8 A Mountain Excursion

Meanwhile a great idea was germinating in the solid constructive mind of Tom Kidd. He had heard the rumors that Mr. Newton in behalf of his father, might become heavily interested in the Groveton and Pleasantville Railroad, his railroad. There was nothing in it yet, but why shouldn’t there be something? Lately his backers in New York had grown somewhat chary with their money. They were beginning to find fault, they said that the progress of construction was too slow, and they intimated doubts of the earning capacity of the road, when it should be finished.

All these things indicated a state of mind, and Tom was disturbed. He knew that the building was a little ahead of calculations, and he knew exactly what the road would earn in the first, second and third years after its completion. He had it all jotted down in an ascending scale in his note-book. If his backers felt this way about it why not discover another source of supplies? It would be a good thing for Mr. Newton as well as himself.

Hence Mr. Kidd, exactly at the time he had prearranged, took his way to Charlie Wentworth’s office. His work in the open had thickened and broadened him still further. He was a tall squarely built young man, and he looked thoroughly seasoned, as he walked through the streets of Groveton, even the summer heat having no effect upon him.

Wentworth’s office was in a new four story brick building, the pride of Groveton, and the latest evidence of her growth and prosperity. It was a contrast to that of Judge Braxton. There was a rug on the floor, some pictures on the walls, and other evidences of a young man’s fastidious taste. Probably no lawyer of the entire preceding generation in Kentucky had such an office. Wentworth himself sat beside the window, in a deep willow chair, with reading ledges. A law book rested on one ledge, and a novel on the other. The law book was closed, Wentworth himself was particular in his dress. His colored shirt was of fine quality and scrupulously neat. His light trousers, belted at the waist, were carefully pressed, and his low-quartered tan shoes disclosed colored socks which however were without the silk clocks that distinguished Mr. Newton’s. In his dress as well as his office Wentworth revealed the New Kentucky. Old lawyers had been known to call him a “dude.”

He hastily closed the novel, and opened the law book, as he heard an entering footstep—he still paid tribute to public opinion—but he returned the books to their original status, when he saw that it was Tom Kidd.

“I was reading fiction, Tom,” he said frankly, “an’ I should have hidden it, if it had not been you. A farmer would think I was no good as a lawyer, if he caught me reading a novel. Sit down. Make yourself cool and comfortable.”

He drew another willow chair to the window, and his friend sat down in it.

“Business dull?” said Tom.

“Of course! These are the dog days. Anyhow there will never be enough law business for us youngsters, until Judge Braxton dies, which I hope won’t occur for the next half century.”

Tom looked out into the blazing sunshine upon the roofs of Groveton. These roofs had increased greatly in number in the last year or two, and his heart thrilled with pride and hope. Groveton and that railroad of his would be like two reciprocating engines.

“I’ve a job for you Charlie,” he said, “if you’ll take it. I’m the one to receive the favor, and you are the one to confer it. I need more support for the road. There’s a lot of stock in the treasury yet to be sold, and I want to get Newton, or, through him, his father interested in it. I’ve a plan to take him, and a big party out on the line to see all its beauties. There’ll be you and Harry, and Cynthia Braxton and a lot of others that we like.”

Tom stopped. This was probably the longest speech that he had ever made in his life, but he had said enough. Wentworth’s blue eyes sparkled, and his agile mind leaped at once to the right conclusion.

“I see,” he said, “You want me to do the talking and to pile it on thick. Uncover all the scenic beauties, agricultural richness and mineral certainties of the section. Well, Tom, I’m your man. I haven’t made a speech in a month, and all the oratory, bottled up within me, is just foaming to break out.”

“We’ve got to put it on a commercial basis,” said Tom, “otherwise you shan’t go. A fee from the road to you as attorney in this case. Why can’t we make you our regular attorney?”

“It’s my political ambitions,” said Wentworth with a sigh. “If I were known as a railroad lawyer it would kill me dead in that line. Our people won’t yet look upon a railroad as a business enterprise, just as they would upon a farm or a mill.”

But the party was quickly arranged, Tom Kidd being a man of action. It was to be, in a way, a picnic, and they were to spend the night in the new hotel at Pleasantville, where Tom Kidd had hired rooms for them. Harry welcomed the excursion. He had been having some strenuous days lately, and the Band of Justice was the chief factor in them. There had been more barn-burnings and a farmer had been wounded. The Eastern and Northern press had begun to thunder about lawlessness in Kentucky, and he had also done a little thundering on his own account, the net result being a number of abusive and threatening letters in his mail, all of course anonymous. He was tired and worried, and knew that he needed a little rest.

