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The Heart of the Hills

by Jr. John Fox · English · Gutenberg #5145 · 518,115 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Heart of the Hills

Author: Jr. John Fox


        
Release date: February 1, 2004 [eBook #5145]
                Most recently updated: May 27, 2013

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5145

Credits: Produced by Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HEART OF THE HILLS ***




Produced by Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team









THE HEART OF THE HILLS

By John Fox, Jr.


Author of "The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come," "The Trail of the
Lonesome Pine," Etc.


With Four Illustrations By F. C. YOHN




                    IN
              GRATEFUL MEMORY
                    OF
                MY FATHER

    WHO LOVED THE GREAT MOTHER, HER FORMS,
            HER MOODS, HER WAYS.

   TO THE END SHE LEFT HIM THE JOY OF YOUTH
          IN THE COMING OF SPRING

June 28, 1912.






THE HEART OF THE HILLS




I


Twin spirals of blue smoke rose on either side of the spur, crept
tendril-like up two dark ravines, and clearing the feathery green
crests of the trees, drifted lazily on upward until, high above, they
melted shyly together and into the haze that veiled the drowsy face of
the mountain.

Each rose from a little log cabin clinging to the side of a little
hollow at the head of a little creek. About each cabin was a rickety
fence, a patch of garden, and a little cleared hill-side, rocky, full
of stumps, and crazily traced with thin green spears of corn. On one
hill-side a man was at work with a hoe, and on the other, over the
spur, a boy--both barefooted, and both in patched jean trousers upheld
by a single suspender that made a wet line over a sweaty cotton shirt:
the man, tall, lean, swarthy, grim; the boy grim and dark, too, and
with a face that was prematurely aged. At the man's cabin a little girl
in purple homespun was hurrying in and out the back door clearing up
after the noonday meal; at the boy's, a comely woman with masses of
black hair sat in the porch with her hands folded, and lifting her eyes
now and then to the top of the spur. Of a sudden the man impatiently
threw down his hoe, but through the battered straw hat that bobbed up
and down on the boy's head, one lock tossed on like a jetblack plume
until he reached the end of his straggling row of corn. There he
straightened up and brushed his earth-stained fingers across a dullred
splotch on one cheek of his sullen set face. His heavy lashes lifted
and he looked long at the woman on the porch--looked without anger now
and with a new decision in his steady eyes. He was getting a little too
big to be struck by a woman, even if she were his own mother, and
nothing like that must happen again.

A woodpecker was impudently tapping the top of a dead burnt tree near
by, and the boy started to reach for a stone, but turned instead and
went doggedly to work on the next row, which took him to the lower
corner of the garden fence, where the ground was black and rich. There,
as he sank his hoe with the last stroke around the last hill of corn, a
fat fishing-worm wriggled under his very eyes, and the growing man
lapsed swiftly into the boy again. He gave another quick dig, the earth
gave up two more squirming treasures, and with a joyful gasp he stood
straight again--his eyes roving as though to search all creation for
help against the temptation that now was his. His mother had her face
uplifted toward the top of the spur; and following her gaze, he saw a
tall mountaineer slouching down the path. Quickly he crouched behind
the fence, and the aged look came back into his face. He did not
approve of that man coming over there so often, kinsman though he was,
and through the palings he saw his mother's face drop quickly and her
hands moving uneasily in her lap. And when the mountaineer sat down on
the porch and took off his hat to wipe his forehead, he noticed that
his mother had on a newly bought store dress, and that the man's hair
was wet with something more than water. The thick locks had been combed
and were glistening with oil, and the boy knew these facts for signs of
courtship; and though he was contemptuous, they furnished the excuse he
sought and made escape easy. Noiselessly he wielded his hoe for a few
moments, scooped up a handful of soft dirt, meshed the worms in it, and
slipped the squirming mass into his pocket. Then he crept stooping
along the fence to the rear of the house, squeezed himself between two
broken palings, and sneaked on tiptoe to the back porch. Gingerly he
detached a cane fishing-pole from a bunch that stood upright in a
corner and was tiptoeing away, when with another thought he stopped,
turned back, and took down from the wall a bow and arrow with a steel
head around which was wound a long hempen string. Cautiously then he
crept back along the fence, slipped behind the barn into the
undergrowth and up a dark little ravine toward the green top of the
spur. Up there he turned from the path through the thick bushes into an
open space, walled by laurel-bushes, hooted three times surprisingly
like an owl, and lay contentedly down on a bed of moss. Soon his ear
caught the sound of light footsteps coming up the spur on the other
side, the bushes parted in a moment more, and a little figure in purple
homespun slipped through them, and with a flushed, panting face and
dancing eyes stood beside him.

The boy nodded his head sidewise toward his own home, and the girl
silently nodded hers up and down in answer. Her eyes caught sight of
the bow and arrow on the ground beside him and lighted eagerly, for she
knew then that the fishingpole was for her. Without a word they slipped
through the bushes and down the steep side of the spur to a little
branch which ran down into a creek that wound a tortuous way into the
Cumberland.




II

On the other side, too, a similar branch ran down into another creek
which looped around the long slanting side of the spur and emptied,
too, into the Cumberland. At the mouth of each creek the river made a
great bend, and in the sweep of each were rich bottom lands. A century
before, a Hawn had settled in one bottom, the lower one, and a
Honeycutt in the other. As each family multiplied, more land was
cleared up each creek by sons and grandsons until in each cove a clan
was formed. No one knew when and for what reason an individual Hawn and
a Honeycutt had first clashed, but the clash was of course inevitable.
Equally inevitable was it, too, that the two clans should take the
quarrel up, and for half a century the two families had, with
intermittent times of truce, been traditional enemies. The boy's
father, Jason Hawn, had married a Honeycutt in a time of peace, and,
when the war opened again, was regarded as a deserter, and had been
forced to move over the spur to the Honeycutt side. The girl's father,
Steve Hawn, a ne'erdo-well and the son of a ne'er-do-well, had for his
inheritance wild lands, steep, supposedly worthless, and near the head
of the Honeycutt cove. Little Jason's father, when he quarrelled with
his kin, could afford to buy only cheap land on the Honeycutt side, and
thus the homes of the two were close to the high heart of the mountain,
and separated only by the bristling crest of the spur. In time the
boy's father was slain from ambush, and it was a Hawn, the Honeycutts
claimed, who had made him pay the death price of treachery to his own
kin. But when peace came, this fact did not save the lad from taunt and
suspicion from the children of the Honeycutt tribe, and being a
favorite with his Grandfather Hawn down on the river, and harshly
treated by his Honeycutt mother, his life on the other side in the
other cove was a hard one; so his heart had gone back to his own people
and, having no companions, he had made a playmate of his little cousin,
Mavis, over the spur. In time her mother had died, and in time her
father, Steve, had begun slouching over the spur to court the
widow--his cousin's widow, Martha Hawn. Straightway the fact had caused
no little gossip up and down both creeks, good-natured gossip at first,
but, now that the relations between the two clans were once more
strained, there was open censure, and on that day when all the men of
both factions had gone to the county-seat, the boy knew that Steve Hawn
had stayed at home for no other reason than to make his visit that day
secret; and the lad's brain, as he strode ahead of his silent little
companion, was busy with the significance of what was sure to come.

At the mouth of the branch, the two came upon a road that also ran down
to the river, but they kept on close to the bank of the stream which
widened as they travelled--the boy striding ahead without looking back,
the girl following like a shadow. Still again they crossed the road,
where it ran over the foot of the spur and turned down into a deep bowl
filled to the brim with bush and tree, and there, where a wide pool lay
asleep in thick shadow, the lad pulled forth the ball of earth and
worms from his pocket, dropped them with the fishing-pole to the
ground, and turned ungallantly to his bow and arrow. By the time he had
strung it, and had tied one end of the string to the shaft of the arrow
and the other about his wrist, the girl had unwound the coarse
fishing-line, had baited her own hook, and, squatted on her heels, was
watching her cork with eager eyes; but when the primitive little hunter
crept to the lower end of the pool, and was peering with Indian caution
into the depths, her eyes turned to him.

"Watch out thar!" he called, sharply.

Her cork bobbed, sank, and when, with closed eyes, she jerked with all
her might, a big shining chub rose from the water and landed on the
bank beside her. She gave a subdued squeal of joy, but the boy's face
was calm as a star. Minnows like that were all right for a girl to
catch and even for him to eat, but he was after game for a man. A
moment later he heard another jerk and another fish was flopping on the
bank, and this time she made no sound, but only flashed her triumphant
eyes upon him. At the third fish, she turned her eyes for approval--and
got none; and at the fourth, she did not look up at all, for he was
walking toward her.

"You air skeerin' the big uns," he said shortly, and as he passed he
pulled his Barlow knife from his pocket and dropped it at her feet. She
rose obediently, and with no sign of protest began gathering an
apronful of twigs and piling them for a fire. Then she began scraping
one of the fish, and when it was cleaned she lighted the fire. The
blaze crackled merrily, the blue smoke rose like some joyous spirit
loosed for upward flight, and by the time the fourth fish was cleaned,
a little bed of winking coals was ready and soon a gentle sizzling
assailed the boy's ears, and a scent made his nostrils quiver and set
his stomach a-hungering. But still he gave no sign of interest--even
when the little girl spoke at last:

"Dinner's ready."

He did not look around, for he had crouched, his body taut from head to
foot, and he might have been turned suddenly to stone for all the sign
of life he gave, and the little girl too was just as motionless. Then
she saw the little statue come slowly back to quivering life. She saw
the bow bend, the shaft of the arrow drawing close to the boy's paling
cheek, there was a rushing hiss through the air, a burning hiss in the
water, a mighty bass leaped from the convulsed surface and shot to the
depths again, leaving the headless arrow afloat. The boy gave one sharp
cry and lapsed into his stolid calm again.

The little girl said nothing, for there is no balm for the tragedy of
the big fish that gets away. Slowly he untied the string from his
reddened wrist and pulled the arrow in. Slowly he turned and gazed
indifferently at the four crisp fish on four dry twigs with four pieces
of corn pone lying on the grass near them, and the little girl
squatting meekly and waiting, as the woman should for her working lord.
With his Barlow knife he slowly speared a corn pone, picking up a fish
with the other hand, and still she waited until he spoke.

"Take out, Mavie," he said with great gravity and condescension, and
then his knife with a generous mouthful on its point stopped in the
air, his startled eyes widened, and the little girl shrank cowering
behind him. A heavy footfall had crunched on the quiet air, the bushes
had parted, and a huge mountaineer towered above them with a Winchester
over his shoulder and a kindly smile under his heavy beard. The boy was
startled--not frightened.

"Hello, Babe!" he said coolly. "Whut devilmint you up to now?"

The giant smiled uneasily:

"I'm keepin' out o' the sun an' a-takin' keer o' my health," he said,
and his eyes dropped hungrily to the corn pone and fried fish, but the
boy shook his head sturdily.

"You can't git nothin' to eat from me, Babe Honeycutt."

"Now, looky hyeh, Jason--"

"Not a durn bite," said the boy firmly, "even if you air my mammy's
brother. I'm a Hawn now, I want ye to know, an' I ain't goin' to have
my folks say I was feedin' an' harborin' a Honeycutt--'specially you."

It would have been humorous to either Hawn or Honeycutt to hear the big
man plead, but not to the girl, though he was an enemy, and had but
recently wounded a cousin of hers, and was hiding from her own people,
for her warm little heart was touched, and big Babe saw it and left his
mournful eyes on hers.

"An' I'm a-goin' to tell whar I've seed ye," went on the boy savagely,
but the girl grabbed up two fish and a corn pone and thrust them out to
the huge hairy hand eagerly stretched out.

"Now, git away," she said breathlessly, "git away--quick!"

"Mavis!" yelled the boy.

"Shet up!" she cried, and the lips of the routed boy fell apart in
sheer amazement, for never before had she made the slightest question
of his tyrannical authority, and then her eyes blazed at the big
Honeycutt and she stamped her foot.

"I'd give 'em to the meanest dog in these mountains."

The big man turned to the boy.

"Is he dead yit?"

"No, he ain't dead yit," said the boy roughly.

"Son," said the mountaineer quietly, "you tell whutever you please
about me."

The curiously gentle smile had never left the bearded lips, but in his
voice a slight proud change was perceptible.

"An' you can take back yo' corn pone, honey."

Then dropping the food in his hand back to the ground, he noiselessly
melted into the bushes again.

At once the boy went to work on his neglected corn-bread and fish, but
the girl left hers untouched where they lay. He ate silently, staring
at the water below him, nor did the little girl turn her eyes his way,
for in the last few minutes some subtle change in their relations had
taken place, and both were equally surprised and mystified. Finally,
the lad ventured a sidewise glance at her beneath the brim of his hat
and met a shy, appealing glance once more. At once he felt aggrieved
and resentful and turned sullen.

"He throwed it back in yo' face," he said. "You oughtn't to 'a' done
it."

Little Mavis made no answer.

"You're nothin' but a gal, an' nobody'll hold nothin' agin you, but
with my mammy a Honeycutt an' me a-livin' on the Honeycutt side, you
mought 'a' got me into trouble with my own folks." The girl knew how
Jason had been teased and taunted and his life made miserable up and
down the Honeycutt creek, and her brown face grew wistful and her chin
quivered.

"I jes' couldn't he'p it, Jason," she said weakly, and the little man
threw up his hands with a gesture that spoke his hopelessness over her
sex in general, and at the same time an ungracious acceptance of the
terrible calamity she had perhaps left dangling over his head. He
clicked the blade of his Barlow knife and rose.

"We better be movin' now," he said, with a resumption of his old
authority, and pulling in the line and winding it about the cane pole,
he handed it to her and started back up the spur with Mavis trailing
after, his obedient shadow once more.

On top of the spur Jason halted. A warm blue haze transfused with the
slanting sunlight overlay the flanks of the mountains which, fold after
fold, rippled up and down the winding river and above the green crests
billowed on and on into the unknown. Nothing more could happen to them
if they went home two hours later than would surely happen if they went
home now, the boy thought, and he did not want to go home now. For a
moment he stood irresolute, and then, far down the river, he saw two
figures on horseback come into sight from a strip of woods, move slowly
around a curve of the road, and disappear into the woods again.

One rode sidewise, both looked absurdly small, and even that far away
the boy knew them for strangers. He did not call Mavis's attention to
them--he had no need--for when he turned, her face showed that she too
had seen them, and she was already moving forward to go with him down
the spur. Once or twice, as they went down, each glimpsed the coming
"furriners" dimly through the trees; they hurried that they might not
miss the passing, and on a high bank above the river road they stopped,
standing side by side, the eyes of both fixed on the arched opening of
the trees through which the strangers must first come into sight. A
ringing laugh from the green depths heralded their coming, and then in
the archway were framed a boy and a girl and two ponies--all from
another world. The two watchers stared silently--the boy noting that
the other boy wore a cap and long stockings, the girl that a strange
hat hung down the back of the other girl's head--stared with widening
eyes at a sight that was never for them before. And then the strangers
saw them--the boy with his bow and arrow, the girl with a
fishing-pole--and simultaneously pulled their ponies in before the
halting gaze that was levelled at them from the grassy bank. Then they
all looked at one another until boy's eyes rested on boy's eyes for
question and answer, and the stranger lad's face flashed with quick
humor.

"Were you looking for us?" he asked, for just so it seemed to him, and
the little mountaineer nodded.

"Yes," he said gravely.

The stranger boy laughed.

"What can we do for you?"

Now, little Jason had answered honestly and literally, and he saw now
that he was being trifled with.

"A feller what wears gal's stockings can't do nothin' fer me," he said
coolly.

Instantly the other lad made as though he would jump from his pony, but
a cry of protest stopped him, and for a moment he glared his hot
resentment of the insult; then he dug his heels into his pony's sides.

"Come on, Marjorie," he said, and with dignity the two little
"furriners" rode on, never looking back even when they passed over the
hill.

"He didn't mean nothin'," said Mavis, "an' you oughtn't--"

Jason turned on her in a fury.

"I seed you a-lookin' at him!"

"'Tain't so! I seed you a-lookin' at HER!" she retorted, but her eyes
fell before his accusing gaze, and she began worming a bare toe into
the sand.

"Air ye goin' home now?" she asked, presently.

"No," he said shortly, "I'm a-goin' atter him. You go on home."

The boy started up the hill, and in a moment the girl was trotting
after him. He turned when he heard the patter of her feet.

"Huh!" he grunted contemptuously, and kept on. At the top of the hill
he saw several men on horseback in the bend of the road below, and he
turned into the bushes.

"They mought tell on us," explained Jason, and hiding bow and arrow and
fishing-pole, they slipped along the flank of the spur until they stood
on a point that commanded the broad river-bottom at the mouth of the
creek.

By the roadside down there, was the ancestral home of the Hawns with an
orchard about it, a big garden, a stable huge for that part of the
world, and a meat-house where for three-quarters of a century there had
always been things "hung up." The old log house in which Jason and
Mavis's great-great-grandfather had spent his pioneer days had been
weather-boarded and was invisible somewhere in the big frame house
that, trimmed with green and porticoed with startling colors, glared
white in the afternoon sun. They could see the two ponies hitched at
the front gate. Two horsemen were hurrying along the river road beneath
them, and Jason recognized one as his uncle, Arch Hawn, who lived in
the county-seat, who bought "wild" lands and was always bringing in
"furriners," to whom he sold them again. The man with him was a
stranger, and Jason understood better now what was going on. Arch Hawn
was responsible for the presence of the man and of the girl and that
boy in the "gal's stockings," and all of them would probably spend the
night at his grandfather's house. A farm-hand was leading the ponies to
the barn now, and Jason and Mavis saw Arch and the man with him throw
themselves hurriedly from their horses, for the sun had disappeared in
a black cloud and a mist of heavy rain was sweeping up the river. It
was coming fast, and the boy sprang through the bushes and, followed by
Mavis, flew down the road. The storm caught them, and in a few moments
the stranger boy and girl looking through the front door at the
sweeping gusts, saw two drenched and bedraggled figures slip shyly
through the front gate and around the corner to the back of the house.




III

The two little strangers sat in cane-bottomed chairs before the open
door, still looking about them with curious eyes at the strings of
things hanging from the smoke-browned rafters--beans, red pepper-pods,
and twists of homegrown tobacco, the girl's eyes taking in the old
spinning-wheel in the corner, the piles of brilliantly figured quilts
between the foot-boards of the two beds ranged along one side of the
room, and the boy's, catching eagerly the butt of a big revolver
projecting from the mantel-piece, a Winchester standing in one corner,
a long, old-fashioned squirrel rifle athwart a pair of buck antlers
over the front door, and a bunch of cane fishing-poles aslant the wall
of the back porch. Presently a slim, drenched figure slipped quietly
in, then another, and Mavis stood on one side of the fire-place and
little Jason on the other. The two girls exchanged a swift glance and
Mavis's eyes fell; abashed, she knotted her hands shyly behind her and
with the hollow of one bare foot rubbed the slender arch of the other.
The stranger boy looked up at Jason with a pleasant glance of
recognition, got for his courtesy a sullen glare that travelled from
his broad white collar down to his stockinged legs, and his face
flushed; he would have trouble with that mountain boy. Before the fire
old Jason Hawn stood, and through a smoke cloud from his corn-cob pipe
looked kindly at his two little guests.

