Shepherd of the Hills — 10 - Chapters 18 and 19

CHAPTER XVIII. LEARNING TO BE A LADY.

The books sent for by Mr. Howitt came a few days after the adventure at the ranch, and Sammy, with all the intensity of her nature, plunged at once into the work mapped out for her by the shepherd.

All through the long summer and autumn, the girl spent hours with her teacher out on the hillside.

Seated on some rocky bench, or reclining on the grassy slope, she would recite the lessons he gave her, or listen to him, as he read aloud from character forming books, pausing now and then to slip in some comment to make the teaching clear, or to answer her eager questions.

At other times, while they followed the sheep, leisurely, from one feeding ground to another, he provoked her to talk of the things they were reading, and, while he thus led her to think, he as carefully guarded her speech and language.

At first they took the old familiar path of early intellectual training, but, little by little, he taught her to find the way for herself.

Always as she advanced, he encouraged her to look for the life that is more than meat, and always, while they read and talked together, there was opened before them the great book wherein God has written, in the language of mountain, and tree, and sky, and flower, and brook, the things that make truly wise those who pause to read.

From her mother, and from her own free life in the hills, Sammy had a body beautiful with the grace and strength of perfect physical womanhood.

With this, she had inherited from many generations of gentle-folk a mind and spirit susceptible of the highest culture.

Unspoiled by the hot-house, forcing process, that so often leaves the intellectual powers jaded and weak, before they have fully developed, and free from the atmosphere of falsehood and surface culture, in which so many souls struggle for their very existence, the girl took what her teacher had to offer and made it her own.

With a mental appetite uninjured by tit-bits and dainties, she digested the strong food, and asked eagerly for more.

Her progress was marvelous, and the old scholar often had cause to wonder at the quickness with which his pupil’s clear mind grasped the truths he showed her.

Often before he could finish speaking, a bright nod, or word, showed that she had caught the purpose of his speech, while that wide eager look, and the question that followed, revealed her readiness to go on.

It was as though many of the things he sought to teach her slept already in her brain, and needed only a touch to arouse them to vigorous life.

In time, the girl’s very clothing, and even her manner of dressing her hair, came to reveal the development and transformation of her inner self; not that she dressed more expensively; she could not do that; but in the selection of materials, and in the many subtle touches that give distinction even to the plainest apparel, she showed her awakening.

To help her in this, there was Aunt Mollie and a good ladies’ magazine, which came to her regularly, through the kindness of her teacher.

Sammy’s father, too, came unconsciously under the shepherd’s influence.

As his daughter grew, the man responded to the change in her, as he always responded to her every thought and mood.

He talked often now of the old home in the south land, and sometimes fell into the speech of other days, dropping, for a moment, the rougher expressions of his associates.

But all this was to Sammy alone.

To the world, there was no change in Jim, and he still went on his long rides with Wash Gibbs.

By fall, the place was fixed up a bit; the fence was rebuilt, the yard trimmed, and another room added to the cabin.

So the days slipped away over the wood fringed ridges.

The soft green of tree, and of bush, and grassy slope changed to brilliant gold, and crimson, and russet brown, while the gray blue haze that hangs always over the hollows took on a purple tone.

Then in turn this purple changed to a deeper, colder blue, when the leaves had fallen, and the trees showed naked against the winter sky.

With the cold weather, the lessons were continued in the Lane cabin on the southern slope of Dewey.

All day, while the shepherd was busy at the ranch, Sammy pored over her books; and every evening the old scholar climbed the hill to direct the work of his pupil, with long Jim sitting, silent and grim, by the fireside, listening to the talk, and seeing who knows what visions of the long ago in the dancing flame.

And so the winter passed, and the spring came again; came, with its soft beauty of tender green; its wealth of blossoms, and sweet fragrance of growing things.

Then came the summer; that terrible summer, when all the promises of spring were broken; when no rain fell for weary months, and the settlers, in the total failure of their crops, faced certain ruin.

CHAPTER XIX. THE DROUGHT.

It began to be serious by the time corn was waist high.

When the growing grain lost its rich color and the long blades rustled dryly in the hot air, the settlers looked anxiously for signs of coming rain.

The one topic of conversation at the mill was the condition of the crops.

The stories were all of past drought or tales of hardship and want.

The moon changed and still the same hot dry sky, with only now and then a shred of cloud floating lazily across the blue.

The grass in the glades grew parched and harsh; the trees rattled their shriveled leaves; creek beds lay glaring white and dusty in the sun; and all the wild things in the woods sought the distant river bottom.

In the Mutton Hollow neighborhood, only the spring below the Matthews place held water; and all day the stock on the range, crowding around the little pool, tramped out the narrow fringe of green grass about its edge, and churned its bright life into mud in their struggle.

Fall came and there was no relief.

Crops were a total failure.

Many people were without means to buy food for themselves and their stock for the coming winter and the months until another crop could be grown and harvested.

Family after family loaded their few household goods into the big covered wagons, and, deserting their homes, set out to seek relief in more fortunate or more wealthy portions of the country.

The day came at last when Sammy found the shepherd in the little grove, near the deer lick, and told him that she and her father were going to move.

“Father says there is nothing else to do.

Even if we could squeeze through the winter, we couldn’t hold out until he could make another crop.

” Throwing herself on the ground, she picked a big yellow daisy from a cluster, that, finding a little moisture oozing from a dirt-filled crevice of the rock, had managed to live, and began pulling it to pieces.

In silence the old man watched her.

He had not before realized how much the companionship of this girl was to him.

To the refined and cultivated scholar, whose lot had been cast so strangely with the rude people of the mountain wilderness, the companionship of such a spirit and mind was a necessity.

Unconsciously Sammy had supplied the one thing lacking, and by her demands upon his thought had kept the shepherd from mental stagnation and morbid brooding.

Day after day she had grown into his life—his intellectual and spiritual child, and though she had dropped the rude speech of the native, she persisted still in calling him by his backwoods title, “Dad.

” But the little word had come to hold a new meaning for them both.

He saw now, all at once, what he would lose when she went away.

One by one, the petals from the big daisy fell from the girl’s hand, dull splashes of gold against her dress and on the grass.

“Where will you go?

” he asked at last.

Sammy shook her head without looking up; “Don’t know; anywhere that Daddy can earn a livin’—I mean living—for us.

” “And when do you start?

” “Pretty soon now; there ain’t nothin’—there is nothing to stay for now.

Father told me when he went away day before yesterday that we would go as soon as he returned.

He promised to be home sometime this evening.

I—I couldn’t tell you before, Dad, but I guess you knew.

” The shepherd did know.

For weeks they had both avoided the subject.

Sammy continued; “I—I’ve just been over to the Matthews place.

Uncle Matt has been gone three days now.

I guess you know about that, too.

Aunt Mollie told me all about it.

Oh, I wish, I wish I could help them.

” She reached for another daisy and two big tears rolled from under the long lashes to fall with the golden petals.

“We’ll come back in the spring when it’s time to plant again, but what if you’re not here?

” Her teacher could not answer for a time; then he said, in an odd, hesitating way, “Have you heard from Ollie lately?

” The girl raised her head, her quick, rare instinct divining his unspoken thought, and something she saw in her old friend’s face brought just a hint of a smile to her own tearful eyes.

She knew him so well.

“You don’t mean that, Dad,” she said.

“We just couldn’t do that.

I had a letter from him yesterday offering us money, but you know we could not accept it from him.

” And there the subject was dropped.

They spent the afternoon together, and in the evening, at Sammy’s Lookout on the shoulder of Dewey, she bade him good-night, and left him alone with his flocks in the soft twilight.