So they came along the creek bed and into the sight of the man who
still sat propped against the mossy rock. As Lescott looked up, he
closed the case of his watch, and put it back into his pocket with a
smile.
"Snappy work, that!" he called out. "Just thirty-three minutes. I
didn't believe it could be done."
Samson's face was mask-like, but, as he surveyed the foreigner, only
the ingrained dictates of the country's hospitable code kept out of his
eyes a gleam of scorn for this frail member of a sex which should be
stalwart.
"Howdy?" he said. Then he added suspiciously: "What mout yer business
be in these parts, stranger?"
Lescott gave the odyssey of his wanderings, since he had rented a mule
at Hixon and ridden through the country, sketching where the mood
prompted and sleeping wherever he found a hospitable roof at the coming
of the evening.
"Ye come from over on Crippleshin?" The boy flashed the question with
a sudden hardening of the voice, and, when he was affirmatively
answered, his eyes contracted and bored searchingly into the stranger's
face.
"Where'd ye put up last night?"
"Red Bill Hollman's house, at the mouth of Meeting House Fork; do you
know the place?"
Samson's reply was curt.
"I knows hit all right."
There was a moment's pause--rather an awkward pause. Lescott's mind
began piecing together fragments of conversation he had heard, until he
had assembled a sort of mental jig-saw puzzle.
The South-Hollman feud had been mentioned by the more talkative of his
informers, and carefully tabooed by others--notable among them his host
of last night. It now dawned on him that he was crossing the boundary
and coming as the late guest of a Hollman to ask the hospitality of a
South.
"I didn't know whose house it was," he hastened to explain, "until I
was benighted, and asked for lodging. They were very kind to me. I'd
never seen them before. I'm a stranger hereabouts."
Samson only nodded. If the explanation failed to satisfy him, it at
least seemed to do so.
"I reckon ye'd better let me holp ye up on thet old mule," he said;
"hit's a-comin' on ter be night."
With the mountaineer's aid, Lescott clambered astride the mount, then
he turned dubiously.
"I'm sorry to trouble you," he ventured, "but I have a paint box and
some materials up there. If you'll bring them down here, I'll show you
how to pack the easel, and, by the way," he anxiously added, "please
handle that fresh canvas carefully--by the edge--it's not dry yet."