"So that's yo' boy an' gal?"

"That's my son Gray," said Colonel Pendleton.

"And that's my cousin Marjorie," said the lad, and Mavis looked quickly
to little Jason for recognition of this similar relationship and got no
answering glance, for little did he care at that moment of hostility
how those two were akin.

"She's my cousin, too," laughed the colonel, "but she always calls me
uncle."

Old Jason turned to him.

"Well, we're a purty rough people down here, but you're welcome to all
we got."

"I've found that out," laughed Colonel Pendleton pleasantly,
"everywhere."

"I wish you both could stay a long time with us," said the old man to
the little strangers. "Jason here would take Gray fishin' an' huntin',
an' Mavis would git on my old mare an' you two could jus' go flyin' up
an' down the road. You could have a mighty good time if hit wasn't too
rough fer ye."

"Oh, no," said the boy politely, and the girl said:

"I'd just love to."

The Blue-grass man's attention was caught by the names.

"Jason," he repeated; "why, Jason was a mighty hunter, and Mavis--that
means 'the songthrush.' How in the world did they get those names?"

"Well, my granddaddy was a powerful b'arhunter in his day," said the
old man, "an' I heerd as how a school-teacher nicknamed him Jason, an'
that name come down to me an' him. I've heerd o' Mavis as long as I can
rickellect. Hit was my grandmammy's name."

Colonel Pendleton looked at the sturdy mountain lad, his compact
figure, square shoulders, well-set head with its shock of hair and
bold, steady eyes, and at the slim, wild little creature shrinking
against the mantel-piece, and then he turned to his own son Gray and
his little cousin Marjorie. Four better types of the Blue-grass and of
the mountains it would be hard to find. For a moment he saw them in his
mind's eye transposed in dress and environment, and he was surprised at
the little change that eye could see, and when he thought of the four
living together in these wilds, or at home in the Blue-grass, his
wonder at what the result might be almost startled him. The mountain
lad had shown no surprise at the talk about him and his cousin, but
when the stranger man caught his eye, little Jason's lips opened.

"I knowed all about that," he said abruptly.

"About what?"

"Why, that mighty hunter--and Mavis."

"Why, who told you?"

"The jologist."

"The what?" Old Jason laughed.

"He means ge-ol-o-gist," said the old man, who had no little trouble
with the right word himself. "A feller come in here three year ago with
a hammer an' went to peckin' aroun' in the rocks here, an' that boy was
with him all the time. Thar don't seem to be much the feller didn't
tell Jason an' nothin' that Jason don't seem to remember. He's al'ays
a-puzzlin' me by comin' out with somethin' or other that rock-pecker
tol' him an'--" he stopped, for the boy was shaking his head from side
to side.

"Don't you say nothin' agin him, now," he said, and old Jason laughed.

"He's a powerful hand to take up fer his friends, Jason is."

"He was a friend o' all us mountain folks," said the boy stoutly, and
then he looked Colonel Pendleton in the face--fearlessly, but with no
impertinence.

"He said as how you folks from the big settlemints was a-comin' down
here to buy up our wild lands fer nothin' because we all was a lot o'
fools an' didn't know how much they was worth, an' that ever'body'd
have to move out o' here an' you'd get rich diggin' our coal an'
cuttin' our timber an' raisin' hell ginerally."

He did not notice Marjorie's flush, but went on fierily: "He said that
our trees caught the rain an' our gullies gethered it together an'
troughed it down the mountains an' made the river which would water all
yo' lands. That you was a lot o' damn fools cuttin' down yo' trees an'
a-plantin' terbaccer an' a-spittin' out yo' birthright in
terbaccer-juice, an' that by an' by you'd come up here an' cut down our
trees so that there wouldn't be nothin' left to ketch the rain when it
fell, so that yo' rivers would git to be cricks an' yo' cricks branches
an' yo' land would die o' thirst an' the same thing 'ud happen here.
Co'se we'd all be gone when all this tuk place, but he said as how I'd
live to see the day when you furriners would be damaged by wash-outs
down thar in the settlements an' would be a-pilin' up stacks an' stacks
o' gold out o' the lands you robbed me an' my kinfolks out of."

"Shet up," said Arch Hawn sharply, and the boy wheeled on him.

"Yes, an' you air a-helpin' the furriners to rob yo' own kin; you air
a-doin' hit yo'self."

"Jason!"

The old man spoke sternly and the boy stopped, flushed and angry, and a
moment later slipped from the room.

"Well!" said the colonel, and he laughed good-humoredly to relieve the
strain that his host might feel on his account; but he was amazed just
the same--the bud of a socialist blooming in those wilds! Arch Hawn's
shrewd face looked a little concerned, for he saw that the old man's
rebuke had been for the discourtesy to strangers, and from the sudden
frown that ridged the old man's brow, that the boy's words had gone
deep enough to stir distrust, and this was a poor start in the
fulfilment of the purpose he had in view. He would have liked to give
the boy a cuff on the ear. As for Mavis, she was almost frightened by
the outburst of her playmate, and Marjorie was horrified by his
profanity; but the dawning of something in Gray's brain worried him,
and presently he, too, rose and went to the back porch. The rain had
stopped, the wet earth was fragrant with freshened odors, wood-thrushes
were singing, and the upper air was drenched with liquid gold that was
darkening fast. The boy Jason was seated on the yard fence with his
chin in his hands, his back to the house, and his face toward home. He
heard the stranger's step, turned his head, and mistaking a puzzled
sympathy for a challenge, dropped to the ground and came toward him,
gathering fury as he came. Like lightning the Blue-grass lad's face
changed, whitening a little as he sprang forward to meet him, but
Jason, motioning with his thumb, swerved behind the chimney, where the
stranger swiftly threw off his coat, the mountain boy spat on his
hands, and like two diminutive demons they went at each other fiercely
and silently. A few minutes later the two little girls rounding the
chimney corner saw them--Gray on top and Jason writhing and biting
under him like a tortured snake. A moment more Mavis's strong little
hand had the stranger boy by his thick hair and Mavis, feeling her own
arm clutched by the stranger-girl, let go and turned on her like a
fury. There was a piercing scream from Marjorie, hurried footsteps
answered on the porch, and old Jason and the colonel looked with
bewildered eyes on the little Blue-grass girl amazed, indignant, white
with horror; Mavis shrinking away from her as though she were the one
who had been threatened with a blow; the stranger lad with a bitten
thumb clinched in the hollow of one hand, his face already reddening
with contrition and shame; and savage little Jason biting a bloody lip
and with the lust of battle still shaking him from head to foot.

"Jason," said the old man sternly, "whut's the matter out hyeh?"

Marjorie pointed one finger at Mavis, started to speak, and stopped.
Jason's eyes fell.

"Nothin'," he said sullenly, and Colonel Pendleton looked to his son
with astonished inquiry, and the lad's fine face turned bewildered and
foolish.

"I don't know, sir," he said at last.

"Don't know?" echoed the colonel. "Well--"

The old man broke in:

"Jason, if you have lost yo' manners an' don't know how to behave when
thar's strangers around, I reckon you'd better go on home."

The boy did not lift his eyes.

"I was a-goin' home anyhow," he said, still sullen, and he turned.

"Oh, no!" said the colonel quickly; "this won't do. Come now--you two
boys shake hands."

At once the stranger lad walked forward to his enemy, and confused
Jason gave him a limp hand. The old man laughed. "Come on in,
Jason--you an' Mavis--an' stay to supper."

The boy shook his head.

"I got to be gittin' back home," he said, and without a word more he
turned again. Marjorie looked toward the little girl, but she, too, was
starting.

"I better be gittin' back too," she said shyly, and off she ran. Old
Jason laughed again.

"Jes' like two young roosters out thar in my barnyard," and he turned
with the colonel toward the house. But Marjorie and her cousin stood in
the porch and watched the two little mountaineers until, without once
looking back, they passed over the sunlit hill.




IV

On they trudged, the boy plodding sturdily ahead, the little girl
slipping mountain-fashion behind. Not once did she come abreast with
him, and not one word did either say, but the mind and heart of both
were busy. All the way the frown over-casting the boy's face stayed
like a shadow, for he had left trouble at home, he had met trouble, and
to trouble he was going back. The old was definite enough and he knew
how to handle it, but the new bothered him sorely. That stranger boy
was a fighter, and Jason's honest soul told him that if interference
had not come he would have been whipped, and his pride was still
smarting with every step. The new boy had not tried to bite, or gouge,
or to hit him when he was on top--facts that puzzled the mountain boy;
he hadn't whimpered and he hadn't blabbed--not even the insult Jason
had hurled with eye and tongue at his girl-clad legs. He had said that
he didn't know what they were fighting about, and just why they were
Jason himself couldn't quite make out now; but he knew that even now,
in spite of the hand-shaking truce, he would at the snap of a finger go
at the stranger again. And little Mavis knew now that it was not fear
that made the stranger girl scream--and she, too, was puzzled. She even
felt that the scorn in Marjorie's face was not personal, but she had
shrunk from it as from the sudden lash of a whip. The stranger girl,
too, had not blabbed but had even seemed to smile her forgiveness when
Mavis turned, with no good-by, to follow Jason. Hand in hand the two
little mountaineers had crossed the threshold of a new world that day.
Together they were going back into their own, but the clutch of the new
was tight on both, and while neither could have explained, there was
the same thought in each mind, the same nameless dissatisfaction in
each heart, and both were in the throes of the same new birth.

The sun was sinking when they started up the spur, and unconsciously
Jason hurried his steps and the girl followed hard. The twin spirals of
smoke were visible now, and where the path forked the boy stopped and
turned, jerking his thumb toward her cabin and his.

"Ef anything happens"--he paused, and the girl nodded her
understanding--"you an' me air goin' to stay hyeh in the mountains an'
git married."

"Yes, Jasie," she said.

His tone was matter-of-fact and so was hers, nor did she show any
surprise at the suddenness of what he said, and Jason, not looking at
her, failed to see a faint flush come to her cheek. He turned to go,
but she stood still, looking down into the gloomy, darkening ravine
below her. A bear's tracks had been found in that ravine only the day
before. "Air ye afeerd?" he asked tolerantly, and she nodded mutely.

"I'll take ye down," he said with sudden gentleness.

The tall mountaineer was standing on the porch of the cabin, and with
assurance and dignity Jason strode ahead with a protecting air to the
gate.

"Whar you two been?" he called sharply.

"I went fishin'," said the boy unperturbed, "an' tuk Mavis with me."

"You air gittin' a leetle too peart, boy. I don't want that gal
a-runnin' around in the woods all day."

Jason met his angry eyes with a new spirit.

"I reckon you hain't been hyeh long."

The shot went home and the mountaineer glared helpless for an answer.

"Come on in hyeh an' git supper," he called harshly to the girl, and as
the boy went back up the spur, he could hear the scolding going on
below, with no answer from Mavis, and he made up his mind to put an end
to that some day himself. He knew what was waiting for him on the other
side of the spur, and when he reached the top, he sat down for a moment
on a long-fallen, moss-grown log. Above him beetled the top of his
world. His great blue misty hills washed their turbulent waves to the
yellow shore of the dropping sun. Those waves of forests primeval were
his, and the green spray of them was tossed into cloudland to catch the
blessed rain. In every little fold of them drops were trickling down
now to water the earth and give back the sea its own. The dreamy-eyed
man of science had told him that. And it was unchanged, all unchanged
since wild beasts were the only tenants, since wild Indians slipped
through the wilderness aisles, since the half-wild white man, hot on
the chase, planted his feet in the footsteps of both and inexorably
pushed them on. The boy's first Kentucky ancestor had been one of those
who had stopped in the hills. His rifle had fed him and his family; his
axe had put a roof over their heads, and the loom and spinning-wheel
had clothed their bodies. Day by day they had fought back the
wilderness, had husbanded the soil, and as far as his eagle eye could
reach, that first Hawn had claimed mountain, river, and tree for his
own, and there was none to dispute the claim for the passing of half a
century. Now those who had passed on were coming back again--the first
trespasser long, long ago with a yellow document that he called a
"blanket-patent" and which was all but the bringer's funeral shroud,
for the old hunter started at once for his gun and the stranger with
his patent took to flight. Years later a band of young men with chain
and compass had appeared in the hills and disappeared as suddenly, and
later still another band, running a line for a railroad up the river,
found old Jason at the foot of a certain oak with his rifle in the
hollow of his arm and marking a dead-line which none dared to cross.

Later still, when he understood, the old man let them pass, but so far
nobody had surveyed his land, and now, instead of trying to take, they
were trying to purchase. From all points of the compass the "furriners"
were coming now, the rock-pecker's prophecy was falling true, and at
that moment the boy's hot words were having an effect on every soul who
had heard them. Old Jason's suspicions were alive again; he was short
of speech when his nephew, Arch Hawn, brought up the sale of his lands,
and Arch warned the colonel to drop the subject for the night. The
colonel's mind had gone back to a beautiful woodland at home that he
thought of clearing off for tobacco--he would put that desecration off
a while. The stranger boy, too, was wondering vaguely at the fierce
arraignment he had heard; the stranger girl was curiously haunted by
memories of the queer little mountaineer, while Mavis now had a new awe
of her cousin that was but another rod with which he could go on ruling
her.

Jason's mother was standing in the door when he walked through the yard
gate. She went back into the cabin when she saw him coming, and met him
at the door with a switch in her hand. Very coolly the lad caught it
from her, broke it in two, threw it away, and picking up a piggin went
out without a word to milk, leaving her aghast and outdone. When he
came back, he asked like a man if supper was ready, and as to a man she
answered. For an hour he pottered around the barn, and for a long while
he sat on the porch under the stars. And, as always at that hour, the
same scene obsessed his memory, when the last glance of his father's
eye and the last words of his father's tongue went not to his wife, but
to the white-faced little son across the foot of the death-bed:

"You'll git him fer me--some day."

"I'll git him, pap."

Those were the words that passed, and in them was neither the asking
nor the giving of a promise, but a simple statement and a simple
acceptance of a simple trust, and the father passed with a grim smile
of content. Like every Hawn the boy believed that a Honeycutt was the
assassin, and in the solemn little fellow one purpose hitherto had been
supreme--to discover the man and avenge the deed; and though, young as
he was, he was yet too cunning to let the fact be known, there was no
male of the name old enough to pull the trigger, not even his mother's
brother, Babe, who did not fall under the ban of the boy's deathless
hate and suspicion. And always his mother, though herself a Honeycutt,
had steadily fed his purpose, but for a long while now she had kept
disloyally still, and the boy had bitterly learned the reason.

It was bedtime now, and little Jason rose and went within. As he
climbed the steps leading to his loft, he spoke at last, nodding his
head toward the cabin over the spur:

"I reckon I know whut you two are up to, and, furhermore, you are
aimin' to sell this land. I can't keep you from doin' it, I reckon, but
I do ask you not to sell without lettin' me know. I know somet'n' 'bout
it that nobody else knows. An' if you don't tell me--" he shook his
head slowly, and the mother looked at her boy as though she were dazed
by some spell.

"I'll tell ye, Jasie," she said.




V

Down the river road loped Arch Hawn the next morning, his square chin
low with thought, his shrewd eyes almost closed, and his straight lips
closed hard on the cane stem of an unlighted pipe. Of all the Hawns he
had been born the poorest in goods and chattels and the richest in
shrewd resource, restless energy, and keen foresight. He had gone to
the settlements when he was a lad, he had always been coming and going
ever since, and the word was that he had been to far-away cities in the
outer world that were as unfamiliar to his fellows and kindred as the
Holy Land. He had worked as teamster and had bought and sold anything
to anybody right and left. Resolutely he had kept himself from all part
in the feud--his kinship with the Hawns protecting him on one side and
the many trades with old Aaron Honeycutt in cattle and lands saving him
from trouble on the other. He carried no tales from one faction to the
other, condemned neither one nor the other, and made the same comment
to both--that it was foolish to fight when there was so much else so
much more profitable to do. Once an armed band of mounted Honeycutts
had met him in the road and demanded news of a similar band of Hawns up
a creek. "Did you ever hear o' my tellin' the Hawns anything about you
Honeycutts?" he asked quietly, and old Aaron had to shake his head.

"Well, if I tol' you anything about them to-day, don't you know I'd be
tellin' them something about you to-morrow?"

Old Aaron scratched his head.

"By Gawd, boys--that's so. Let him pass!"

Thus it was that only Arch Hawn could have brought about an agreement
that was the ninth wonder of the mountain world, and was no less than a
temporary truce in the feud between old Aaron Honeycutt and old Jason
Hawn until the land deal in which both leaders shared a heavy interest
could come to a consummation. Arch had interested Colonel Pendleton in
his "wild lands" at a horse sale in the Blue-grass. The mountaineer's
shrewd knowledge of horses had caught the attention of the colonel, his
drawling speech, odd phrasing, and quaint humor had amused the
Blue-grass man, and his exposition of the wealth of the hills and the
vast holdings that he had in the hollow of his hand, through options
far and wide, had done the rest--for the matter was timely to the
colonel's needs and to his accidental hour of opportunity. Only a short
while before old Morton Sanders, an Eastern capitalist of Kentucky
birth, had been making inquiry of him that the mountaineer's talk
answered precisely, and soon the colonel found himself an intermediary
between buried coal and open millions, and such a quick unlooked-for
chance of exchange made Arch Hawn's brain reel. Only a few days before
the colonel started for the mountains, Babe Honeycutt had broken the
truce by shooting Shade Hawn, but as Shade was going to get well,
Arch's oily tongue had licked the wound to the pride of every Honeycutt
except Shade, and he calculated that the latter would be so long in bed
that his interference would never count. But things were going wrong.
Arch had had a hard time with old Jason the night before. Again he had
to go over the same weary argument that he had so often travelled
before: the mountain people could do nothing with the mineral wealth of
their hills; the coal was of no value to them where it was; they could
not dig it, they had no market for it; and they could never get it into
the markets of the outside world. It was the boy's talk that had halted
the old man, and to Arch's amazement the colonel's sense of fairness
seemed to have been touched and his enthusiasm seemed to have waned a
little. That morning, too, Arch had heard that Shade Hawn was getting
well a little too fast, and he was on his way to see about it. Shade
was getting well fast, and with troubled eyes Arch saw him sitting up
in a chair and cleaning his Winchester.

"What's yo' hurry?"

"I ain't never agreed to no truce," said Shade truculently.

"Don't you think you might save a little time--waitin' fer Babe to git
tame? He's hidin' out. You can't find him now."

"I can look fer him."

"Shade!"--wily Arch purposely spoke loud enough for Shade's wife to
hear, and he saw her thin, worn, shrewish face turn eagerly--"I'll give
ye just fifty dollars to stay here in the house an' git well fer two
more weeks. You know why, an' you know hit's wuth it to me. What you
say?"

