Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 109, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 May 1910 — THE QUICKENING FRANCIS LYNDE [ARTICLE]

THE QUICKENING FRANCIS LYNDE

Copyriekt, 1906,

CHAPTER H. Thomas Jefferson's twelfth summer fell in the year 1886; a yeat memorable In the annals of the Lebanon iron and coal region as the first of :m epoch, and as the year of the great flood. But the herald of change had not yet blown his trumpet in Paradise Valley; and the world of russet and green and limestone white, spreading itself before the eyes of the boy sitting with his hands locked ,over his knees on the top step of the -porch fronting the Gordon homestead, was the same world which, with due seasonal variations, had been his wond from the beginning. It was a hot July afternoon, a full month after the revivals and Thomas JefferSon. was at that perilous pass where Satan is said to lurk for the purpose of providing employment for the idle. He was wondering If the shade of the hill .oaks would be worth the trouble It would take to reach It, When -his mother came to the open window of the living-room: a small, fair, well-preserved woman, this mother of the boy of 12, with light brown hair graying a little at the temples, and eyes remindful of vigils, of fervent beseeching, of mighty wrestlings against principalities and powers and the rulers of the darkness of this world. “You, Thomas Jefferson,” she said, gently, but speaking as one having authority, “you’d better be studying your Sunday lesson than sitting there doing nothing.” - “Yes’m,” said the boy, but he made no move other than to hug his knees a little closer. He wished his mother would stop calling his “Thomas Jefferson." To be sure, It was his name, or at least twb-thirds of it; but he liked the “Buddy” of his father, or the “Tom-Jeff” of other pebble a vast deal better. Further, the thought of studying Sunday lessons begot rebellion. At times, as during those soul-stirring revival weeks, now seemingly receding into a far-away past, he had moments of yearning to be wholly sanctified. But the miracle of transformation which he had confidently expected as the result of his "coming through” was still unwrought. When John Bates or Simon Cantrell undertook to bully him, as aforetime, there was the same intoxicating experience of all the visibio world goipg blood-red before his eye# —the same sinful desire to slay them, one or both. - He stole a glance at the open window' of the living-room. His mother had gone about her housework, and he could hear her singing-softly, as befitted the still, -warm day. All hymns were beginning to have that effect, and this one In particular always renewed the conflict between the yearning for sanctity and a desire to do something desperately wicked;’ the only middle course lay in flight Hence, the battle being fairly on, he stole another glance at the window, sprang afoot, and ran silently around the house and through the peach orchard to clamber over the low stone wall which was the only barrier on that side between the wilderness aiul the sown. Men spoke of Paradise as "the valley,” though It was rather a sheltered cove with Mount Lebanon for Its background and a semicircular range of oak-grown hills for its other rampart. Splitting it endwise raw the white streak of the pike, macadamized from the hill quarry which, a full quarter of a century before the Civil War, had furnished the stone for the Dabn«y manor-house; and paralleling the road unevenly lay a ribbon of silver, known to less poetic souls than Thomas Jefferson's as Turkey Creek, but loved best by him under Its almost forgotten Indian name of Chiawassee. Beyond the valley and its inclosing hills rose the "other mountatl," blue in the sunlight and royal purple in the shadows —the Cumberland: source and birthplace of the cooling west wind that was whispering softly to the -cedars on high Lebanon. Thomas Jefferson called, the loftiest of the purple distances Pisgah, picturing it as the mountain from which Moseß had looked over inttf the Promised Land. Sometime he would go and climb it and - feast his eyes on the sight of the Canaan beyond; yea, he might even go down and possess the good land, if so the Lord should not hold him back as He had held Moses. That was a high thought, quite in \keeping with the sense of overlordship bred of the upper stillnesses. To &>mpany with it, the home valley straightway began to idealize itself from the uplifted point of view on the mount of vision. The Paradise fields were delicately-outlined squares of vivid green or golden yellow, or the warm red brown of the upturned earth nt the fallow places. The old negro quarters on the Dabney grounds, many years gone to the ruin of disuse, were vine-grown and invisible save as a spot of summer verdure; and the man-or-house itself, gray, grim and forbidding to a small boy scurrying past it in the deepening twilight, was now no more than a great square roof with the cheerful sunlight playing on it '* Farther down the valley, near the place where the white pike twisted itself between two of the rampart hills to escape Into the great valley of he Tennessee, the split-shingled roof under which Thomas Jefferson had eaten and slept since the earliest beginning of memories became also a part of the hlgh-mountain harmony; and the ragged, red Iron-ore beds on the slope above the furnace were softened into a blur of Joyous color. The Iron furnace, with Its alternating smoke puff and dull red flare, struck the one Jarring note In a symphony blown otherwise on great nature’s organ-pipes; but to Thomas Jefferson the furnace was as much n / „ .

