire to express my thanks and shall be glad of any opportunity to stop and see you again."

"Here we are at the Salt Trace road; you follow it over the mountain to the river, then up the river valley to Poor Fork which you cross almost within sight of the town. Goodbye to both and good luck to Judge Cornwall; come again."

Their road after crossing the mountains was up the Cumberland Valley, hemmed in on the north by the gracefully sloping spurs of Pine Mountain and flanked on the south by the more rugged and closely encroaching Cumberland mountains.

The river gurgles and murmurs and surges along over a bottom of boulders or lies restfully placid over a bottom of sand. In these pool-like reaches many large rocks, shaken from the mountain tops in ages past, lift their gray heads high above the water and give to the scene a touch of rugged grandeur.

The water is so clear that the natives climb into the overhanging elms or sycamores, or lie peering down from a jutting rock and do their fishing with a Winchester.

About ten o'clock the travelers crossed the Poor Fork and fifteen minutes later rode into Harlan Town; and to the office of the company; a three-story red brick building fronting the court house square.