Shade rubbed his stubbled chin ruminatively and his wife Mandy broke in
sharply:

"Take it, you fool!"

Apparently Shade paid no heed to the advice nor the epithet, which was
not meant to be offensive, but he knew that Mandy wanted a cow of just
that price and a cow she would have; while he needed cartridges and
other little "fixin's," and he owed for moonshine up a certain creek,
and wanted more just then and badly. But mental calculation was
laborious and he made a plunge:

"Not a cent less'n seventy-five, an' I ain't goin' to argue with ye."

Arch scowled.

"Split the difference!" he commanded.

"All right."

A few minutes later Arch was loping back up the river road. Within an
hour he had won old Jason to a non-committal silence and straight-way
volunteered to show the colonel the outcroppings of his coal. And old
Jason mounted his sorrel mare and rode with the party up the creek.

It was Sunday and a holiday for little Jason from toil in the rocky
corn-field. He was stirring busily before the break of dawn. While the
light was still gray, he had milked, cut wood for his mother, and eaten
his breakfast of greasy bacon and corn-bread. On that day it had been
his habit for months to disappear early, come back for his dinner, slip
quietly away again and return worn out and tired at milking-time.
Invariably for a long time his mother had asked:

"Whut you been a-doin', Jason?" And invariably his answer was:

"Nothin' much."

But, by and by, as the long dark mountaineer, Steve Hawn, got in the
daily habit of swinging over the ridge, she was glad to be free from
the boy's sullen watchfulness, and particularly that morning she was
glad to see him start as usual up the path his own feet had worn
through the steep field of corn, and disappear in the edge of the
woods. She would have a long day for courtship and for talk of plans
which she was keeping secret from little Jason. She was a Honeycutt and
she had married one Hawn, and there had been much trouble. Now she was
going to marry another of the tribe, there would be more trouble, and
Steve Hawn over the ridge meant to evade it by straightway putting
forth from those hills. Hurriedly she washed the dishes, tidied up her
poor shack of a home, and within an hour she was seated in the porch,
in her best dress, with her knitting in her lap and, even that early,
lifting expectant and shining eyes now and then to the tree-crowned
crest of the ridge.

Up little Jason went through breaking mist and flashing dew. A
wood-thrush sang, and he knew the song came from the bird of which
little Mavis was the human counterpart. Woodpeckers were hammering and,
when a crested cock of the woods took billowy flight across a blue
ravine, he knew him for a big cousin of the little red-heads, just as
Mavis was a little cousin of his. Once he had known birds only by
sight, but now he knew every calling, twittering, winging soul of them
by name. Once he used to draw bead on one and all heartlessly and
indiscriminately with his old rifle, but now only the whistle of a
bob-white, the darting of a hawk, or the whir of a pheasant's wings
made him whirl the old weapon from his shoulder. He knew flower, plant,
bush, and weed, the bark and leaf of every tree, and even In winter he
could pick them out in the gray etching of a mountain-side--dog-wood,
red-bud, "sarvice" berry, hickory, and walnut, the oaks--white, black,
and chestnut--the majestic poplar, prized by the outer world, and the
black-gum that defied the lightning. All this the dreamy stranger had
taught him, and much more. And nobody, native born to those hills,
except his uncle Arch, knew as much about their hidden treasures as
little Jason. He had trailed after the man of science along the benches
of the mountains where coal beds lie. With him he had sought the roots
of upturned trees and the beds of little creeks and the gray faces of
"rock-houses" for signs of the black diamonds. He had learned to watch
the beds of little creeks for the shining tell-tale black bits, and
even the tiny mouths of crawfish holes, on the lips of which they
sometimes lay. And the biggest treasure in the hills little Jason had
found himself; for only on the last day before the rock-pecker had gone
away, the two had found signs of another vein, and the geologist had
given his own pick to the boy and told him to dig, while he was gone,
for himself. And Jason had dug. He was slipping now up the tiny branch,
and where the stream trickled down the face of a water-worn
perpendicular rock the boy stopped, leaned his rifle against a tree,
and stepped aside into the bushes. A moment later he reappeared with a
small pick in his hand, climbed up over a mound of loose rocks and
loose earth, ten feet around the rock, and entered the narrow mouth of
a deep, freshly dug ditch. Ten feet farther on he was halted by a tall
black column solidly wedged in the narrow passage, at the base of which
was a bench of yellow dirt extending not more than two feet from the
foot of the column and above the floor of the ditch. There had been
mighty operations going on in that secret passage; the toil for one boy
and one tool had been prodigious and his work was not yet quite done.
Lifting the pick above his head, the boy sank it into that yellow
pedestal with savage energy, raking the loose earth behind him with
hands and feet. The sunlight caught the top of the black column above
his head and dropped shining inch by inch, but on he worked tirelessly.
The yellow bench disappeared and the heap of dirt behind him was piled
high as his head, but the black column bored on downward as though
bound for the very bowels of the earth, and only when the bench
vanished to the level of the ditch's floor did the lad send his pick
deep into a new layer and lean back to rest even for a moment. A few
deep breaths, the brushing of one forearm and then the other across his
forehead and cheeks, and again he grasped the tool. This time it came
out hard, bringing out with its point particles of grayish-black earth,
and the boy gave a low, shrill yell. It was a bed of clay that he had
struck--the bed on which, as the geologist had told him, the massive
layers of coal had slept so long. In a few minutes he had skimmed a
yellow inch or two more to the dingy floor of the clay bed, and had
driven his pick under the very edge of the black bulk towering above
him.

His work was done, and no buccaneer ever gloated more over hidden
treasure than Jason over the prize discovered by him and known of
nobody else in the world. He raised his head and looked up the
shimmering black face of his find. He took up his pick again and
notched foot-holes in each side of the yellow ditch. He marked his own
height on the face of the column, and, climbing up along it, measured
his full length again, and yet with outstretched arm he could barely
touch the top of the vein with the tips of his fingers. No vein half
that thick had the rock-pecker with all his searching found, and the
lad gave a long, low whistle of happy amazement. A moment later he
dropped his pick, climbed over the pile of new dirt, emerged at the
mouth of the passage, and sat down as if on guard in the grateful
coolness of the little ravine. Drawing one long breath, he looked
proudly back once more and began shaking his head wisely. They couldn't
fool him. He knew what that mighty vein of coal was worth. Other
people--fools--might sell their land for a dollar or two an acre, even
old Jason, his grandfather, but not the Jason Hawn who had dug that
black giant out of the side of the mountain.

"Go away, boy," the rock-pecker had said, "Get an education. Leave this
farm alone--it won't run away. By the time you are twenty-one, an acre
of it will be worth as much as all of it is now."

No, they couldn't fool him. He would keep his find a secret from every
soul on earth--even from his grandfather and Mavis, both of whom he had
already been tempted to tell. He rose to his feet with the resolution
and crouched suddenly, listening hard. Something was coming swiftly
toward him through the undergrowth on the other side of the creek, and
he reached stealthily for his rifle, sank behind the bowlder with his
thumb on the hammer just as the bushes parted on the opposite cliff,
and Mavis stood above him, peering for him and calling his name in an
excited whisper. He rose glowering and angry.

"Whut you doin' up here?" he asked roughly, and the girl shrank, and
her message stopped at her lips.

"They're comin' up here," she faltered.

The boy's eyes accused her mercilessly and he seemed not to hear her.

"You've been spyin'!"

The dignity of his manhood was outraged, and humbly and helplessly she
nodded in utter abasement, faltering again:

"They're comin' up here!"

"Who's comin' up here?"

"Them strangers an' grandpap an' Uncle Arch--an' another rock-pecker."

"Did you tell'em?"

The girl crossed her heart and body swiftly.

"I hain't told a soul," she gasped". I come up to tell you."

"When they comin'?"

The sound of voices below answered for her.

The boy wheeled, alert as a wild-cat, the girl slid noiselessly down
the cliff and crept noiselessly after him down the bed of the creek,
until they could both peer through the bushes down on the next bend of
the stream below. There they were--all of them, and down there they had
halted.

"Ain't no use goin' up any furder," said the voice of Arch Hawn; "I've
looked all up this crick an' thar ain't nary a blessed sign o' coal."

"All right," said the colonel, who was puffing with the climb. "That
suits me--I've had enough."

At Jason's side, Mavis echoed his own swift breath of relief, but as
the party turned, the rock-pecker stooped and rose with a black lump in
his hand.

"Hello!" he said, "where did this come from?"

The boy's heart began to throb, for once he had started to carry that
very lump to his grandfather, had changed his mind, and thoughtlessly
dropped it there. The geologist was looking at it closely and then
began to weigh it with his hand.

"This is pretty good-looking coal," he said, and he laughed. "I guess
we'd better go up a little farther--this didn't come out all by itself."

The boy dug Mavis sharply in the shoulder.

"Git back into the bushes--quick!" he whispered.

The girl shrank away and the boy dropped down into the bed of the creek
and slipped down to where the stream poured between two bowlders over
which ascent was slippery and difficult. And when the party turned up
the bend of the creek, Arch Hawn saw the boy, tense and erect, on the
wet black summit of one bowlder, with his old rifle in the hollow of
his arm.

"Why, hello, Jason!" he cried, with a start of surprise; "found
anything to shoot?"

"Not yit!" said Jason shortly.

The geologist stepped around Arch and started to climb toward the foot
of the bowlder.

"You stop thar!"

The ring of the boy's fiery command stopped the man as though a
rattlesnake had given the order at his very feet, and he looked up
bewildered; but the boy had not moved.

"Whut you mean, boy?" shouted Arch. "We're lookin' for a vein o' coal."

"Well, you hain't a-goin' to find hit up this way."

"Whut you want to keep us from goin' up here fer?" asked the uncle with
sarcastic suspicion. "Got a still up here?"

"That's my business," said little Jason.

"Well," shouted Arch angrily again, "this ain't yo' land an' I've got a
option on it an' hit's my business to go up here, an' I'm goin'!"

As he pushed ahead of the geologist the boy flashed his old rifle to
his shoulder.

"I'll let ye come just two steps more," he said quietly, and old Jason
Hawn began to grin and stepped aside as though to get out of range.

"Hol' on thar, Arch," he said; "he'll shoot, shore!" And Arch held on,
bursting with rage and glaring up at the boy.

"I've a notion to git me a switch an' whoop the life out o' you." The
boy laughed derisively.

"My whoopin' days air over." The amazed and amused geologist put his
hand on Arch's shoulder.

"Never mind," he said, and with a significant wink he pulled a
barometer out of his pocket and carefully noted the altitude.

"We'll manage it later."

The party turned, old Jason still smiling grimly, the colonel
chuckling, the geologist busy with speculation, and Arch sore and
angry, but wondering what on earth it was that the boy had found up
that ravine. Presently with the geologist he dropped behind the other
two and the latter's frowning brow cleared into a smile at his lips. He
stopped, looking still at the black lump and weighing it once more in
his hand.

"I think I know this coal," he said in a low voice, "and if I'm right
you've got the best and thickest vein of coking coal in these
mountains. It's the Culloden seam. Nobody ever has found it on this
side of the mountain, and it is supposed to have petered out on the way
through. That boy has found the Culloden seam. The altitude is right,
the coal looks and weighs like it, and we can find it somewhere else
under that bench along the mountain. So you better let the boy alone."

Little Jason stood motionless looking after them. Little Mavis crept
from her hiding-place. Her face showed no pride in Jason's triumph and
few traces of excitement, for she was already schooled to the quiet
acquiescence of mountain women in the rough deeds of the men. She had
seen Jason going up that ravine, she could simply not help going
herself to learn why, she was mystified by what he had done up there,
but she had kept his secret faithfully. Now she was beginning to
understand that the matter was serious, and for that reason the boy's
charge of spying lay heavier on her mind. So she came slowly and shyly
and stood behind him, her eyes dark with penitence.

The boy heard her, but he did not turn around.

"You better go home, Mavie," he said, and at his very tone her face
flashed with joy. "They mought come back agin. I'm goin' to stay up
here till dark. They can't see nothin' then."

There was not a word of rebuke for her; it was his secret and hers now,
and pride and gratitude filled her heart and her eyes.

"All right, Jasie," she said obediently, and down the bowlder she
stepped lightly, and slipping down the bed of the creek, disappeared.
And not once did she look around.

The shadows lengthened, the ravines filled with misty blue, the steep
westward spur threw its bulky shadow on the sunlit flank of the
opposite hill, and the lonely spirit of night came with the gloom that
gathered fast about him in the defile where he lay. A slow wind was
blowing up from the river toward him, and on it came faintly the long
mellow blast of a horn. It was no hunter's call, and he sprang to his
feet. Again the winding came and his tense muscles relaxed--nor was it
a warning that "revenues" were coming--and he sank back to his lonely
useless vigil again. The sun dipped, the sky darkened, the black wings
of the night rushed upward and downward and from all around the
horizon, but only when they were locked above him did he slip like a
creature of the gloom down the bed of the stream.




VI

The cabin was unlighted when Jason came in sight of it and apprehension
straightway seized him; so that he broke into a run, but stopped at the
gate and crept slowly to the porch and almost on tiptoe opened the
door. The fire was low, but the look of things was unchanged, and on
the kitchen table he saw his cold supper laid for him. His mother had
maybe gone over the ridge for some reason to stay all night, so he
gobbled his food hastily and, still uneasy, put forth for Mavis's cabin
over the hill. That cabin, too, was dark and deserted, and he knew now
what had happened--that blast of the horn was a summons to a dance
somewhere, and his mother and Steve had answered and taken Mavis with
them; so the boy sat down on the porch, alone with the night and the
big still dark shapes around him. It would not be very pleasant for him
to follow them--people would tease him and ask him troublesome
questions. But where was the dance, and had they gone to it after all?
He rose and went swiftly down the creek. At the mouth of it a light
shone through the darkness, and from it a quavering hymn trembled on
the still air. A moment later Jason stood on the threshold of an open
door and an old couple at the fireplace lifted welcoming eyes.

"Uncle Lige, do you know whar my mammy is?"

The old man's eyes took on a troubled look, but the old woman answered
readily:

"Why, I seed her an' Steve Hawn an' Mavis a-goin' down the crick jest
afore dark, an' yo' mammy said as how they was aimin' to go to yo'
grandpap's."

It was his grandfather's horn, then, Jason had heard. The lad turned to
go, and the old circuit rider rose to his full height.

"Come in, boy. Yo' grandpap had better be a-thinkin' about spreadin'
the wings of his immortal sperit, stid o' shakin' them feet o' clay o'
his'n an' a-settin' a bad example to the young an' errin'!"

"Hush up!" said the old woman. "The Bible don't say nothin' agin a boy
lookin' fer his mammy, no matter whar she is."

She spoke sharply, for Steve Hawn had called her husband out to the
gate, where the two had talked in whispers, and the old man had refused
flatly to tell her what the talk was about. But Jason had turned
without a word and was gone. Out in the darkness of the road he stood
for a moment undecided whether or not he should go back to his lonely
home, and some vague foreboding started him swiftly on down the creek.
On top of a little hill he could see the light in his grandfather's
house, and that far away he could hear the rollicking tune of "Sourwood
Mountain." The sounds of dancing feet soon came to his ears, and from
those sounds he could tell the figures of the dance just as he could
tell the gait of an unseen horse thumping a hard dirt road. He leaned
over the yard fence--looking, listening, thinking. Through the window
he could see the fiddler with his fiddle pressed almost against his
heart, his eyes closed, his horny fingers thumping the strings like
trip-hammers, and his melancholy calls ringing high above the din of
shuffling feet. His grandfather was standing before the fireplace, his
grizzled hair tousled and his face red with something more than the
spirits of the dance. The colonel was doing the "grand right and left,"
and his mother was the colonel's partner--the colonel as gallant as
though he were leading mazes with a queen and his mother simpering and
blushing like a girl. In one corner sat Steve Hawn, scowling like a
storm-cloud, and on one bed sat Marjorie and the boy Gray watching the
couple and apparently shrieking with laughter; and Jason wondered what
they could be laughing about. Little Mavis was not in sight. When the
dance closed he could see the colonel go over to the little strangers
and, seizing each by the hand, try to pull them from the bed into the
middle of the floor. Finally they came, and the boy, looking through
the window, and Mavis, who suddenly appeared in the door leading to the
porch, saw a strange sight. Gray took Marjorie's right hand with his
left and put his right arm around her waist and then to the stirring
strains of "Soapsuds Over the Fence" they whirled about the room as
lightly as two feathers in an eddy of air. It was a two-step and the
first round dance ever seen in these hills, and the mountaineers took
it silently, grimly, and with little sign of favor or disapproval,
except from old Jason, who, looking around for Mavis, caught sight of
little Jason's wondering face over her shoulder, for the boy had left
the blurred window-pane and hurried around to the back door for a
better view. With a whoop the old man reached for the little girl, and
gathered in the boy with his other hand.

"Hyeh!" he cried, "you two just git out thar an' shake a foot!"

Little Mavis hung back, but the boy bounded into the middle of the
floor and started into a furious jig, his legs as loose from the hip as
a jumping-jack and the soles and heels of his rough brogans thumping
out every note of the music with astonishing precision and rapidity. He
hardly noticed Mavis at first, and then he began to dance toward her,
his eyes flashing and fixed on hers and his black locks tumbling about
his forehead as though in an electric storm. The master was calling and
the maid answered--shyly at first, coquettishly by and by, and then,
forgetting self and onlookers, with a fiery abandon that transformed
her. Alternately he advanced and she retreated, and when, with a
scornful toss of that night-black head, the boy jigged away, she would
relent and lure him back, only to send him on his way again. Sometimes
they were back to back and the colonel saw that always then the girl
was first to turn, but if the lad turned first, the girl whirled as
though she were answering the dominant spirit of his eyes even through
the back of her head, and, looking over to the bed, he saw his own
little kinswoman answering that same masterful spirit in a way that
seemed hardly less hypnotic. Even Gray's clear eyes, fixed at first on
the little mountain girl, had turned to Jason, but they were undaunted
and smiling, and when Jason, seeing Steve's face at the window and his
mother edging out through the front door, seemed to hesitate in his
dance, and Mavis, thinking he was about to stop, turned panting away
from him, Gray sprang from the bed like a challenging young buck and
lit facing the mountain boy and in the midst of a double-shuffle that
the amazed colonel had never seen outdone by any darkey on his farm.

"Jenny with a ruff-duff a-kickin' up the dust," clicked his feet.

   "Juba this and Juba that!
    Juba killed a yaller cat!
    Juba! Juba!"

"Whoop!" yelled old Jason, bending his huge body and patting his leg
and knee to the beat of one big cowhide boot and urging them on in a
frenzy of delight:

"Come on, Jason! Git atter him, stranger! Whoop her up thar with that
fiddle--Heh--ee--dum dee--eede-eedle--dedee-dee!"