They left Groveton early in the morning, twenty in number in five or six carriages. The ten thousand dollar automobile was left behind, it having been represented to Mr. Newton with great force that the road was too rough, and with the exception of Professor Ross, the head of the Groveton High School, who was supposed to lend gravity and dignity, the party was composed wholly of young people. Up in the hills they would return to the line, and thence they would travel by flat car to Pleasantville, the higher half of the road not being complete.

The sun had not yet fully risen when they left Groveton, and the dawn was cool. Over the far blue line of the mountains the golden light was just breaking. Wave after wave, it came, the red now showing through the gold, and by the time they had left Groveton behind, the sun was clear of the highest ridges. Only then did they begin to talk and laugh as young people do. Before, they had been held by the mystery and splender of the day’s dawning.

Wentworth took the cork out of the long-sealed bottle and his eloquence began to flow in a mellow silver stream that nothing could check. He had been placed purposely in the carriage with Mr. Newton, and he held him enchained. Under the color of Wentworth’s rhetoric the commonest objects took on poetic forms. A crooked rail-fence was not a rail-fence only, it was a definite and concrete expression, alike, of the region’s forest resources, its agricultural riches, and the energetic and ingenious qualities of its inhabitants. Tom Kidd in the next carriage listened in devout admiration and satisfaction. Not having the gift of free speech himself he acknowledged its power in others.

The morning deepened. A sky of solid unbroken blue arched from horizon to horizon, and out of it shone the sun, a great red globe. The dim blue mountains rose before them, nearer and clearer, and the forests on the slopes began to show now, shaggy and brown. The heat was tempered by a breeze that blew down from the ridges, but they were still in the tobacco country. The fields stretched away on either side, with the plants now in their full maturity.

“They’ll be cutting it soon,” said Wentworth to Newton “we’re in the last days of summer and then frost may come at any moment. This is the edge of the greatest tobacco region in the world! Unlimited resources in timber too, underlaid with oceans of oil of the highest quality!”

Young Newton seemed duly impressed with a catalogue of resources as long as Don Giovanni’s catalogue of conquests, and Wentworth’s talk flowed smoothly and convincingly on. He certainly had a wonderful gift of speech, and Tom Kidd’s look of admiration was varied now and then by a touch of amazement. But the others paid little attention. Youth, gay, festive, irresponsible youth was in the saddle, and Professor Ross neither was nor wished to be any check upon it.

They were steadily ascending now. The soil grew poorer, not fertile enough for corn or tobacco or wheat, but Strong enough for magnificent forests, which as yet, because of the distance from a railroad, the lumbermen had spared. They passed suddenly from a land of farms and frequent houses into a wilderness. All around them rolled the unbroken forest, and they saw not a house, not a human being. The wind from the distant ridges grew sharper, and whistled a tune among the leaves. There was nothing civilized or tame in its note. It was the song of vast empty spaces, and of a solitude that had been unbroken for ages. It was a music keen, piercing and penetrating, carrying with it a strange, primitive charm, the voice of an old, old world.

Everyone in the party except Herbert Newton had had ancestors who came up through the Wilderness Road or over the mountains, stalwart men who fought the forest and savages, and not one of them was far in blood from the border. He alone had generations of peaceful ordered ancestors branching away in all directions, and he alone did not respond to the wilderness note. All the others thrilled to its music. Here in the forest that seemed to have no end, they were very near to the heroic lives of their grandfathers and grandmothers.

Cynthia, from courtesy had been placed in the carriage with Newton and Wentworth, and Harry was in another, but he could see her. He saw her eyes, light up, and the flush on her face deepen as they came into the forest. He knew that she was feeling the music as he was feeling it, and that she was not hearing Mr. Newton’s trivial talk. “She is one of us and she cannot help it, if she would!” he said fiercely to himself.

At noon they were far up the slopes. The wind still blew and the air was cool. In a magnificent grove of beeches, free from undergrowth, they stopped for luncheon. Cynthia, standing at the edge, could see the lowlands sweeping far away, rolling like waves of the sea until they met the horizon in the distance. The faint touches of red massed to the westward were the roofs of Groveton. She drew a deep breath of pride and happiness, and then turned back to the others.