by Francis Lynde

part of the immutable scheme - as the hills or the forests or the Creek which furrrtshed the motive power fqr its airblast. More, it stood for him as the summary St the world’s industry, as the white pike world’s great highway, and Major Dabney its chief citizen, i. ... ' ~ He was knocking his bare heels together and thinking idly of Major Dabney and certain disquieting rumors lately come to Paradise, when the tinkling drip of the spring pool at the foot of his perch was interrupted by a sudden splash. By shifting a little to the right he could see the spring. A girl of about his own age, barefooted, and with only her tangled mat of dark hair for a head covering, was filling her bucket in the pool. He broke a dry twig from the nearest cedar and dropped it on her. “You better quit that, Tom-Jeff GO •- don. I taken sight o’ you up there,” said the girl, ignoring him otherwise. “That’s my spring, Nan Bryerson,” he warned her dictatorlhlly. Shucks! it ain’t your spring anymore’n it’s mine!” she retorted. “Hit's on Maje’ Dabney’s land.” “Well, don’t you muddy It none,” said Thomas Jefferson, with threatening emphasis. For answer to this she put one brown foot deep into the pool and wriggled her toes in the sandy bottom. Things began to turn red for Thomas Jefferson, and a high, buzzing note, like the tocsin of the bees, sang in his ears. “Take your foot out o’ that spring! Don’t-you mad me, Nan Bryerson!” he cried. She laughed at him and flung him a taunt. “You don’t darst to get mad, Tommy-Jeffy; you’ve got religion.” It is a terrible thing to be angry In shackles. There are similes—pent volcanoes, overcharged boilers and the like—but they are all inadequate. Thomas Jefferson searched for missiles more deadly than dry twigs, found none, and fell headlong— not from the rock, but from grace. The girl laughed mockingly and took her foot from the pool, not in deference to his outburst, but because the water was icy cold and gave her a cramp. “Now you’ve done it,” she remarked. “The devil ’ll shore get ye for savin’ that word, Tom-Jeff.” There was no reply, and she stepped back to see what had become of him. He yas prone, writhing in Agony. She knew titfe way to the top of the rock, and was presently crouching beside him. “Don’t take on like that!” she pleaded. “Times I cay n’t he’p bein’ mean: looks like I was made thataway. Get up and slap me. If you want to. I won’t, slap back.” But Thomas Jefferson only ground his face deeper into the thick mat of cedar needles and begged to be let alone, - “Go away; I don’t want you to talk to me!” he groaned. “You’re always making me sin! You’re awfully wicked.” ” ’Cause I don’t believe all that abo-tt the woman and the shake and the apple and the man?” " v “You’ll go to heli -when you die, and then I guess you’ll believe,” said Thomas Jefferson, still more definitely. She took a red apple from the pocket of her ragged frock and gave it to him. “What’s that for?” he asked, suspiciously. i - “You eat it; it's the kind you like—off ’m the tree right back of Jim Stone’s barn lot,” she answered. “You stole it, Nan Bryerson!” “Well, what if I did? You didn’t” He bit 'into it, and she held him in talk till It was eaten to the core. “Have yovf heard tell anything new abotjt the new railroad?” she asked. Thomas Jefferson shook, his head. “I heard Squire Bates and Major Dabney naming It one day last week.” “Well, It’s shoreffcomin’ thoo’ Paradise. I heard tell how It was goin’ to cut the old Maje’s grass patch plumb in two, and run right smack thoo’ you-fins’ peach orchard.” A far-away cry, long-drawn and penetrating, rose on the still air of the lower slope and was blown on the breeze to the summit of the great rock. "That’s maw, hollerin’ for me to get back home with that bucket o’ wat#r,” said the girl; and, as she was descending the tree ladder: “You didn’t s’picion why I give you that apple, did you, Tommy-Jeffy?” —1 -“’Cause you didn’t want it yourself, I reCffon,” said the second Adam. “No; it was ’cause you said I was goin’ to hell and I wanted comp’ny. That apple was stole and you knowed It!” Thomas Jefferson flung the core far out over the tree-tops and shut nls eyes till he could see without seeing red. Then he rose to the serenesf height he had yet attained and said: “I forgive you, you wicked, wicked girl!” < Her laugh was a screaming taunt “But you’ve et the apple!" she cried; “and if you wasn’t soared of goin’ to hell, you’d cuss me—you know you would! Lemme tell you, Tom-Jeff, if the preacher had dipped me in the creek like he did you, I’d be a mighty sight holier than what you are. I cert’nly would.” And now anger came to its own again. "You don’t know what you’re talking about, Nan Bryerson! You’re nothing .but a—a miserable little heathen; my, mother said you was '•" he cried out after her. But a back-flung grimace was all the answer he had. chapter nr. It has been said-that nothing comes suddenly; that the unexpected is merely the overlooked. For weeks Thom-