Then there was dancing. The fiddler woke like a battery newly charged,
every face lighted with freshened interest, and only the colonel and
Marjorie showed surprise and mystification. The double-shuffle was
hardly included in the curriculum of the colonel's training school for
a gentleman, and where, when, and how the boy had learned such
Ethiopian skill, neither he nor Marjorie knew. But he had it and they
enjoyed it to the full. Gray's face wore a merry smile, and Jason,
though he was breathing hard and his black hair was plastered to his
wet forehead, faced his new competitor with rallying feet but a sullen
face. "The Forked Deer," "Big Sewell Mountain," and "Cattle Licking
Salt" for Jason, and the back-step, double-shuffle, and "Jim Crow" for
Gray; both improvising their own steps when the fiddler raised his
voice in "Comin' up, Sandy," "Chicken in the Dough-Tray," and "Sparrows
on the Ash-Bank"; and thus they went through all the steps known to the
negro or the mountaineer, until the colonel saw that game little Jason,
though winded, would go on till he dropped, and gave Gray a sign that
the boy's generous soul caught like a flash; for, as though worn out
himself, he threw up his hands with a laugh and left the floor to
Jason. Just then there was the crack of a Winchester from the darkness
outside. Simultaneously, as far as the ear could detect, there was a
sharp rap on a window-pane, as a bullet sped cleanly through, and in
front of the fire old Jason's mighty head sagged suddenly and he
crumbled into a heap on the floor. Arch Hawn had carried his business
deal through. The truce was over and the feud was on again.




VII

Knowing but little of his brother in the hills, the man from the
lowland Blue-grass was puzzled and amazed that all feeling he could
observe was directed solely at the deed itself and not at the way it
was done. No indignation was expressed at what was to him the
contemptible cowardice involved--indeed little was said at all, but the
colonel could feel the air tense and lowering with a silent deadly
spirit of revenge, and he would have been more puzzled had he known the
indifference on the part of the Hawns as to whether the act of revenge
should take precisely the same form of ambush. For had the mountain
code of ethics been explained to him--that what was fair for one was
fair for the other; that the brave man could not fight the coward who
shot from the brush and must, therefore, adopt the coward's methods;
that thus the method of ambush had been sanctioned by long custom--he
still could never have understood how a big, burly, kind-hearted man
like Jason Hawn could have been brought even to tolerance of ambush by
environment, public sentiment, private policy, custom, or any other
influence that moulds the character of men.

Old Jason would easily get well--the colonel himself was surgeon enough
to know that--and he himself dressed and bandaged the ragged wound that
the big bullet had made through one of the old man's mighty shoulders.
At his elbow all the time, helping, stood little Jason, and not once
did the boy speak, nor did the line of his clenched lips alter, nor did
the deadly look in his smouldering eyes change. One by one the guests
left, the colonel sent Marjorie and Gray to bed, grandmother Hawn sent
Mavis, and when all was done and the old man was breathing heavily on a
bed in the corner and grandmother Hawn was seated by the fire with a
handkerchief to her lips, the colonel heard the back door open and
little Jason, too, was gone--gone on business of his own. He had seen
Steve Hawn's face at the window, his mother had slipped out on the
porch while he was dancing, and neither had appeared again. So little
Jason went swiftly through the dark, over the ridge and up the big
creek to the old circuit rider's house, where the stream forked. All
the way he had seen the tracks of a horse which he knew to be Steve's,
for the right forefoot, he knew, had cast a shoe only the day before.

At the forks the tracks turned up the branch that led to Steve's cabin
and not up toward his mother's house. If Steve had his mother behind
him, he had taken her to his own home; that, in Mavis's absence, was
not right, and, burning with sudden rage, the boy hurried up the
branch. The cabin was dark and at the gate he gave a shrill, imperative
"Hello!"

In a few minutes the door opened and the tousled head of his cousin was
thrust forth.

"Is my mammy hyeh?" he called hotly.

"Yep," drawled Steve.

"Well, tell her I'm hyeh to take her home!" There was no sound from
within.

"Well, she ain't goin' home," Steve drawled.

The boy went sick and speechless with fury, but before he could get his
breath Steve drawled again:

"She's goin' to live here now--we got married to-night." The boy
dropped helplessly against the gate at these astounding words and his
silence stirred Steve to kindness.

"Now, don't take it so hard, Jason. Come on in, boy, an' stay all
night."

Still the lad was silent and another face appeared at the door.

"Come on in, Jasie."

It was his mother's voice and the tone was pleading, but the boy, with
no answer, turned, and they heard his stumbling steps as he made his
way along the fence and started over the spur. Behind him his mother
began to sob and with rough kindness Steve soothed her and closed the
door.

Slowly little Jason climbed the spur and dropped on the old log on
which he had so often sat--fighting out the trouble which he had so
long feared must come. The moon and the stars in her wake were sinking
and the night was very still. His reason told him his mother was her
own mistress, and had the right to marry when she pleased and whom she
pleased, but she was a Honeycutt, again she had married a Hawn, and the
feud was starting again. Steve Hawn would be under suspicion as his own
father had been, Steve would probably have to live on the Honeycutt
side of the ridge, and Jason's own earlier days of shame he must go
through again. That was his first thought, but his second was a quick
oath to himself that he would not go through them again. He was big
enough to handle a Winchester now, and he would leave his mother and he
would fight openly with the Hawns. And then as he went slowly down the
spur he began to wonder with fresh suspicion what his mother and Steve
might now do, what influence Steve might have over her, and if he might
not now encourage her to sell her land. And, if that happened, what
would become of him? The old hound in the porch heard him coming and
began to bay at him fiercely, but when he opened the gate the dog
bounded to him whining with joy and trying to lick his hands. He
dropped on the porch and the loneliness of it all clutched his heart so
that he had to gulp back a sob in his throat and blink his eyes to keep
back the tears. But it was not until he went inside finally and threw
himself with his clothes on across his mother's empty bed that he lost
all control and sobbed himself to sleep. When he awoke it was not only
broad daylight, but the sun was an hour high and streaming through the
mud-chinked crevices of the cabin. In his whole life he had never slept
so long after daybreak and he sprang up in bed with bewildered eyes,
trying to make out where he was and why he was there. The realization
struck him with fresh pain, and when he slowly climbed out of the bed
the old hound was whining at the door. When he opened it the fresh wind
striking his warm body aroused him sharply. He wondered why his mother
had not already been over for her things. The chickens were clustered
expectantly at the corner of the house, the calf was bawling at the
corner of the fence, and the old cow was waiting patiently at the gate.
He turned quickly to the kitchen and to a breakfast on the scraps of
his last night's supper. He did not know how to make coffee, and for
the first time in his life he went without it. Within an hour the cow
was milked and fed, bread crumbs were scattered to the chickens, and
alone in the lonely cabin he faced the new conditions of his life. He
started toward the gate, not knowing where he should go. He drifted
aimlessly down the creek and he began to wonder about Mavis, whether
she had got home and now knew what had happened and what she thought
about it all, and about his grandfather and who it was that had shot
him. There were many things that he wanted to know, and his steps
quickened with a definite purpose. At the mouth of the creek he hailed
the old circuit rider's house, and the old man and his wife both
appeared in the doorway.

"I reckon you couldn't help doin' it?"

"No," said the old man. "Thar wasn't no reason fer me to deny 'em."

He looked confused and the old woman gulped, for both were wondering
how much the lad knew.

"How's grandpap?"

"Right porely I heerd," said the old woman. "The doctor's thar, an' he
said that if the bullet had 'a' gone a leetle furder down hit would 'a'
killed him."

"Whar's Mavis?"

Again the two old people looked confused, for it was plain that Jason
did not know all that had happened.

"I hain't seed her, but somebody said she went by hyeh on her way home
about an hour ago. I was thinkin' about goin' up thar right now."

The boy's eyes were shifting now from one to the other and he broke in
abruptly:

"Whut's the matter?"

The old man's lips tightened.

"Jason, she's up thar alone. Yo' mammy an' Steve have run away."

The lad looked at the old man with unblinking eyes.

"Don't ye understand, boy?" repeated the old man kindly. "They've run
away!"

Jason turned his head quickly and started for the gate.

"Now, don't, Jason," called the old woman in a broken voice. "Don't
take on that way. I want ye both to come an' live with us," she
pleaded. "Come on back now."

The little fellow neither made answer nor looked back, and the old
people watched him turn up the creek, trudging toward Mavis's home.

The boy's tears once more started when he caught sight of Steve Hawn's
cabin, but he forced them back. A helpless little figure was sitting in
the open doorway with head buried in her arms. She did not hear him
coming even when he was quite near, for the lad stepped softly and
gently put one hand on her shoulder. She looked up with a frightened
start, and at sight of his face she quit her sobbing and with one hand
over her quivering mouth turned her head away.

"Come on, Mavie," he said quietly.

Again she looked up, wonderingly this time, and seeing some steady
purpose in his eyes rose without a question.

With no word he turned and she followed him back down the creek. And
the old couple, sitting in the porch, saw them coming, the boy striding
resolutely ahead, the little girl behind, and the faces of both deadly
serious--the one with purpose and the other with blind trust. They did
not call to the boy, for they saw him swerve across the road toward the
gate. He did not lift his head until he reached the gate, and he did
not wait for Mavis. He had no need, for she had hurried to his side
when he halted at the steps of the porch.

"Uncle Lige," he said, "me an' Mavis hyeh want to git married."

Not the faintest surprise showed in Mavis's face, little as she knew
what his purpose was, for what the master did was right; but the old
woman and the old man were stunned into silence and neither could smile.

"Have you got yo' license?" the old man asked gravely.

"Whut's a license?"

"You got to git a license from the county clerk afore you can git
married, an' hit costs two dollars."

The boy flinched, but only for a moment.

"I kin borrer the money," he said stoutly.

"But you can't git a license--you ain't a man."

"I ain't!" cried the boy hotly; "I GOT to be!"

"Come in hyeh, Jason," said the old man, for it was time to leave off
evasion, and he led the lad into the house while Mavis, with the old
woman's arm around her, waited in the porch. Jason came out baffled and
pale.

"Hit ain't no use, Mavis," he said; "the law's agin us an' we got to
wait. They've run away an' they've both sold out an' yo' daddy left
word that he was goin' to send fer ye whenever he got whatever he was
goin'."

Jason waited and he did not have to wait long.

"I hain't goin' to leave ye," she flashed.




VIII

St. Hilda sat on the vine-covered porch of her little log cabin, high
on the hill-side, with a look of peace in her big dreaming eyes. From
the frame house a few rods below her, mountain children--boys and
girls--were darting in and out, busy as bees, and, unlike the dumb,
pathetic little people out in the hills, alert, keen-eyed, cheerful,
and happy. Under the log foot-bridge the shining creek ran down past
the mountain village below, where the cupola of the court-house rose
above the hot dirt streets, the ramshackle hotel, and the dingy stores
and frame dwellings of the town. Across the bridge her eyes rested on
another neat, well-built log cabin with a grass plot around it, and,
running alongside and covered with honeysuckle--a pergola! That was her
hospital down there--empty, thank God. With a little turn of her strong
white chin, her eyes rested on the charred foundation of her
school-house, to which some mean hand had applied the torch a month
ago, and were lifted up to the mountain-side, where mountain men were
chopping down trees and mountain oxen yanking them down the steep
slopes to the bank of the creek, and then the peace of them went deeper
still, for they could look back on her work and find it good. Nun-like
in renunciation, she had given up her beloved Blue-grass land, she had
left home and kindred, and she had settled, two days' journey from a
railroad, in the hills. She had gone back to the physical life of the
pioneers, she had encountered the customs and sentiments of mediaeval
days, and no abbess of those days, carrying light into dark places,
needed more courage and devotion to meet the hardships, sacrifice, and
prejudice that she had overcome. She brought in the first wagon-load of
window-panes for darkened homes before she even tapped on the window of
a darkened mind; but when she did, no plants ever turned more eagerly
toward the light than did the youthful souls of those Kentucky hills.
She started with five pupils in a log cabin. She built a homely frame
house with five rooms, only to find more candidates clamoring at her
door. She taught the girls to cook, sew, wash and iron, clean house,
and make baskets, and the boys to use tools, to farm, make garden, and
take care of animals; and she taught them all to keep clean. Out in the
hills she found good old names, English and Scotch-Irish. She found men
who "made their mark" boasting of grandfathers who were "scholards." In
one household she came upon a time-worn set of the "British Poets" up
to the nineteenth century, and such was the sturdy character of the
hillsmen that she tossed the theory aside that they were the
descendants of the riffraff of the Old World, tossed it as a miserable
slander and looked upon them as the same blood as the people of the
Blue-grass, the valleys, and the plains beyond. On the westward march
they had simply dropped behind, and their isolation had left them in a
long sleep that had given them a long rest, but had done them no real
harm. Always in their eyes, however, she was a woman, and no woman was
"fitten" to teach school. She was more--a "fotched-on" woman, a
distrusted "furriner," and she was carrying on a "slavery school."
Sometimes she despaired of ever winning their unreserved confidence,
but out of the very depth of that despair to which the firebrand of
some miscreant had plunged her, rose her star of hope, for then the
Indian-like stoicism of her neighbors melted and she learned the place
in their hearts that was really hers. Other neighborhoods asked for her
to come to them, but her own would not let her go. Straightway there
was nothing to eat, smoke, chew, nor wear that grew or was made in
those hills that did not pour toward her. Land was given her, even
money was contributed for rebuilding, and when money was not possible,
this man and that gave his axe, his horse, his wagon, and his services
as a laborer for thirty and sixty days. So that those axes gleaming in
the sun on the hillside, those straining muscles, and those sweating
brows meant a labor of love going on for her. No wonder the peace of
her eyes was deep.

And yet St. Hilda, as one forsaken lover in the Blue-grass had
christened her, opened the little roll-book in her lap and sighed
deeply, for in there on her waiting-list were the names of a hundred
children for whom, with all the rebuilding, she would have no place.
Only the day before, a mountaineer had brought in nine boys and girls,
his stepdaughter's and his own, and she had sadly turned them away.
Still they were coming in name and in person, on horseback, in wagon
and afoot, and among them was Jason Hawn, who was starting toward her
that morning from far away over the hills.

Over there the twin spirals of smoke no longer rose on either side of
the ridge and drifted upward, for both cabins were closed. Jason's sale
was just over--the sale of one cow, two pigs, a dozen chickens, one
stove, and a few pots and pans--the neighbors were gone, and Jason sat
alone on the porch with more money in his pocket than he had ever seen
at one time in his life. His bow and arrow were in one hand, his
father's rifle was over his shoulder, and his old nag was hitched to
the fence. The time had come. He had taken a farewell look at the black
column of coal he had unearthed for others, the circuit rider would
tend his little field of corn on shares, Mavis would live with the
circuit rider's wife, and his grandfather had sternly forbidden the boy
to take any hand in the feud. The geologist had told him to go away and
get an education, his Uncle Arch had offered to pay his way if he would
go to the Bluegrass to school--an offer that the boy curtly
declined--and now he was starting to the settlement school of which he
had heard so much, in the county-seat of an adjoining county. For, even
though run by women, it must be better than nothing, better than being
beholden to his Uncle Arch, better than a place where people and
country were strange. So, Jason mounted his horse, rode down to the
forks of the creek and drew up at the circuit rider's house, where
Mavis and the old woman came out to the gate to say good-by. The boy
had not thought much about the little girl and the loneliness of her
life after he was gone, for he was the man, he was the one to go forth
and do; and it was for Mavis to wait for him to come back. But when he
handed her the bow and arrow and told her they were hers, the sight of
her face worried him deeply.

"I'm a-goin' over thar an' if I like it an' thar's a place fer you,
I'll send the nag back fer you, too."

He spoke with manly condescension only to comfort her, but the eager
gladness that leaped pitifully from her eyes so melted him that he
added impulsively: "S'pose you git up behind me an' go with me right
now."

"Mavis ain't goin' now," said the old woman sharply. "You go on whar
you're goin' an' come back fer her."

"All right," said Jason, greatly relieved. "Take keer o' yourselves."

With a kick he started the old nag and again pulled in.

"An' if you leave afore I git back, Mavis, I'm a-goin' to come atter
you, no matter whar you air--some day."

"Good-by," faltered the little girl, and she watched him ride down the
creek and disappear, and her tears came only when she felt the old
woman's arms around her.

"Don't you mind, honey."

Over ridge and mountain and up and down the rocky beds of streams
jogged Jason's old nag for two days until she carried him to the top of
the wooded ridge whence he looked down on the little mountain town and
the queer buildings of the settlement school. Half an hour later St.
Hilda saw him cross the creek below the bridge, ride up to the
foot-path gate, hitch his old mare, and come straight to her where she
sat--in a sturdy way that fixed her interest instantly and keenly.

"I've come over hyeh to stay with ye," he said simply.

St. Hilda hesitated and distress kept her silent.

"My name's Jason Hawn. I come from t'other side o' the mountain an' I
hain't got no home."

"I'm sorry, little man," she said gently, "but we have no place for
you."

The boy's eyes darted to one side and the other.

"Shucks! I can sleep out thar in that woodshed. I hain't axin' no
favors. I got a leetle money an' I can work like a man."

Now, while St. Hilda's face was strong, her heart was divinely weak and
Jason saw it. Unhesitatingly he climbed the steps, handed his rifle to
her, sat down, and at once began taking stock of everything about
him--the boy swinging an axe at the wood-pile, the boy feeding the hogs
and chickens; another starting off on an old horse with a bag of corn
for the mill, another ploughing the hill-side. Others were digging
ditches, working in a garden, mending a fence, and making cinder paths.
But in all this his interest was plainly casual until his eyes caught
sight of a pile of lumber at the door of the workshop below, and
through the windows the occasional gleam of some shining tool.
Instantly one eager finger shot out.

"I want to go down thar."

Good-humoredly St. Hilda took him, and when Jason looked upon boys of
his own age chipping, hewing, planing lumber, and making furniture, so
busy that they scarcely gave him a glance, St. Hilda saw his eyes light
and his fingers twitch.

"Gee!" he whispered with a catch of his breath, "this is the place fer
me."

But when they went back and Jason put his head into the big house, St.
Hilda saw his face darken, for in there boys were washing dishes and
scrubbing floors.

"Does all the boys have to do that?" he asked with great disgust.

"Oh, yes," she said.

Jason turned abruptly away from the door, and when he passed a window
of the cottage on the way back to her cabin and saw two boys within
making up beds, he gave a grunt of scorn and derision and he did not
follow her up the steps.

"Gimme back my gun," he said.

"Why, what's the matter, Jason?"

"This is a gals' school--hit hain't no place fer me."

It was no use for her to tell him that soldiers made their own beds and
washed their own dishes, for his short answer was:

"Mebbe they had to, 'cause thar wasn't no women folks around, but he
didn't," and his face was so hopelessly set and stubborn that she
handed him the old gun without another word. For a moment he hesitated,
lifting his solemn eyes to hers. "I want you to know I'm much
obleeged," he said. Then he turned away, and St. Hilda saw him mount
his old nag, climb the ridge opposite without looking back, and pass
over the summit.

Old Jason Hawn was sitting up in a chair when two days later disgusted
little Jason rode up to his gate.

"They wanted me to do a gal's work over thar," he explained shortly,
and the old man nodded grimly with sympathy and understanding.