The manner and way of the wilderness clung to them. They lighted a fire of fallen brushwood to heat their coffee, and then they ate and drank, sitting on fallen logs. They talked too. None of them had travelled and their talk was all of Kentucky, of old familiar things, and of people whom they knew. Mr. Newton of Chicago had started with superior feelings, and a manner which now and then exhibited traces of condescension. He had felt that he deserved praise for the personal, practice of democracy. His father was a power in the material world. He could disturb, if he chose, the finances of the two great business continents. He could buy and sell all Groveton, and yet his only son, had not in the local vernacular “put on airs”. Now he was conscious of a certain distance and aloofness, not intended, by anybody, but nevertheless existent.

A faint veil, almost impalpable, but yet a veil, was drawn between him and the others, He alone was on one side of the veil and he felt it. Finally he said to Wentworth:

“Is everybody in Kentucky kin to everybody else?”

Wentworth considered gravely.

“I hadn’t thought of it before,” he replied, “but since you put the question to me I think it is so, excepting of course the Italians in Louisville. Now I’m a distant cousin of Cynthia there on one side, and Tom Kidd is an equally distant sort of a cousin of hers on the other side.”

“I thought so,” said Mr. Newton. “And Mr. Beauchamp there? I understand that his father is a Frenchman.”

“Oh, that doesn’t make any difference. His mother was a Mason, a native Kentuckian, and through her he is kin to the whole state, excepting, as I said, the Italians in Louisville. But we don’t mean to be clannish, Mr. Newton. We need people from other states. It’s perhaps our drawback that in recent generations we have had so few of them.”

Cynthia too had been conscious of that, fine impalpable, but nevertheless present, veil between Mr. Newton and the others. She had taken a certain pride in her conquest. She had listened with satisfaction to his allusions to the palace on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. It had been pleasing to her to know that the great millionaire’s son had been drawn by her alone, among all the girls of Groveton or Louisville.

Today their lives did not seem to touch anywhere. To all the allusions, to all the dear intimate things of which they talked he was a stranger. What was Groveton to him? and what after all could he Tom Kidd’s railroad to him except a possible investment? It was more than that to her, it was a vital, living thing, all in the Groveton family. She was intensely local, and she knew now that no city, no matter how large, could ever mean as much to her as Groveton.

“Tom,” said Wentworth, “This is so fine here that I’m almost sorry we’re about to come to your railroad.”

“And a great time you’d have” retorted Tom, grimly, “dragging timber and oil over these hills on wagons.”

“No use,” said Wentworth sadly, “You needn’t bore for poetry there.”

A half hour later they reached the Pleasantville section of the road, and found two flat cars in waiting. It was a crude way of traveling, but they proceeded swiftly to Pleasantville over an ascending grade.

The character of the country had now wholly changed. The mountains were low, but they were mountains nevertheless, with a bald peak shooting up now and then through the veil of forest. They saw one or two small patches of tobacco in “new ground,” a stray field or so of dwarfed and stubby corn, and an occasional log cabin at the foot of a ridge, but soon the signs of primitive civilization disappeared altogether, and they reached the wildest part of the line.

Tom Kidd, on the first flat car, was full of enthusiasm. For perhaps the first time in his life he broke into fluent speech. He had planned this line around the steep sides of the hills and across the black gorges, and it was chiefly his youthful fire and energy that had carried it thus far. Cynthia felt a kindred glow. She admired work, the planning and pushing forward of a big task, and here she beheld its concrete embodiment. In the mind of Herbert Newton she made a picture of singular fascination, half sitting, half crouching on the flat car, a stray tendril or two of the wonderful black hair blown about her face, and her eyes, black in the shadow, scintillating with mingled fear and delight, as they passed over a gorge deeper than all the rest.

Mr. Newton sadly needed this bright picture for inspiration, for physically he was far from comfortable. He had adorned, his head on departure with a wonderful yellow pith helmet, such as never before had been seen in Groveton, and now, under the influence of the wind rushing past, it showed a strong desire to take flight on the back track. To hold it on his head with one hand, and himself on the flat car with the other was a task that kept him busy and unhappy. He was sorry that Cynthia had such numerous and primitive relatives. Harry meanwhile was swayed by wholly different emotions. The mountains were grand and beautiful to him, and this slender spear of steel piercing through the hills meant a great increase of wealth, prosperity and comfort to Groveton, and to all for whom he cared. He was so much absorbed in these thoughts that he was chided for inattention by Rose Compton, a girl of Cynthia’s own age, by whom he was then sitting.