as Jefferson had been scenting the un« .Wonted In the air of sleepy Pa radian Once he had stumbled on the engineers at work in the # ‘dark woods'* across the creek, spying out a line sos the new railroad, Another day he had cOme home late from a. fishing excursion to the upper pools to find his father shut in the sitting-room with three strangers resplendent In town clothes, and the talk was of iron and coal, of a “New-South,”-whatever that might be, and of wonderful changes portending, which his father was exhorted to help bring about. But these were only the gentle heavings and crackings of the ground premonitary of the real earthquake. That came on a day of days when, as a reward of merit for havlngyfaultlessly recited the eighty-third Psalm from memory, he was permitted to go tb town with his father. Behold him, then, dangling his feet —uncomfortable because they were stockinged and shod - from the high buggy seat the laziest of horses ambled between the shafts up the wjiite pike ahd around and over the hunched shoulder of Mount Lebanon. This in the cool of the morning of the day of revelations. In spite of the premonitory tremblings, the true earthquake found Thomas Jefferson totally, unprepared. He had been to town often enough to have a clear memory picture of South Tredegar—the prehistoric South Tredegar. There was a single street, hubdeep in mud in the rains, beginning vaguely in the open square surrounding the venerable court-house of pale brick and stucco-pillared porticoes. There were the shops—only ThomiS Jefferson and all his kind called them “stores"—one-storied, these, the wooden ones with lying false fronts to hide the mean little gables; the brick ones honester in face, but-sadly chipped and crumbling and dingy with age and the weathfer. Also, on the banks of the river, there was the antiquated iron-furnace which, long before the war, had 'Viven the town its pretentious name. And lastly, there was the Calhoun House, dreariest and most inhospitable inn of Its kind; and across the muddy street from it the great echoing train-shed,' ridiculously out of proportion to every other building in the town, the tavern not excepted, and to the ramshackle, once-a-day train that wheezed and clanked into and out of it. Thomas Jefferson had seen It all, time and again; and this he remembered, that each time the dead, weath-er-worn, miry or dusty dullness of it had crept into his soul, sending him back to the freshness of the Paradije fields and forests at eventide with grateful gladness in his heart. But now all this was to be forgotten, or to be remembered only as a dream. On the day of revelations the earlier picture was effaced, blacked out, obliterated; arftl it came to the boy with a pang that he should never be able to recall it again in its entirety. For the genius of modern progress is contemptuous of old landmarks and impatient of delays. And swift as its race U elsewhere, it is only in 6)at part of the South which has become "industrial" that it came as a thunderclap, with all the intermediate and accelerated steps taken at a bound. Men spoke of it as "the boom.” It was not that. It was merely that the spirit of modernity had discovered a Hitherto overlooked corner of the field, and made haste to occupy it. So in South Tredegar, besprent now before the wondering eyes of a .Thomas Jefferson. The muddy street had vanished to give place to a smooth black roadway, as springy under foot as a forest path, and as clean as the pike after a sweeping summer storrm The shops, with their false fronts and shabby lean-to awnings, were gone, or going, and in their room majestic vastnesses in brick and cut stone were' rising, by their own might, as it would seem, out of disorderly mountains of building material/ Street-cars, propelled as yet by the patient mule, tinkled their bells incessantly. Sipart vehicles of many kinds strange to Paradise eyes rattled recklessly in and out among the. street obstructions. •.Bustling' throngs were in possession of the sidewalks; of the awe-inspiring restaurant, where they gave you lenjonade in a glass bowl and some people washe£ their fingers In it; of the rotunda of the Marlboro, the mammoth hotel which had gfown up on the site of the old Calhoun House—distressing crowds and multitudes of people everywhere. (To oe continued.)