"I was lookin' fer ye to come back."

Old Aaron Honeycutt had been winged through the shoulder while the lad
was away and the feud score had been exactly evened by the ambushing of
another of the tribe. On this argument Arch Hawn was urging a
resumption of the truce, but both clans were armed and watchful and
everybody was looking for a general clash on the next county-court day.
The boy soon rose restlessly.

"Whar you goin'?"

"I'm a-goin' to look atter my corn."

At the forks of the creek the old circuit rider hailed Jason gladly,
and he, too, nodded with approval when he heard the reason the boy had
come back.

"I'll make ye a present o' the work I've done in yo' corn--bein' as I
must 'a' worked might' nigh an hour up thar yestiddy an' got plumb
tuckered out. I come might' nigh fallin' out, hit was so steep, an' if
I had, I reckon I'd 'a' broke my neck."

The old woman appeared on the porch and she, too, hailed the boy with a
bantering tone and a quizzical smile.

"One o' them fotched-on women whoop ye fer missin' yo' a-b-abs?" she
asked. Jason scowled.

"Whar's Mavis?" The old woman laughed teasingly.

"Why, hain't ye heerd the news? How long d'ye reckon a purty gal like
Mavis was a-goin' to wait fer you? 'Member that good-lookin' little
furrin feller who was down here from the settlemints? Well, he come
back an' tuk her away."

Jason knew the old woman was teasing him, and instead of being angry,
as she expected, he looked so worried and distressed that she was
sorry, and her rasping old voice became gentle with affection.

"Mavis's gone to the settlemints, honey. Her daddy sent fer her an' I
made her go. She's whar she belongs--up thar with him an' yo' mammy. Go
put yo' hoss in the stable an' come an' live right here with us."

Jason shook his head and without answer turned his horse down the creek
again. A little way down he saw three Honeycutts coming, all armed, and
he knew that to avoid passing his grandfather's house they were going
to cross the ridge and strike the head of their own creek. One of them
was a boy--"little Aaron"--less than two years older than himself, and
little Aaron not only had a pistol buckled around him, but carried a
Winchester across his saddle-bow. The two men grinned and nodded
good-naturedly to him, but the boy Aaron pulled his horse across the
road and stopped Jason, who had stood many a taunt from him.

"Which side air you on NOW?" asked Aaron contemptuously.

"You git out o' my road!"

"Hit's my road now," said Aaron, tapping his Winchester, "an' I've got
a great notion o' makin' you git offen that ole bag o' bones an' dance
fer me." One of the Honeycutts turned in his saddle.

"Come on," he shouted angrily, "an' let that boy alone."

"All right," he shouted back, and then to his white, quivering,
helpless quarry:

"I'll let ye off this time, but next time--"

"I'll be ready fer ye," broke in Jason.

The lad's mind was made up now. He put the old nag in a lope down the
rocky creek. He did not even go to his grandfather's for dinner, but
turned at the river in a gallop for town. The rock-pecker, and even
Mavis, were gone from his mind, and the money in his pocket was going,
not for love or learning, but for pistol and cartridge now.




IX

September in the Blue-grass. The earth cooling from the summer's heat,
the nights vigorous and chill, the fields greening with a second
spring. Skies long, low, hazy, and gently arched over rolling field and
meadow and woodland. The trees gray with the dust that had sifted all
summer long from the limestone turnpikes. The streams shrunken to
rivulets that trickled through crevices between broad flat stones and
oozed through beds of water-cress and crow-foot, horse-mint and
pickerel-weed, the wells low, cisterns empty, and recourse for water to
barrels and the sunken ponds. The farmers cutting corn, still green,
for stock, and ploughing ragweed strongholds for the sowing of wheat.
The hemp an Indian village of gray wigwams. And a time of weeds--indeed
the heyday of weeds of every kind, and the harvest time for the king
weed of them all. Everywhere his yellow robes were hanging to poles and
drying in the warm sun. Everywhere led the conquering war trail of the
unkingly usurper, everywhere in his wake was devastation. The iron-weed
had given up his purple crown, and yellow wheat, silver-gray oats, and
rippling barley had fled at the sight of his banner to the open sunny
spaces as though to make their last stand an indignant appeal that all
might see. Even the proud woodlands looked ragged and drooping, for
here and there the ruthless marauder had flanked one and driven a
battalion into its very heart, and here and there charred stumps told
plainly how he had overrun, destroyed, and ravished the virgin soil
beneath. A fuzzy little parasite was throttling the life of the
Kentuckians' hemp. A bewhiskered moralist in a far northern State would
one day try to drive the kings of his racing-stable to the plough. A
meddling band of fanatical teetotalers would overthrow his merry
monarch, King Barleycorn, and the harassed son of the Blue-grass,
whether he would or not, must turn to the new pretender who was in the
Kentuckians' midst, uninvited and self-throned.

And with King Tobacco were coming his own human vassals that were to
prove a new social discord in the land--up from the river-bottoms of
the Ohio and down from the foot-hills of the Cumberland--to plant,
worm, tend, and fit those yellow robes to be stuffed into the mouth of
the world and spat back again into the helpless face of the earth. And
these vassals were supplanting native humanity as the plant was
supplanting the native products of the soil. And with them and the new
king were due in time a train of evils to that native humanity,
creating disaffection, dividing households against themselves, and
threatening with ruin the lordly social structure itself.

But, for all this, the land that early September morning was a land of
peace and plenty, and in field, meadow, and woodland the most foreign
note of the landscape was a spot of crimson in the crotch of a high
staked and ridered fence on the summit of a little hill, and that spot
was a little girl. She had on an old-fashioned poke-bonnet of deep
pink, her red dress was of old-fashioned homespun, her stockings were
of yarn, and her rough shoes should have been on the feet of a boy. Had
the vanished forests and cane-brakes of the eighteenth century covered
the land, had the wild beasts and wild men come back to roam them, had
the little girl's home been a stockade on the edge of the wilderness,
she would have fitted perfectly to the time and the scene, as a little
daughter of Daniel Boone. As it was, she felt no less foreign than she
looked, for the strangeness of the land and of the people still
possessed her so that her native shyness had sunk to depths that were
painful. She had a new ordeal before her now, for in her sinewy little
hands were a paper bag, a first reader, and a spelling-book, and she
was on her way to school. Beneath her the white turnpike wound around
the hill and down into a little hollow, and on the crest of the next
low hill was a little frame house with a belfry on top. Even while she
sat there with parted lips, her face in a tense dream and her eyes dark
with dread and indecision, the bell from the little school-house
clanged through the still air with a sudden, sharp summons that was so
peremptory and personal that she was almost startled from her perch.
Not daring to loiter any longer, she leaped lightly to the ground and
started in breathless haste up and over the hill. As she went down it,
she could see horses hitched to the fence around the yard and
school-children crowding upon the porch and filing into the door. The
last one had gone in before she reached the school-house gate, and she
stopped with a thumping heart that quite failed her then and there, for
she retreated backward through the gate, to be sure that no one saw
her, crept along the stone wall, turned into a lane, and climbed a worm
fence into the woods behind the school-house. There she sat down on a
log, miserably alone, and over the sunny strange slopes of this new
world, on over the foothills, her mind flashed to the big far-away
mountains and, dropping her face into her hands, she began to sob out
her loneliness and sorrow. The cry did her good, and by and by she
lifted her head, rubbed her reddened eyes with the back of one hand,
half rose to go to the school-house, and sank helplessly down on the
thick grass by the side of the log. The sun beat warmly and soothingly
down on her. The grass and even the log against her shoulders were warm
and comforting, and the hum of insects about her was so drowsy that she
yawned and settled deeper into the grass, and presently she passed into
sleep and dreams of Jason. Jason was in the feud. She could see him
crouched in some bushes and peering through them on the lookout
evidently for some Honeycutt; and slipping up the other side of the
hill was a Honeycutt looking for Jason. Somehow she knew it was the
Honeycutt who had slain the boy's father, and she saw the man creep
through the brush and worm his way on his belly to a stump above where
Jason sat. She saw him thrust his Winchester through the leaves, she
tried to shriek a warning to Jason, and she awoke so weak with terror
that she could hardly scramble to her feet. Just then the air was rent
with shrill cries, she saw school-boys piling over a fence and rushing
toward her hiding-place, and, her wits yet ungathered, she turned and
fled in terror down the hill, nor did she stop until the cries behind
her grew faint; and then she was much ashamed of herself. Nobody was in
pursuit of her--it was the dream that had frightened her. She could
almost step on the head of her own shadow now, and that fact and a pang
of hunger told her it was noon. It was noon recess back at the school
and those school-boys were on their way to a playground. She had left
her lunch at the log where she slept, and so she made her way back to
it, just in time to see two boys pounce on the little paper bag lying
in the grass. There was no shyness about her then--that bag was
hers--and she flashed forward.

"Gimme that poke!"

The wrestling stopped and, startled by the cry and the apparition, the
two boys fell apart.

"What?" said the one with the bag in his hand, while the other stared
at Mavis with puzzled amazement.

"Gimme that poke!" blazed the girl, and the boy laughed, for the word
has almost passed from the vocabulary of the Blue-grass. He held it
high.

"Jump for it!" he teased.

"I hain't goin' to jump fer it--hit's mine."

Her hands clenched and she started slowly toward him.

"Give her the bag," said the other boy so imperatively that the little
girl stopped with a quick and trustful shift of her own burden to him.

"She's got to jump for it!"

The other boy smiled, and it strangely seemed to Mavis that she had
seen that smile before.

"Oh, I reckon not," he said quietly, and in a trice the two boys in a
close, fierce grapple were rocking before her and the boy with the bag
went to the earth first.

"Gouge him!" shrieked the mountain girl, and she rushed to them while
they were struggling, snatched the bag from the loosened fingers, and,
seeing the other boys on a run for the scene, fled for the lane. From
the other side of the fence she saw the two lads rise, one still
smiling, the other crying with anger; the school-bell clanged and she
was again alone. Hurriedly she ate the bacon and corn-bread in the bag
and then she made her way back along the lane, by the stone wall,
through the school-house gate, and gathering her courage with one deep
breath, she climbed the steps resolutely and stood before the open door.

The teacher, a tall man in a long black frock-coat, had his back to
her, the room was crowded, and she saw no vacant seat. Every pair of
eyes within was raised to her, and instantly she caught another
surprised and puzzled stare from the boy who had taken her part a
little while before. The teacher, seeing the attention of his pupils
fixed somewhere behind him, turned to see the quaint figure, dismayed
and helpless, in the doorway, and he went quickly toward her.

"This way," he said kindly, and pointing to a seat, he turned again to
his pupils.

Still they stared toward the new-comer, and he turned again. The little
girl's flushed face was still hidden by her bonnet, but before he
reached her to tell her quietly she must take it off, she had seen that
all the heads about her were bare and was pulling it off
herself--disclosing a riotous mass of black hair, combed straight back
from her forehead and gathered into a Psyche knot at the back of her
head. Slowly the flush passed, but not for some time did she lift the
extraordinary lashes that veiled her eyes to take a furtive glance
about her. But, as the pupils bent more to their books, she grew bolder
and looked about oftener and keenly, and she saw with her own eyes and
in every pair of eyes whose glance she met, how different she was from
all the other girls. For it was a look of wonder and amusement that she
encountered each time, and sometimes two girls would whisper behind
their hands and laugh, or one would nudge her desk-mate to look around
at the stranger, so that the flush came back to Mavis's face and stayed
there. The tall teacher saw, too, and understood, and, to draw no more
attention to her than was necessary, he did not go near her until
little recess. As he expected, she did not move from her seat when the
other pupils trooped out, and when the room was empty he beckoned her
to come to his desk, and in a moment, with her two books clasped in her
hands, she stood shyly before him, meeting his kind gray searching eyes
with unwavering directness.

"You were rather late coming to school."

"I was afeerd." The teacher smiled, for her eyes were fearless.

"What is your name?"

"Mavis Hawn."

Her voice was slow, low, and rich, and in some wonder he half
unconsciously repeated the unusual name.

"Where do you live?"

"Down the road a piece--'bout a whoop an' a holler."

"What? Oh, I see."

He smiled, for she meant to measure distance by sound, and she had used
merely a variation of the "far cry" of Elizabethan days.

"Your father works in tobacco?" She nodded.

"You come from near the Ohio River?"

She looked puzzled.

"I come from the mountains."

"Oh!"

He understood now her dress and speech, and he was not surprised at the
answer to his next question.

"I hain't nuver been to school. Pap couldn't spare me."

"Can you read and write?"

"No," she said, but she flushed, and he knew straightway the
sensitiveness and pride with which he would have to deal.

"Well," he said kindly, "we will begin now."

And he took the alphabet and told her the names of several letters and
had her try to make them with a lead pencil, which she did with such
uncanny seriousness and quickness that the pity of it, that in his own
State such intelligence should be going to such broadcast waste for the
want of such elemental opportunities, struck him deeply. The general
movement to save that waste was only just beginning, and in that
movement he meant to play his part. He was glad now to have under his
own supervision one of those mountaineers of whom, but for one summer,
he had known so little and heard so much--chiefly to their
discredit--and he determined then and there to do all he could for her.
So he took her back to her seat with a copy-book and pencil and told
her to go on with her work, and that he would go to see her father and
mother as soon as possible.

"I hain't got no mammy--hit's a step-mammy," she said, and she spoke of
the woman as of a horse or a cow, and again he smiled. Then as he
turned away he repeated her name to himself and with a sudden wonder
turned quickly back.

"I used to know some Hawns down in your mountains. A little fellow
named Jason Hawn used to go around with me all the time."

Her eyes filled and then flashed happily.

"Why, mebbe you air the rock-pecker?"

"The what?"

"The jologist. Jason's my cousin. I wasn't thar that summer. Jason's
always talkin' 'bout you."

"Well, well--I guess I am. That is curious."

"Jason's mammy was a Honeycutt an' she married my daddy an' they run
away," she went on eagerly, "an' I had to foller 'em."

"Where's Jason?" Again her eyes filled.

"I don't know."

John Burnham put his hand on her head gently and turned to his desk. He
rang the bell and when the pupils trooped back she was hard at work,
and she felt proud when she observed several girls looking back to see
what she was doing, and again she was mystified that each face showed
the same expression of wonder and of something else that curiously
displeased her, and she wondered afresh why it was that everything in
that strange land held always something that she could never
understand. But a disdainful whisper came back to her that explained it
all.

"Why, that new girl is only learning her a-b-c's," said a girl, and her
desk-mate turned to her with a quick rebuke.

"Don't--she'll hear you."

Mavis caught the latter's eyes that instant, and with a warm glow at
her heart looked her gratitude, and then she almost cried her surprise
aloud--it was the stranger-girl who had been in the
mountains--Marjorie. The girl looked back in a puzzled way, and a
moment later Mavis saw her turn to look again. This time the mountain
girl answered with a shy smile, and Marjorie knew her, nodded in a gay,
friendly way, and bent her head to her book.

Presently she ran her eyes down the benches where the boys sat, and
there was Gray waiting apparently for her to look around, for he too
nodded gayly to her, as though he had known her from the start. The
teacher saw the exchange of little civilities and he was much puzzled,
especially when, the moment school was over, he saw the lad hurry to
catch Marjorie, and the two then turn together toward the little
stranger. Both thrust out their hands, and the little mountain girl, so
unaccustomed to polite formalities, was quite helpless with
embarrassment, so the teacher went over to help her out and Gray
explained:

"Marjorie and I stayed with her grandfather, and didn't we have a good
time, Marjorie?"

Marjorie nodded with some hesitation, and Gray went on:

"How--how is he now?"

"Grandpap's right peart now."

"And how's your cousin--Jason?"

The question sent such a sudden wave of homesickness through Mavis that
her answer was choked, and Marjorie understood and put her arm around
Mavis's shoulder.

"You must be lonely up here. Where do you live?" And when she tried to
explain Gray broke in.

"Why, you must be one of our ten--you must live on our farm. Isn't that
funny?"

"And I live further down the road across the pike," said Marjorie.

"In that great big house in the woods?"

"Yes," nodded Marjorie, "and you must come to see me."

Mavis's eyes had the light of gladness in them now, and through them
looked a grateful heart. Outside, Gray got Marjorie's pony for her, the
two mounted, rode out the gate and went down the pike at a gallop, and
Marjorie whirled in her saddle to wave her bonnet back at the little
mountaineer. The teacher, who stood near watching them, turned to go
back and close up the school-house.

"I'm coming to see your father, and we'll get some books, and you are
going to study so hard that you won't have time to get homesick any
more," he said kindly, and Mavis started down the road, climbed the
staked and ridered fence, and made her way across the fields. She had
been lonely, and now homesickness came back to her worse than ever. She
wondered about Jason--where he was and what he was doing and whether
she would ever see him again. The memory of her parting with him came
back to her--how he looked as she saw him for the last time sitting on
his old nag, sturdy and apparently unmoved, and riding out of her sight
in just that way; and she heard again his last words as though they
were sounding then in her ears:

"I'm a-goin' to come an' git you--some day."

Since that day she had heard of him but once, and that was lately, when
Arch Hawn had come to see her father and the two had talked a long
time. They were all well, Arch said, down in the mountains. Jason had
come back from the settlement school. Little Aaron Honeycutt had
bantered him in the road and Jason had gone wild. He had galloped down
to town, bought a Colt's forty-five and a pint of whiskey, had ridden
right up to old Aaron Honeycutt's gate, shot off his pistol, and dared
little Aaron to come out and fight. Little Aaron wanted to go, but old
Aaron held him back, and Jason sat on his nag at the gate and "cussed
out" the whole tribe, and swore "he'd kill every dad-blasted one of 'em
if only to git the feller who shot his daddy." Old Aaron had behaved
mighty well, and he and old Jason had sent each other word that they
would keep both the boys out of the trouble. Then Arch had brought
about another truce and little Jason had worked his crop and was making
a man of himself. It was Archer Hawn who had insisted that Mavis
herself should go to school and had agreed to pay all her expenses, but
in spite of her joy at that, she was heart-broken when he was gone, and
when she caught her step-mother weeping in the kitchen a vague sympathy
had drawn them for the first time a little nearer together.

From the top of the little hill her new home was visible across a creek
and by the edge of a lane. As she crossed a foot-bridge and made her
way noiselessly along the dirt road she heard voices around a curve of
the lane and she came upon a group of men leaning against a fence. In
the midst of them was her father, and they were arguing with him
earnestly and he was shaking his head.

"Them toll-gates hain't a-hurtin' me none," she heard him drawl. "I
don't understand this business, an' I hain't goin' to git mixed up in
hit."

Then he saw her coming and he stopped, and the others looked at her
uneasily, she thought, as if wondering what she might have heard.

"Go on home, Mavis," he said shortly, and as she passed on no one spoke
until she was out of hearing. Some mischief was afoot, but she was not
worried, nor was her interest aroused at all.