They reached Pleasantville about the middle of the afternoon, and, somewhat cramped, they alighted from the hand cars, glad to put foot again on the solid earth. Mr. Newton settled his helmet firmly on his head and a sigh of great satisfaction escaped him.

Pleasantville, until it was made the terminus of the new railroad, had been nothing but the tiniest of mountain hamlets, set in a deep but narrow valley, through which flowed a brawling mountain creek. Down the valley they could see ugly red wooden structures, uprearing their heads. These were the derricks over the oil wells, and they were expected to lift to the surface the future great wealth of Randolph County, and the chief cause of the railroad’s being. The vitalizing influence of the road and of hope was seen already. A two story wooden hotel, made picturesque by its background of mountain, had been finished. There were two general stores, a small sheet-iron oil refinery, some new cottages and a mixed collection of workmen and strolling mountaineers. The brawling creek, cutting the middle of the town and foaming over the rocks, carried away all impurities, performing its double duty of beautifier and scavenger. Above all alike, loomed the mountains on either side.

“Isn’t it, fine?” exclaimed Tom Kidd. “And it’s all been done within the last six months!”

Mr. Newton gazed scornfully, seeing neither beauty nor grandeur. Not so with the others. It appealed to them as an evidence of Groveton energy.

“Come along this path,” said Tom Kidd. “We’ve just cut it here in the side of the hill, and it leads straight to the front door of the hotel.”

Then he added shame-facedly: “What do you think? Some of the silly directors insisted on calling it the Kidd House. They’ve put that name over the doorway.”

“They are not silly directors at all,” said Cynthia. “They know a good nan when they get him.”

Tom blushed, but the blush was partly from secret pride, and he led on with a thumping heart. Pleasantville, small as it had been, was a county seat, with a courthouse and a jail on the other side of the creek, hidden among the trees and today, being county court day, many mountaineers were about. Tom, alert from experience noted all the symptoms, and he observed that more than one of them was drunk. The fact annoyed him greatly. He knew the jealous, suspicious mountain mind, bred by long isolation, and he knew that when the mountaineer took too much “moonshine” or “tanglefoot” he was likely to prove troublesome, whether let alone or not. Tom Kidd, a practical straight-forward man, was a lowlander through and through.

His annoyance grew into apprehension when he saw just ahead of them a large black-bearded man standing at the edge of the path. The man was swaying slightly, and Tom knew it was Cad Burke. He glanced anxiously at Harry Beauchamp. In the mountains old feuds that had slumbered for twenty years would flare up at the mere sight of an enemy. Harry had seen too! Tom knew it by the sudden flash of the eye and the involuntary shudder, but he walked calmly on with Rose Compton, and Cad Burke made no movement.

The hotel, considering the isolation of the place, was highly inviting. Located picturesquely in a coign of the slope it commanded a splendid view, and it was clean and orderly throughout. The girls withdrew, and the men, after their brief repairs, awaited them on the veranda, where they sat luxuriously in rocking chairs, and looked out over the vast sweep of peaks and ridges.

Meanwhile a colored man in clean white clothes brought them glasses of cool, refreshing liquid, sprayed around the border with mint. Charlie Wentworth drank gracefully and gratefully, and then, not forgetful of his mission, burst into poetry. He spoke to Herbert Newton of beauty and utility combined. Behold the mountains above and the oil wells below! Other lands might have beauty and yet other lands might have utility, but only in Kentucky did beauty and utility go together, elbowing each other for space on the same acre. Mr. Newton, soothed and comforted, by the situation, listened with appreciation.

Tom Kidd presently stole away, when he knew that no one was noticing, and beckoned to Harry Beauchamp to follow.

“You saw, of course,” he said.

“Yes, I saw,” said Harry, “but I shall avoid any trouble.”

A spark deep down in his eye glittered redly, and Tom saw it. Sometimes he knew more about Harry Beauchamp than Harry Beauchamp knew about himself, and again he was troubled.

“I think it is well to be very cautious,” he said. “I would take no notice whatever of anything that he might say.”

“I’m not seeking any trouble with anybody,” replied Harry, half defiantly, “but at the same time I shall not make any sacrifices to avoid it. You would not ask me to run away from Cad Burke, would you, Tom?”

Tom could not answer him. He too was a shoot off the same Kentucky stem, and, in silence, the two rejoined the others.

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