A moment later she could see her step-mother seated on her porch and
idling in the warm sun. The new home was a little frame house, neat and
well built. There was a good fence around the yard and the garden, and
behind the garden was an orchard of peach-trees and apple-trees. The
house was guttered and behind the kitchen was a tiny grape-arbor, a
hen-house, and a cistern--all strange appurtenances to Mavis. The two
spoke only with a meeting of the eyes, and while the woman looked her
curiosity she asked no questions, and Mavis volunteered no information.

"Did you see Steve a-talkin' to some fellers down the road?"

Mavis nodded.

"Did ye hear whut they was talkin' about?"

"Somethin' about the toll-gates."

A long silence followed.

"The teacher said he was comin' over to see you and pap."

"Whut fer?"

"I dunno."

After another silence Mavis went on:

"The teacher is that rock-pecker Jason was always a-talkin' 'bout."

The woman's interest was aroused now, for she wondered if he were
coming over to ask her any troublesome questions.

"Well, ain't that queer!"

"An' that boy an' gal who was a-stayin' with grandpap was thar at
school too, an' she axed me to come over an' see her." This the
step-mother was not surprised to hear, for she knew on whose farm they
were living and why they were there, and she had her own reasons for
keeping the facts from Mavis.

"Well, you oughter go."

"I am a-goin'."

Mavis missed the mountains miserably when she went to bed that
night--missed the gloom and lift of them through her window, and the
rolling sweep of the land under the moon looked desolate and lonely and
more than ever strange. A loping horse passed on the turnpike, and she
could hear it coming on the hard road far away and going far away; then
a buggy and then a clattering group of horsemen, and indeed everything
heralded its approach at a great distance. She missed the stillness of
the hills, for on the night air were the barking of dogs, whinny of
horses, lowing of cattle, the song of a night-prowling negro, and now
and then the screech of a peacock. She missed Jason wretchedly, too,
for there had been so much talk of him during the day, and she went to
sleep with her lashes wet with tears. Some time during the night she
was awakened by pistol-shots, and her dream of Jason made her think
that she was at home again. But no mountains met her startled eyes
through the window. Instead a red glare hung above the woods, there was
the clatter of hoofs on the pike, and flames shot above the tops of the
trees. Nor could it be a forest fire such as was common at home, for
the woods were not thick enough. This land, it seemed, had troubles of
its own, as did her mountains, but at least folks did not burn folks'
houses in the hills.




X

On the top of a bushy foot-hill the old nag stopped, lifted her head,
and threw her ears forward as though to gaze, like any traveller to a
strange land, upon the rolling expanse beneath, and the lad on her back
voiced her surprise and his own with a long, low whistle of amazement.
He folded his hands on the pommel of his saddle and the two searched
the plains below long and hard, for neither knew so much level land was
spread out anywhere on the face of the earth. The lad had a huge pistol
buckled around him; he looked half dead with sleeplessness and the old
nag was weary and sore, for Jason was in flight from trouble back in
those hills. He had kept his promise to his grandfather that summer, as
little Aaron Honeycutt had kept his. Neither had taken part in the
feud, and even after the truce came, each had kept out of the other's
way. When Jason's corn was gathered there was nothing for him to do and
the lad had grown restless. While roaming the woods one day, a pheasant
had hurtled over his head. He had followed it, sighted it, and was
sinking down behind a bowlder to get a rest for his pistol when the
voices of two Honeycutts who had met in the road just under him stopped
his finger on the trigger.

"That boy's a-goin' to bust loose some day," said one voice. "I've
heerd him a-shootin' at a tree every day for a month up thar above his
corn-field."

"Oh, no, he ain't," said the other. "He's just gittin' ready fer the
man who shot his daddy."

"Well, who the hell WAS the feller?"

The other man laughed, lowered his voice, and the heart of the
listening lad thumped painfully against the bowlder under him.

"Well, I hain't nuver told hit afore, but I seed with my own eyes a
feller sneakin' outen the bushes ten minutes atter the shot was fired,
an' hit was Babe Honeycutt."

A low whistle followed and the two rode on. The pheasant squatted to
his limb undisturbed, and the lad lay gripping the bowlder with both
hands. He rose presently, his face sick but resolute, slipped down into
the road, and, swaying his head with rage, started up the hill toward
the Honeycutt cove. On top of the hill the road made a sharp curve and
around that curve, as fate would have it, slouched the giant figure of
his mother's brother. Babe shouted pleasantly, stopped in sheer
amazement when he saw Jason whip his revolver from his holster, and,
with no movement to draw his own, leaped for the bushes. Coolly the lad
levelled, and when his pistol spoke, Babe's mighty arms flew above his
head and the boy heard his heavy body crash down into the undergrowth.
In the terrible stillness that followed the boy stood shaking in his
tracks--stood until he heard the clatter of horses' hoofs in the
creek-bed far below. The two Honeycutts had heard the shot, they were
coming back to see what the matter was, and Jason sped as if winged
back down the creek. He had broken the truce, his grandfather would be
in a rage, the Honeycutts would be after him, and those hills were no
place for him. So all that day and through all that night he fled for
the big settlements of the Blue-grass and but half consciously toward
his mother and Mavis Hawn. The fact that Babe was his mother's brother
weighed on his mind but little, for the webs of kinship get strangely
tangled in a mountain feud and his mother could not and would not blame
him. Nor was there remorse or even regret in his heart, but rather the
peace of an oath fulfilled--a duty done.

The sun was just coming up over the great black bulks which had given
the boy forth that morning to a new world. Back there its mighty rays
were shattered against them, and routed by their shadows had fought
helplessly on against the gloom of deep ravines--those fortresses of
perpetual night--but, once they cleared the eminence where Jason sat,
the golden arrows took level flight, it seemed, for the very end of the
world. This was the land of the Blue-grass--the home of the
rock-pecker, home of the men who had robbed him of his land, the refuge
to his Cousin Steve, his mother, and little Mavis, and now their home.
He could see no end of the land, for on and on it rolled, and on and on
as far as it rolled were the low woodlands, the fields of cut
corn--more corn than he knew the whole world held--and pastures and
sheep and cattle and horses, and houses and white fences and big white
barns. Little Jason gazed but he could not get his fill. Perhaps the
old nag, too, knew those distant fields for corn, for with a whisk of
her stubby tail she started of her own accord before the lad could dig
his bare heels into her bony sides, and went slowly down. The log
cabins had disappeared one by one, and most of the houses he now saw
were framed. One, however, a relic of pioneer times, was of stone, and
at that the boy looked curiously. Several were of red brick and one had
a massive portico with great towering columns, and at that he looked
more curiously still. Darkies were at work in the fields. He had seen
only two or three in his life, he did not know there were so many in
the world as he saw that morning, and now his skin ruffled with some
antagonism ages deep. Everybody he met in the road or passed working in
the fields gave him a nod and looked curiously at his big pistol, but
nobody asked him his name or where he was going or what his business
was; at that he wondered, for everybody in the mountains asked those
questions of the stranger, and he had all the lies he meant to tell,
ready for any emergency to cover his tracks from any possible pursuers.
By and by he came to a road that stunned him. It was level and smooth
and made, as he saw, of rocks pounded fine, and the old nag lifted her
feet and put them down gingerly. And this road never stopped, and there
was no more dirt road at all. By and by he noticed running parallel
with the turnpike two shining lines of iron, and his curiosity so got
the better of him that he finally got off his old nag and climbed the
fence to get a better look at them. They were about four feet apart,
fastened to thick pieces of timber, and they, too, like everything
else, ran on and on, and he mounted and rode along them much puzzled.
Presently far ahead of him there was a sudden, unearthly shriek, the
rumbling sound of a coming storm, rolling black smoke beyond the crest
of a little hill, and a swift huge mass swept into sight and, with
another fearful blast, bore straight at him. The old nag snorted with
terror, and in terror dashed up the hill, while the boy lay back and
pulled helplessly on the reins. When he got her halted the thing had
disappeared, and both boy and beast turned heads toward the still
terrible sounds of its going. It was the first time either had ever
seen a railroad train, and the lad, with a sickly smile that even he
had shared the old nag's terror, got her back into the road. At the
gate sat a farmer in his wagon and he was smiling.

"Did she come purty near throwin' you?"

"Huh!" grunted Jason contemptuously. "Whut was that?"

The farmer looked incredulous, but the lad was serious.

"That was a railroad train."

"Danged if I didn't think hit was a saw-mill comin' atter me."

The farmer laughed and looked as though he were going to ask questions,
but he clucked to his horses and drove on, and Jason then and there
swore a mighty oath to himself never again to be surprised by anything
else he might see in this new land. All that day he rode slowly, giving
his old nag two hours' rest at noon, and long before sundown he pulled
up before a house in a cross-roads settlement, for the mountaineer does
not travel much after nightfall.

"I want to git to stay all night," he said.

The man smiled and understood, for no mountaineer's door is ever closed
to the passing stranger and he cannot understand that any door can be
closed to him. Jason told the truth that night, for he had to ask
questions himself--he was on his way to see his mother and his
step-father and his cousin, who had moved down from the mountains, and
to his great satisfaction he learned that it was a ride of but three
hours more to Colonel Pendleton's.

When his host showed him to his room, the boy examined his pistol with
such care while he was unbuckling it, that, looking up, he found a
half-smile, half-frown, and no little suspicion, in his host's face;
but he made no explanation, and he slept that night with one ear open,
for he was not sure yet that no Honeycutt might be following him.

Toward morning he sprang from bed wide-awake, alert, caught up his
pistol and crept to the window. Two horsemen were at the gate. The door
opened below him, his host went out, and the three talked in whispers
for a while. Then the horsemen rode away, his host came back into the
house, and all was still again. For half an hour the boy waited, his
every nerve alive with suspicion. Then he quietly dressed, left half a
dollar on the washstand, crept stealthily down the stairs and out to
the stable, and was soon pushing his old nag at a weary gallop through
the dark.




XI

The last sunset had been clear and Jack Frost had got busy. All the
preceding day the clouds had hung low and kept the air chill so that
the night was good for that arch-imp of Satan who has got himself
enshrined in the hearts of little children. At dawn Jason saw the robe
of pure white which the little magician had spun and drawn close to the
breast of the earth. The first light turned it silver and showed it
decked with flowers and jewels, that the old mother might mistake it,
perhaps, for a wedding-gown instead of a winding-sheet; but the sun,
knowing better, lifted, let loose his tiny warriors, and from pure love
of beauty smote it with one stroke gold, and the battle ended with the
blades of grass and the leaves in their scarlet finery sparkling with
the joy of another day's deliverance and the fields grown gray and aged
in a single night. Before the fight was quite over that morning,
saddle-horses were stepping from big white barns in the land Jason was
entering, and being led to old-fashioned stiles; buggies, phaetons, and
rock-aways were emerging from turnpike gates; and rabbit-hunters moved,
shouting, laughing, running races, singing, past fields sober with
autumn, woods dingy with oaks and streaked with the fire of sumac and
maple. On each side of the road new hemp lay in shining swaths, while
bales of last year's crop were on the way to market along the roads.
The farmers were turning over the soil for the autumn sowing of wheat,
corn-shucking was over, and ragged darkies were straggling from the
fields back to town. From every point the hunters came, turning in
where a big square brick house with a Grecian portico stood far back in
a wooded yard, with a fish-pond on one side and a great smooth lawn on
the other. On the steps between the columns stood Colonel Pendleton and
Gray and Marjorie welcoming the guests; the men, sturdy country youths,
good types of the beef-eating young English squire--sunburnt fellows
with big frames, open faces, fearless eyes, and a manner that was easy,
cordial, kindly, independent; the girls midway between the types of
brunette and blonde, with a leaning toward the latter type, with hair
that had caught the light of the sun, radiant with freshness and good
health and strength; round of figure, clear of eye and skin, spirited,
soft of voice, and slow of speech. Soon a cavalcade moved through a
side-gate of the yard, through a Blue-grass woodland, and into a sweep
of stubble and ragweed; and far up the road on top of a little hill the
mountain boy stopped his old mare and watched a strange sight in a
strange land--a hunt without dog, stick, or gun. A high ringing voice
reached his ears clearly, even that far away:

"Form a line!"

And the wondering lad saw man and woman aligning themselves like
cavalry fifteen feet apart and moving across the field--the men in
leggings or high boots, riding with the heel low and the toes turned
according to temperament; the girls with a cap, a derby, or a beaver
with a white veil, and the lad's eye caught one of them quickly, for a
red tam-o'-shanter had slipped from her shining hair and a broad white
girth ran around both her saddle and her horse. There was one man on a
sorrel mule and he was the host at the big house, for Colonel Pendleton
had surrendered every horse he had to a guest. Suddenly there came a
yell--the rebel yell--and a horse leaped forward. Other horses leaped
too, everybody yelled in answer, and the cavalcade swept forward. There
was a massing of horses, the white girth flashing in the midst of the
melee, a great crash and much turning, twisting, and sawing of bits,
and then all dashed the other way, the white girth in the lead, and the
boy's lips fell apart in wonder. A black thoroughbred was making a wide
sweep, an iron-gray was cutting in behind, and all were sweeping toward
him. Far ahead of them he saw a frightened rabbit streaking through the
weeds. As it passed him the lad gave a yell, dug his heels into the old
mare, and himself swept down the pike, drawing his revolver and firing
as he rode. Five times the pistol spoke to the wondering hunters in
pursuit, at the fifth the rabbit tumbled heels over head and a little
later the hunters pulled their horses in around a boy holding a rabbit
high in one hand, a pistol in the other, and his eager face flushed
with pride in his marksmanship and the comradeship of the hunt. But the
flush died into quick paleness, so hostile were the faces, so hostile
were the voices that assailed him, and he dropped the rabbit quickly
and began shoving fresh cartridges into the chambers of his gun.

"What do you mean, boy," shouted an angry voice, "shooting that rabbit?"

The boy looked dazed.

"Why, wasn't you atter him?"

He looked around and in a moment he knew several of them, but nobody,
it was plain, remembered him.

The girl with the white girth was Marjorie, the boy on the black
thoroughbred was Gray, and coming in an awkward gallop on the sorrel
mule was Colonel Pendleton. None of these people could mean to do him
harm, so Jason dropped his pistol in his holster and, with a curious
dignity for so ragged an atom, turned in silence away, and only the
girl with the white girth noticed the quiver of his lips and the angry
starting of tears.

As he started to mount the old mare, the excited yells coming from the
fields were too much for him, and he climbed back on the fence to
watch. The hunters had parted in twain, the black thoroughbred leading
one wing, the iron-gray the other--both after a scurrying rabbit. Close
behind the black horse was the white girth and close behind was a pony
in full run. Under the brow of the hill they swept and parallel with
the fence, and as they went by the boy strained eager widening eyes,
for on the pony was his cousin Mavis Hawn, bending over her saddle and
yelling like mad. This way and that poor Mollie swerved, but every way
her big startled eyes turned, that way she saw a huge beast and a
yelling demon bearing down on her. Again the horses crashed, the pony
in the very midst. Gray threw himself from his saddle and was after her
on foot. Two others swung from their saddles, Mollie made several
helpless hops, and the three scrambled for her. The riders in front
cried for those behind to hold their horses back, but they crowded on
and Jason rose upright on the fence to see who should be trampled down.
Poor Mollie was quite hemmed in now, there was no way of escape, and
instinctively she shrank frightened to the earth. That was the crucial
instant, and down went Gray on top of her as though she were a
foot-ball, and the quarry was his. Jason saw him give her one blow
behind her long ears and then, holding a little puff of down aloft,
look about him, past Marjorie to Mavis. A moment later he saw that
rabbit's tail pinned to Mavis's cap, and a sudden rage of jealousy
nearly shook him from the fence. He was too far away to see Marjorie's
smile, but he did see her eyes rove about the field and apparently
catch sight of him, and as the rest turned to the hunt she rode
straight for him, for she remembered the distress of his face and he
looked lonely.

"Little boy," she called, and the boy stared with amazement and rage,
but the joke was too much for him and he laughed scornfully.

"Little gal," he mimicked, "air you a-talkin' to me?"

The girl gasped, reddened, lifted her chin haughtily, and raised her
riding-whip to whirl away from the rude little stranger, but his steady
eyes held hers until a flash of recognition came--and she smiled.

"Well, I never--Uncle Bob!" she cried excitedly and imperiously, and as
the colonel lumbered toward her on his sorrel mount, she called with
sparkling eyes, "don't you know him?"

The puzzled face of the colonel broke into a hearty smile.

"Well, bless my soul, it's Jason. You've come up to see your folks?"

And then he explained what Marjorie meant to explain.

"We're not hunting with guns--we just chase 'em. Hang your artillery on
a fence-rail, bring your horse through that gate, and join us."

He turned and Marjorie, with him, called back over her shoulder: "Hurry
up now, Jason."

Little Jason sat still, but he saw Marjorie ride straight for the pony,
he heard her cry to Mavis, saw her wave one hand toward him, and then
Mavis rode for him at a gallop, waving her whip to him as she came. The
boy gave no answering signal, but sat still, hard-eyed, cool. Before
she was within twenty yards of him he had taken in every detail of the
changes in her and the level look of his eyes stopped her happy cry,
and made her grow quite pale with the old terror of giving him offence.
Her hair looked different, her clothes were different, she wore gloves,
and she had a stick in one hand with a head like a cane and a loop of
leather at the other end. For these drawbacks, the old light in her
eyes and face quite failed to make up, for while Jason looked, Mavis
was looking, too, and the boy saw her eyes travelling him down from
head to foot: somehow he was reminded of the way Marjorie had looked at
him back in the mountains and somehow he felt that the change that he
resented in Mavis went deeper than her clothes. The morbidly sensitive
spirit of the mountaineer in him was hurt, the chasm yawned instead of
closing, and all he said shortly was:

"Whar'd you git them new-fangled things?"

"Marjorie give 'em to me. She said fer you to bring yo' hoss in--hit's
more fun than I ever knowed in my life up here."

"Hit is?" he half-sneered. "Well, you git back to yo' high-falutin'
friends an' tell 'em I don't hunt nothin' that-a-way."

"I'll stop right now an' go home with ye. I guess you've come to see
yo' mammy."

"Well, I hain't ridin' aroun' just fer my health exactly."

He had suddenly risen on the fence as the cries in the field swelled in
a chorus. Mavis saw how strong the temptation within him was, and so,
when he repeated for her to "go on back," the old habit of obedience
turned her, but she knew he would soon follow.

The field was going mad now, horses were dashing and crashing together,
the men were swinging to the ground and were pushed and trampled in a
wild clutch for Mollie's long ears, and Jason could see that the
contest between them was who should get the most game. The big mule was
threshing the weeds like a tornado, and crossing the field at a heavy
gallop he stopped suddenly at a ditch, the girth broke, and the colonel
went over the long ears. There was a shriek of laughter, in which Jason
from his perch joined, as with a bray of freedom the mule made for
home. Apparently that field was hunted out now, and when the hunters
crossed another pike and went into another field too far away for the
boy to see the fun, he mounted his old mare and rode slowly after them.
A little later Mavis heard a familiar yell, and Jason flew by her with
his pistol flopping on his hip, his hat in his hand, and his face
frenzied and gone wild. The thoroughbred passed him like a swallow, but
the rabbit twisted back on his trail and Mavis saw Marjorie leap
lightly from her saddle, Jason flung himself from his, and then both
were hidden by the crush of horses around them, while from the midst
rose sharp cries of warning and fear.

She saw Gray's face white with terror, and then she saw Marjorie
picking herself up from the ground and Jason swaying dizzily on his
feet with a rabbit in his hand.

"'Tain't nothin'," he said stoutly, and he grinned his admiration
openly for Marjorie, who looked such anxiety for him. "You ain't afeerd
o' nothin', air ye, an' I reckon this rabbit tail is a-goin' to you,"
and he handed it to her and turned to his horse. The boy had jerked
Marjorie from under the thoroughbred's hoofs and then gone on
recklessly after the rabbit, getting a glancing blow from one of those
hoofs himself.

Marjorie smiled.

"Thank you, little--man," and Jason grinned again, but his head was
dizzy and he did not ride after the crowd.

"I'm afeerd fer this ole nag," he lied to Colonel Pendleton, for he was
faint at the stomach and the world had begun to turn around. Then he
made one clutch for the old nag's mane, missed it, and rolled senseless
to the ground.

Not long afterward he opened his eyes to find his head in the colonel's
lap, Marjorie bathing his forehead with a wet handkerchief, and Gray
near by, still a little pale from remorse for his carelessness and
Marjorie's narrow escape, and Mavis the most unconcerned of all--and he
was much ashamed. Rudely he brushed Marjorie's consoling hand away and
wriggled away from the colonel to his knees.

"Shucks!" he said, with great disgust.

The shadows were stretching fast, it was too late to try another field,
so back they started through the radiant air, laughing, talking,
bantering, living over the incidents of the day, the men with one leg
swung for rest over the pommel of their saddles, the girls with habits
disordered and torn, hair down, and all tired, but all flushed,
clear-eyed, happy. The leaves--russet, gold and crimson--were dropping
to the autumn-greening earth, the sunlight was as yellow as the wings
of a butterfly, and on the horizon was a faint haze that shadowed the
coming Indian summer. But still it was warm enough for a great spread
on the lawn, and what a feast for mountain eyes--chicken, turkey, cold
ham, pickles, croquettes, creams, jellies, beaten biscuits. And what
happy laughter and thoughtful courtesy and mellow
kindness--particularly to the little mountain pair, for in the
mountains they had given the Pendletons the best they had and now the
best was theirs. Inside fires were being lighted in the big fireplaces,
and quiet, solid, old-fashioned English comfort everywhere the blaze
brought out.

Already two darky fiddlers were waiting on the back porch for a dram,
and when the darkness settled the fiddles were talking old tunes and
nimble feet were busy. Little Jason did his wonderful dancing and Gray
did his; and round about, the window-seats and the tall columns of the
porch heard again from lovers what they had been listening to for so
long. At midnight the hunters rode forth again in pairs into the crisp,
brilliant air and under the kindly moon, Mavis jogging along beside
Jason on Marjorie's pony, for Marjorie would not have it otherwise. No
wonder that Mavis loved the land.

"I jerked the gal outen the way," explained Jason, "'cause she was a
gal an' had no business messin' with men folks."

"Of co'se," Mavis agreed, for she was just as contemptuous as he over
the fuss that had been made of the incident.

"But she ain't afeerd o' nothin'."

This was a little too much.

"I ain't nuther."

"Co'se you ain't."

There was no credit for Mavis--her courage was a matter of course; but
with the stranger-girl, a "furriner"--that was different. There was
silence for a while.

"Wasn't it lots o' fun, Jasie?"

"Shore!" was the absent-minded answer, for Jason was looking at the
strangeness of the night. It was curious not to see the big bulks of
the mountains and to see so many stars. In the mountains he had to look
straight up to see stars at all and now they hung almost to the level
of his eyes.

"How's the folks?" asked Mavis.

"Stirrin'. Air ye goin' to school up here?"

"Yes, an' who you reckon the school-teacher is?"

Jason shook his head.

"The jologist."

"Well, by Heck."

"An' he's always axin' me about you an' if you air goin' to school."

For a while more they rode in silence.

"I went to that new furrin school down in the mountains," yawned the
boy, "fer 'bout two hours. They're gittin' too high-falutin' to suit
me. They tried to git me to wear gal's stockin's like they do up here
an' I jes' laughed at 'em. Then they tried to git me to make up beds
an' I tol' 'em I wasn't goin' to wear gal's clothes ner do a gal's
work, an' so I run away."

He did not tell his reason for leaving the mountains altogether, for
Mavis, too, was a girl, and he did not confide in women--not yet.

But the girl was woman enough to remember that the last time she had
seen him he had said that he was going to come for her some day. There
was no sign of that resolution, however, in either his manner or his
words now, and for some reason she was rather glad.

"Every boy wears clothes like that up here. They calls 'em
knickerbockers."

"Huh!" grunted Jason. "Hit sounds like 'em."

"Air ye still shootin' at that ole tree?"

"Yep, an' I kin hit the belly-band two shots out o' three."

Mavis raised her dark eyes with a look of apprehension, for she knew
what that meant; when he could hit it three times running he was going
after the man who had killed his father. But she asked no more
questions, for while the boy could not forbear to boast about his
marksmanship, further information was beyond her sphere and she knew it.

When they came to the lane leading to her home, Jason turned down it of
his own accord.

"How'd you know whar we live?"

"I was here this mornin' an' I seed my mammy. Yo' daddy wasn't thar."

Mavis smiled silently to herself; he had found out thus where she was
and he had followed her. At the little stable Jason unsaddled the
horses and turned both out in the yard while Mavis went within, and
Steve Hawn appeared at the door in his underclothes when Jason stepped
upon the porch.

"Hello, Jason!"

"Hello, Steve!" answered the boy, but they did not shake hands, not
because of the hard feeling between them, but because it was not
mountain custom.

"Come on in an' lay down."

Mavis had gone upstairs, but she could hear the voices below her. If
Mavis had been hesitant about asking questions, as had been the boy's
mother as well, Steve was not. "Whut'd you come up here fer?"

"Same reason as you once left the mountains--I got inter trouble."

Steve was startled and he frowned, but the boy gazed coolly back into
his angry eyes.

"Whut kind o' trouble?"

"Same as you--I shot a feller," said the boy imperturbably.

Little Mavis heard a groan from her step-mother, an angry oath from her
father, and a curious pang of horror pierced her.

Silence followed below and the girl lay awake and trembling in her bed.

"Who was it?" Steve asked at last.

"That's my business," said little Jason. The silence was broken no
more, and Mavis lay with new thoughts and feelings racking her brain
and her heart. Once she had driven to town with Marjorie and Gray, and
a man had come to the carriage and cheerily shaken hands with them
both. After he was gone Gray looked very grave and Marjorie was half
unconsciously wiping her right hand with her handkerchief.

"He killed a man," was Marjorie's horrified whisper of explanation, and
now if they should hear what she had heard they would feel the same way
toward her own cousin, Jason Hawn. She had never had such a feeling in
the mountains, but she had it now, and she wondered whether she could
ever be quite the same toward Jason again.




XII

Christmas was approaching and no greater wonder had ever dawned on the
lives of Mavis and Jason than the way these people in the settlements
made ready for it. In the mountains many had never heard of Christmas
and few of Christmas stockings, Santa Claus, and catching Christmas
gifts--not even the Hawns, But Mavis and Jason had known of Christmas,
had celebrated it after the mountain way, and knew, moreover, what the
Blue-grass children did not know, of old Christmas as well, which came
just twelve days after the new. At midnight of old Christmas, so the
old folks in the mountains said, the elders bloomed and the beasts of
the field and the cattle in the barn kneeled lowing and moaning, and
once the two children had slipped out of their grandfather's house to
the barn and waited to watch the cattle and to listen to them, but they
suffered from the cold, and when they told what they had done next
morning, their grandfather said they had not waited long enough, for it
happened just at midnight; so when Mavis and Jason told Marjorie and
Gray of old Christmas they all agreed they would wait up this time till
midnight sure.

As for new Christmas in the hills, the women paid little attention to
it, and to the men it meant "a jug of liquor, a pistol in each hand,
and a galloping nag." Always, indeed, it meant drinking, and
target-shooting to see "who should drink and who should smell," for the
man who made a bad shot got nothing but a smell from the jug until he
had redeemed himself. So, Steve Hawn and Jason got ready in their own
way and Mavis and Martha Hawn accepted their rude preparations as a
matter of course.

At four o'clock in the afternoon before Christmas Eve darkies began
springing around the corners of the twin houses, and from closets and
from behind doors, upon the white folks and shouting "Christmas gift,"
for to the one who said the greeting first the gift came, and it is
safe to say that no darky in the Blue-grass was caught that day. And
the Pendleton clan made ready to make merry. Kinspeople gathered at the
old general's ancient home and at the twin houses on either side of the
road. Stockings were hung up and eager-eyed children went to restless
dreams of their holiday king. Steve Hawn, too, had made ready with
boxes of cartridges and two jugs of red liquor, and he and Jason did
not wait for the morrow to make merry. And Uncle Arch Hawn happened to
come in that night, but he was chary of the cup, and he frowned with
displeasure at Jason, who was taking his dram with Steve like a man,
and he showed displeasure before he rode away that night by planting a
thorn in the very heart of Jason's sensitive soul. When he had climbed
on his horse he turned to Jason.

"Jason," he drawled, "you can come back home now when you git good an'
ready. Thar ain't no trouble down thar just now, an' Babe Honeycutt
ain't lookin' fer you."

Jason gasped. He had not dared to ask a single question about the one
thing that had been torturing his curiosity and his soul, and Arch was
bringing it out before them all as though it were the most casual and
unimportant matter in the world. Steve and his wife looked amazed and
Mavis's heart quickened.

"Babe ain't lookin' fer ye," Arch drawled on, "he's laughin' at ye. I
reckon you thought you'd killed him, but he stumbled over a root an'
fell down just as you shot. He says you missed him a mile. He says you
couldn't hit a barn in plain daylight." And he started away.

A furious oath broke from Jason's gaping mouth, Steve laughed, and if
the boy's pistol had been in his hand, he might in his rage have shown
Arch as he rode away what his marksmanship could be even in the dark,
but even with his uncle's laugh, too, coming back to him he had to turn
quickly into the house and let his wrath bite silently inward.

But Mavis's eyes were like moist stars.

"Oh, Jasie, I'm so glad," she said, but he only stared and turned
roughly on toward the jug in the corner.

Before day next morning the children in the big houses were making the
walls ring with laughter and shouts of joy. Rockets whizzed against the
dawn, fire-crackers popped unceasingly, and now and then a loaded anvil
boomed through the crackling air, but there was no happy awakening for
little Jason. All night his pride had smarted like a hornet sting, his
sleep was restless and bitter with dreams of revenge, and the hot
current in his veins surged back and forth in the old channel of hate
for the slayer of his father. Next morning his blood-shot eyes opened
fierce and sullen and he started the day with a visit to the whiskey
jug: then he filled his belt and pockets with cartridges.

Early in the afternoon Marjorie and Gray drove over with Christmas
greetings and little presents. Mavis went out to meet them, and when
Jason half-staggered out to the gate, the visitors called to him
merrily and became instantly grave and still. Mavis flushed, Marjorie
paled with horror and disgust, Gray flamed with wonder and contempt and
quickly whipped up his horse--the mountain boy was drunk.

Jason stared after them, knowing something had suddenly gone wrong, and
while he said nothing, his face got all the angrier, he rushed in for
his belt and pistol, and shaking his head from side to side, swaggered
out to the stable and began saddling his old mare. Mavis stood in the
doorway frightened and ashamed, the boy's mother pleaded with him to
come into the house and lie down, but without a word to either he
mounted with difficulty and rode down the road. Steve Hawn, who had
been silently watching him, laughed.

"Let him alone--he ain't goin' to do nothin'." Down the road the boy
rode with more drunken swagger than his years in the wake of Marjorie
and Gray--unconsciously in the wake of anything that was even critical,
much less hostile, and in front of Gray's house he pulled up and gazed
long at the pillars and the broad open door, but not a soul was in
sight and he paced slowly on. A few hundred yards down the turnpike he
pulled up again and long and critically surveyed a woodland. His eye
caught one lone tree in the centre of an amphitheatrical hollow just
visible over the slope of a hill. The look of the tree interested him,
for its growth was strange, and he opened the gate and rode across the
thick turf toward it. The bark was smooth, the tree was the size of a
man's body, and he dismounted, nodding his head up and down with much
satisfaction. Standing close to the tree, he pulled out his knife, cut
out a square of the bark as high as the first button of his coat and
moving around the trunk cut out several more squares at the same level.

"I reckon," he muttered, "that's whar his heart is yit, if _I_ ain't
growed too much."

Then he led the old mare to higher ground, came back, levelled his
pistol, and moving in a circle around the tree, pulled the trigger
opposite each square, and with every shot he grunted:

"Can't hit a barn, can't I, by Heck!"

In each square a bullet went home. Then he reloaded and walked rapidly
around the tree, still firing.

"An' I reckon that's a-makin' some nail-holes fer his galluses!"

And reloading again he ran around the tree, firing.

"An' mebbe I couldn't still git him if I was hikin' fer the corner of a
house an' was in a LEETLE grain of a hurry to git out o' HIS range."

Examining results at a close range, the boy was quite satisfied--hardly
a shot had struck without a band three inches in width around the tree.
There was one further test that he had not yet made; but he felt sober
now and he drew a bottle from his hip-pocket and pulled at it hard and
long. The old nag grazing above him had paid no more attention to the
fusillade than to the buzzing of flies. He mounted her, and Gray,
riding at a gallop to make out what the unearthly racket going on in
the hollow was, saw the boy going at full speed in a circle about the
tree, firing and yelling, and as Gray himself in a moment more would be
in range, he shouted a warning. Jason stopped and waited with
belligerent eyes as Gray rode toward him.

"I say, Jason," Gray smiled, "I'm afraid my father wouldn't like
that--you've pretty near killed that tree."

Jason stared, amazed--

"Fust time I ever heerd of anybody not wantin' a feller to shoot at a
tree."

Gray saw that he was in earnest and he kept on, smiling.

"Well, we haven't got as many trees here as you have down in the
mountains, and up here they're more valuable."

The last words were unfortunate.

"Looks like you keer a heep fer yo' trees," sneered the mountain boy
with a wave of his pistol toward a demolished woodland; "an' if our
trees air so wuthless, whut do you furriners come down thar and rob us
of 'em fer?"

The sneer, the tone, and the bitter emphasis on the one ugly word
turned Gray's face quite red.

"You mustn't say anything like that to me," was his answer, and the
self-control in his voice but helped make the mountain boy lose his at
once and completely. He rode straight for Gray and pulled in, waving
his pistol crazily before the latter's face, and Gray could actually
hear the grinding of his teeth.

"Go git yo' gun! Git yo' gun!"

Gray turned very pale, but he showed no fear.

"I don't know what's the matter with you," he said steadily, "but you
must be drunk."

"Go git yo' gun!" was the furious answer. "Go git yo' gun!"

"Boys don't fight with guns in this country, but--"

"You're a d--d coward," yelled Jason.

Gray's fist shot through the mist of rage that suddenly blinded him,
catching Jason on the point of the chin, and as the mountain boy spun
half around in his saddle, Gray caught the pistol in both hands and in
the struggle both rolled, still clutching the weapon, to the ground,
Gray saying with quiet fury:

"Drop that pistol and I'll lick hell out of you!"

There was no answer but the twist of Jason's wrist, and the bullet went
harmlessly upward. Before he could pull the trigger again, the sinewy
fingers of a man's hand closed over the weapon and pushed it flat with
the earth, and Jason's upturned eyes looked into the grave face of the
school-master. That face was stern and shamed Jason instantly. The two
boys rose to their feet, and the mountain boy turned away from the
school-master and saw Marjorie standing ten yards away white and
terror-stricken, and her eyes when he met them blazed at him with a
light that no human eye had ever turned on him before. The boy knew
anger, rage, hate, revenge, but contempt was new to him, and his soul
was filled with sudden shame that was no less strange, but the spirit
in him was undaunted, and like a challenged young buck his head went up
as he turned again to face his accuser.

"Were you going to shoot an unarmed boy?" asked John Burnham gravely.

"He hit me."

"You called him a coward."

"He hit me."

"He offered to fight you fist and skull."

"He had the same chance to git the gun that I had."

"He wasn't trying to get it in order to shoot you."

Jason made no answer and the school-master repeated:

"He offered to fight you fist and skull."

"I was too mad--but I'll fight him now."

"Boys don't fight in the presence of young ladies."

Gray spoke up and in his tone was the contempt that was in Marjorie's
eyes, and it made the mountain boy writhe.

"I wouldn't soil my hands on you--now."

The school-master rebuked Gray with a gesture, but Jason was confused
and sick now and he held out his hand for his pistol.

"I better be goin' now--this ain't no place fer me."

The school-master gravely handed the weapon to him.

"I'm coming over to have a talk with you, Jason," he said.

The boy made no answer. He climbed on his horse slowly. His face was
very pale, and once only he swept the group with eyes that were
badgered but no longer angry, and as they rested on Marjorie, there was
a pitiful, lonely something in them that instantly melted her and
almost started her tears. Then he rode silently and slowly away.




XIII

Slowly the lad rode westward, for the reason that he was not yet quite
ready to pass between those two big-pillared houses again, and because
just then whatever his way--no matter. His anger was all gone now and
his brain was clear, but he was bewildered. Throughout the day he had
done nothing that he thought was wrong, and yet throughout the day he
had done nothing that seemed to be right. This land was not for him--he
did not understand the ways of it and the people, and they did not
understand him. Even the rock-pecker had gone back on him, and though
that hurt him deeply, the lad loyally knew that the school-master must
have his own good reasons. The memory of Marjorie's look still hurt,
and somehow he felt that even Mavis was vaguely on their side against
him, and of a sudden the pang of loneliness that Marjorie saw in his
eyes so pierced him that he pulled his old nag in and stood motionless
in the middle of the road. The sky was overcast and the air was bitter
and chill; through the gray curtain that hung to the rim of the earth,
the low sun swung like a cooling ball of fire and under it the gray
fields stretched with such desolation for him that he dared ride no
farther into them. And then as the lad looked across the level
stillness that encircled him, the mountains loomed suddenly from
it--big, still, peaceful, beckoning--and made him faint with
homesickness. Those mountains were behind him--his mountains and his
home that was his no longer--but, after all, any home back there was
his, and that thought so filled his heart with a rush of gladness that
with one long breath of exultation he turned in his saddle to face
those distant unseen hills, and the old mare, following the movement of
his body, turned too, as though she, too, suddenly wanted to go home.
The chill air actually seemed to grow warmer as he trotted back, the
fields looked less desolate, and then across them he saw flashing
toward him the hostile fire of a scarlet tam-o'-shanter. He was nearing
the yard gate of the big house on the right, and from the other big
house on the left the spot of shaking crimson was galloping toward the
turnpike. He could wait until Marjorie crossed the road ahead of him,
or he could gallop ahead and pass before she could reach the gate, but
his sullen pride forbade either course, and so he rode straight on, and
his dogged eyes met hers as she swung the gate to and turned her pony
across the road. Marjorie flushed, her lips half parted to speak, and
Jason sullenly drew in, but as she said nothing, he clucked and dug his
heels viciously into the old mare's sides.

Then the little girl raised one hand to check him and spoke hurriedly:

"Jason, we've been talking about you, and my Uncle Bob says you kept me
from getting killed."

Jason stared.

"And the school-teacher says we don't understand you--you people down
in the mountains--and that we mustn't blame you for--" she paused in
helpless embarrassment, for still the mountain boy stared.

"You know," she went on finally, "boys here don't do things that you
boys do down there--"

She stopped again, the tears started suddenly in her earnest eyes, and
a miracle happened to little Jason. Something quite new surged within
him, his own eyes swam suddenly, and he cleared his throat huskily.

"I hain't a-goin' to bother you folks no more," he said, and he tried
to be surly, but couldn't. "I'm a-goin' away." The little girl's tears
ceased.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I wish you'd stay here and go to school. The
school-teacher said he wanted you to do that, and he says such nice
things about you, and so does my Uncle Bob, and Gray is sorry, and he
says he is coming over to see you to-morrow."

"I'm a-goin' home," repeated Jason stubbornly.

"Home?" repeated the girl, and her tone did what her look had done a
moment before, for she knew he had no home, and again the lad was
filled with a throbbing uneasiness. Her eyes dropped to her pony's
mane, and in a moment more she looked up with shy earnestness.

"Will you do something for me?"

Again Jason started and of its own accord his tongue spoke words that
to his own ears were very strange.

"Thar hain't nothin' I won't do fer ye," he said, and his sturdy
sincerity curiously disturbed Marjorie in turn, so that her flush came
back, and she went on with slow hesitation and with her eyes again
fixed on her pony's neck.

"I want you to promise me not--not to shoot anybody--unless you HAVE to
in self-defence--and never to take another drink until--until you see
me again."

She could not have bewildered the boy more had she asked him never to
go barefoot again, but his eyes were solemn when she looked up and
solemnly he nodded assent.

"I give ye my hand."

The words were not literal, but merely the way the mountaineer phrases
the giving of a promise, but the little girl took them literally and
she rode up to him with slim fingers outstretched and a warm friendly
smile on her little red mouth. Awkwardly the lad thrust out his dirty,
strong little hand.

"Good-by, Jason," she said.

"Good-by--" he faltered, and, still smiling, she finished the words for
him.

"Marjorie," she said, and unsmilingly he repeated:

"Marjorie."

While she passed through the gate he sat still and watched her, and he
kept on watching her as she galloped toward home, twisting in his
saddle to follow her course around the winding road. He saw a negro boy
come out to the stile to take her pony, and there Marjorie,
dismounting, saw in turn the lad still motionless where she had left
him, and looking after her. She waved her whip to him, went on toward
the house, and when she reached the top of the steps, she turned and
waved to him again, but he made no answering gesture, and only when the
front door closed behind her, did the boy waken from his trance and jog
slowly up the road. Only the rim of the red fire-ball was arched over
the horizon behind him now. Winter dusk was engulfing the fields and
through it belated crows were scurrying silently for protecting woods.
For a little while Jason rode with his hands folded man-wise on the
pommel of his saddle and with manlike emotions in his heart, for, while
the mountains still beckoned, this land had somehow grown more friendly
and there was a curious something after all that he would leave behind.
What it was he hardly knew; but a pair of blue eyes, misty with
mysterious tears, had sown memories in his confused brain that he would
not soon lose. He did not forget the contempt that had blazed from
those eyes, but he wondered now at the reason for that contempt. Was
there something that ruled this land--something better than the code
that ruled his hills? He had remembered every word the geologist had
ever said, for he loved the man, but it had remained for a strange
girl--a girl--to revive them, to give them actual life and plant within
him a sudden resolve to learn for himself what it all meant, and to
practise it, if he found it good. A cold wind sprang up now and cutting
through his thin clothes drove him in a lope toward his mother's home.

Apparently Mavis was watching for him through the window of the
cottage, for she ran out on the porch to meet him, but something in the
boy's manner checked her, and she neither spoke nor asked a question
while the boy took off his saddle and tossed it on the steps. Nor did
Jason give her but one glance, for the eagerness of her face and the
trust and tenderness in her eyes were an unconscious reproach and made
him feel guilty and faithless, so that he changed his mind about
turning the old mare out in the yard and led her to the stable, merely
to get away from the little girl.

Mavis was in the kitchen when he entered the house, and while they all
were eating supper, the lad could feel his little cousin's eyes on him
all the time--watching and wondering and troubled and hurt. And when
the four were seated about the fire, he did not look at her when he
announced that he was going back home, but he saw her body start and
shrink. His step-father yawned and said nothing, and his mother looked
on into the fire.

"When you goin', Jasie?" she asked at last.

"Daylight," he answered shortly.

There was a long silence.

"Whut you goin' to do down thar?"

The lad lifted his head fiercely and looked from the woman to the man
and back again.

"I'm a-goin' to git that land back," he snapped; and as there was no
question, no comment, he settled back brooding in his chair.

"Hit wasn't right--hit COULDN'T 'a' been right," he muttered, and then
as though he were answering his mother's unspoken question:

"I don't know HOW I'm goin' to git it back, but if it wasn't right,
thar must be some way, an' I'm a-goin' to find out if hit takes me all
my life."

His mother was still silent, though she had lifted a comer of her apron
to her eyes, and the lad rose and without a word of good-night climbed
the stairs to go to bed. Then the mother spoke to her husband angrily.

"You oughtn't to let the boy put all the blame on me, Steve--you made
me sell that land."

Steve's answer was another yawn, and he rose to get ready for bed, and
Mavis, too, turned indignant eyes on him, for she had heard enough from
the two to know that her step-mother spoke the truth. Her father opened
the door and she heard the creak of his heavy footsteps across the
freezing porch. Her step-mother went into the kitchen and Mavis climbed
the stairs softly and opened Jason's door.

"Jasie!" she called.

"Whut you want?"

"Jasie, take me back home with ye, won't you?"

A rough denial was on his lips, but her voice broke into a little sob
and the boy lay for a moment without answering.

"Whut on earth would you do down thar, Mavis?"

And then he remembered how he had told her that he would come for her
some day, and he remembered the Hawn boast that a Hawn's word was as
good as his bond and he added kindly: "Wait till mornin', Mavis. I'll
take ye if ye want to go."

The door closed instantly and she was gone. When the lad came down
before day next morning Mavis had finished tying a few things in a
bundle and was pushing it out of sight under a bed, and Jason knew what
that meant.

"You hain't told 'em?"

Mavis shook her head.

"Mebbe yo' pap won't let ye."

"He ain't hyeh," said the little girl.

"Whar is he?"

"I don't know."

"Mavis," said the boy seriously, "I'm a boy an' hit don't make no
difference whar I go, but you're a gal an' hit looks like you ought to
stay with yo' daddy."

The girl shook her head stubbornly, but he paid no attention.

"I tell ye, I'm a-goin' back to that new-fangled school when I git to
grandpap's, an' whut'll you do?"

"I'll go with ye."

"I've thought o' that," said the boy patiently, "but they mought not
have room fer neither one of us--an' I can take keer o' myself anywhar."

"Yes," said the little girl proudly, "an' I'll trust ye to take keer o'
me--anywhar."

The boy looked at her long and hard, but there was no feminine cunning
in her eyes--nothing but simple trust--and his silence was a despairing
assent. From the kitchen his mother called them to breakfast.

"Whar's Steve?" asked the boy.

The mother gave the same answer as had Mavis, but she looked anxious
and worried.

"Mavis is a-goin' back to the mountains with me," said the boy, and the
girl looked up in defiant expectation, but the mother did not even look
around from the stove.

"Mebbe yo' pap won't let ye," she said quietly.

"How's he goin' to help hisself," asked the girl, "when he ain't hyeh?"

"He'll blame me fer it, but I ain't a-blamin' you."

The words surprised and puzzled both and touched both with sympathy and
a little shame. The mother looked at her son, opened her lips again,
but closed them with a glance at Mavis that made her go out and leave
them alone.

"Jasie," she said then, "I reckon when Babe was a-playin' 'possum in
the bushes that day, he could 'a' shot ye when you run down the hill."

She took his silence for assent and went on:

"That shows he don't hold no grudge agin you fer shootin' at him."

Still Jason was silent, and a line of stern justice straightened the
woman's lips.

"I hain't got no right to say a word, just because Babe air my own
brother. Mebbe Babe knows who the man was, but I don't believe Babe
done it. Hit hain't enough that he was jes' SEED a-comin' outen the
bushes, an' afore you go a-layin' fer Babe, all I axe ye is to make
PLUMB DEAD SHORE."

It was a strange new note to come from his mother's voice, and it kept
the boy still silent from helplessness and shame. She had spoken
calmly, but now there was a little break in her voice.

"I want ye to go back, an' I'd go blind fer the rest o' my days if that
land was yours an' was a-waitin' down thar fer ye."

From the next room came the sound of Mavis's restless feet, and the boy
rose.

"I hain't a-goin' to lay fer Babe, mammy," he said huskily; "I hain't
a-goin' to lay fer nobody--now. An' don't you worry no more about that
land."

Half an hour later, just when day was breaking, Mavis sat behind Jason
with her bundle in her lap, and the mother looked up at them.

"I wish I was a-goin' with ye," she said.

And when they had passed out of sight down the lane, she turned back
into the house--weeping.




XIV

Little Mavis did not reach the hills. At sunrise a few miles down the
road, the two met Steve Hawn on a borrowed horse, his pistol buckled
around him and his face pale and sleepless.

"Whar you two goin'?" he asked roughly.

"Home," was Jason's short answer, and he felt Mavis's arm about his
waist begin to tremble.

"Git off, Mavis, an' git up hyeh behind me. Yo' home's with me."

Jason valiantly reached for his gun, but Mavis caught his hand and,
holding it, slipped to the ground. "Don't, Jasie--I'll come, pap, I'll
come." Whereat Steve laughed and Jason, raging, saw her ride away
behind her step-father, clutching him about the waist with one arm and
with the other bent over her eyes to shield her tears.

A few miles farther, Jason came on the smoking, charred remains of a
toll-gate, and he paused a moment wondering if Steve might not have had
a hand in that, and rode on toward the hills. Two hours later the
school-master's horse shied from those black ruins, and John Burnham
kept on toward school with a troubled face. To him the ruins meant the
first touch of the writhing tentacles of the modern trust and the
Blue-grass Kentuckian's characteristic way of throwing them off, for
turnpikes of white limestone, like the one he travelled, thread the
Blue-grass country like strands of a spider's web. The spinning of them
started away back in the beginning of the last century. That far back,
the strand he followed pierced the heart of the region from its chief
town to the Ohio and was graded for steam-wagons that were expected to
roll out from the land of dreams. Every few miles on each of these
roads sat a little house, its porch touching the very edge of the
turnpike, and there a long pole, heavily weighted at one end and pulled
down and tied fast to the porch, blocked the way. Every traveller,
except he was on foot, every drover of cattle, sheep, hogs, or mules,
must pay his toll before the pole was lifted and he could go on his
way. And Burnham could remember the big fat man who once a month, in a
broad, low buggy, drawn by two swift black horses, would travel hither
and thither, stopping at each little house to gather in the deposits of
small coins. As time went on, this man and a few friends began to
gather in as well certain bits of scattered paper that put the turnpike
webs like reins into a few pairs of hands, with the natural, inevitable
result: fewer men had personal need of good roads, the man who parted
with his bit of paper lost his power of protest, and while the
traveller paid the small toll, the path that he travelled got steadily
worse. A mild effort to arouse a sentiment for county control was made,
and this failing, the Kentuckian had straightway gone for firebrand and
gun. The dormant spirit of Ku-Klux awakened, the night-rider was born
again, and one by one the toll-gates were going up in flame and
settling back in ashes to the mother earth. The school-master smiled
when he thought of the result of one investigation in the county by
law. A sturdy farmer was haled before the grand jury.

"Do you know the perpetrators of the unlawful burning of the toll-gate
on the Cave Hill Pike?" asked the august body. The farmer ran his
fearless eyes down the twelve of his peers and slowly walked the length
of them, pointing his finger at this juror and that.

"Yes, I do," he said quietly, "and so do you--and you and YOU. Your son
was in it--and yours--and mine; and you were in it yourself. Now, what
are you going to do about it?" And, unrebuked and unrestrained, he
turned and walked out of the room, leaving the august body, startled,
grimly smiling and reduced to a helpless pulp of inactivity.

That morning Mavis was late to school, and the school-master and Gray
and Marjorie all saw that she had been weeping. Only Marjorie suspected
the cause, but at little recess John Burnham went to her to ask where
Jason was, and Gray was behind him with the same question on his lips.
And when Mavis burst into tears, Marjorie answered for her and sat down
beside her and put her arms around the mountain girl. After school she
even took Mavis home behind her, and Gray rode along with them on his
pony. Steve Hawn was sitting on his little porch smoking when they rode
up, and he came down and hospitably asked them to "light and hitch
their beastes," and the black-haired step-mother called from the
doorway for them to "come in an' rest a spell." Gray and Marjorie
concealed with some difficulty their amusement at such queer phrases of
welcome, and a wonder at the democratic ease of the two and their utter
unconsciousness of any social difference between the lords and ladies
of the Blue-grass and poor people from the mountains, for the other
tobacco tenants were not like these. And there was no surprise on the
part of the man, the woman, or the little girl when a sudden warm
impulse to relieve loneliness led Marjorie to ask Mavis to go to her
own home and stay all night with her.

"Course," said the woman.

"Go right along, Mavis," said the man, and Marjorie turned to Gray.

"You can carry her things," she said, and she turned to Mavis and met
puzzled, unabashed eyes.

"Whut things?" asked little Mavis, whereat Marjorie blushed, looked
quickly to Gray, whose face was courteously unsmiling, and started her
pony abruptly.

It was a wonderful night for the mountaineer girl in the big-pillared
house on the hill. When they got home, Marjorie drove her in a little
pony-cart over the big farm, while Gray trotted alongside--through
pastures filled with cattle so fat they could hardly walk, past big
barns bursting with hay and tobacco and stables full of slender,
beautiful horses. Even the pigs had little red houses of refuge from
the weather and flocks of sheep dotted the hill-side like unmelted
patches of snow. The mountain girl's eyes grew big with wonder when she
entered the great hall with its lofty ceiling, its winding stairway,
and its polished floor, so slippery that she came near falling down,
and they stayed big when she saw the rows of books, the pictures on the
walls, the padded couches and chairs, the noiseless carpets, the
polished andirons that gleamed like gold before the blazing fires, and
when she glimpsed through an open door the long dining-table with its
glistening glass and silver. When she mounted that winding stairway and
entered Marjorie's room she was stricken dumb by its pink curtains,
pink wall-paper, and gleaming brass bedstead with pink coverlid and
pink pillow-facings. And she nearly gasped when Marjorie led her on
into another room of blue.

"This is your room," she said smiling, "right next to mine. I'll be
back in a minute."

Mavis stood a moment in the middle of the room when she was alone,
hardly daring to sit down. A coal fire crackled behind a wire
screen--coal from her mountains. A door opened into a queer little
room, glistening white, and she peeped, wondering, within.

"There's the bath-room," Marjorie had said. She had not known what was
meant, and she did not now, looking at the long white tub and the white
tiling floor and walls until she saw the multitudinous towels, and she
marvelled at the new mystery. She went back and walked to the window
and looked out on the endless rolling winter fields over which she had
driven that afternoon--all, Gray had told her, to be Marjorie's some
day, just as all across the turnpike, Marjorie had told her, was some
day to be Gray's. She thought of herself and of Jason, and her tears
started, not for herself, but for him. Then she heard Marjorie coming
in and she brushed her eyes swiftly.

"Whar can I git some water to wash?" she asked.

Marjorie laughed delightedly and led her back to that wonderful little
white room, turned a gleaming silver star, and the water spurted
joyously into the bowl.

"Well, I do declare!"

Soon they went down to supper, and Mavis put out a shy hand to
Marjorie's mother, a kind-eyed, smiling woman in black. And Gray, too,
was there, watching the little mountain girl and smiling encouragement
whenever he met her eyes. And Mavis passed muster well, for the
mountaineer's sensitiveness makes him wary of his manners when he is
among strange people, and he will go hungry rather than be guilty
unknowingly of a possible breach. Marjorie's mother was much interested
and pleased with Mavis, and she made up her mind at once to discuss
with her daughter how they could best help along the little stranger.
After supper Marjorie played on the piano, and she and Gray sang duets,
but the music was foreign to Mavis, and she did not like it very much.
When the two went upstairs, there was a dainty long garment spread on
Mavis's bed, which Mavis fingered carefully with much interest and much
curiosity until she recalled suddenly what Marjorie had said about Gray
carrying her "things." This was one of these things, and Mavis put it
on wondering what the other things might be. Then she saw that a
silver-backed comb and brush had appeared on the bureau along with a
tiny pair of scissors and a little ivory stick, the use of which she
could not make out at all. But she asked no questions, and when
Marjorie came in with a new toothbrush and a little tin box and put
them in the bath-room, Mavis still showed no surprise, but ran her eyes
down the nightgown with its dainty ribbons.

"Ain't it purty?" she said, and her voice and her eyes spoke all her
thanks with such sincerity and pathos that Marjorie was touched. Then
they sat down in front of the fire--a pair of slim brown feet that had
been bruised by many a stone and pierced by many a thorn stretched out
to a warm blaze side by side with a pair of white slim ones that had
been tenderly guarded against both since the first day they had touched
the earth, and a golden head that had never been without the caress of
a tender hand and a tousled dark one that had been bared to sun and
wind and storm--close together for a long time. Unconsciously Marjorie
had Mavis tell her much about Jason, just as Mavis without knowing it
had Marjorie tell her much about Gray. Mavis got the first good-night
kiss of her life that night, and she went to bed thinking of the
Blue-grass boy's watchful eyes, little courtesies, and his sympathetic
smile, just as Gray, riding home, was thinking of the dark, shy little
mountain girl with a warm glow of protection about his heart, and
Marjorie fell asleep dreaming of the mountain boy who, under her
promise, had gone back homeless to his hills. In them perhaps it was
the call of the woods and wilds that had led their pioneer forefathers
long, long ago into woods and wilds, or perhaps, after all, it was only
the little blind god shooting arrows at them in the dark.

At least with little Jason one arrow had gone home. At the forks of the
road beyond the county-seat he turned not toward his grandfather's, but
up the spur and over the mountain. And St. Hilda, sitting on her porch,
saw him coming again. His face looked beaten but determined, and he
strode toward her as straight and sturdy as ever.

"I've come back to stay with ye," he said.

Again she started to make denial, but he shook his head. "'Tain't no
use--I'm a-goin' to stay this time," he said, and he walked up the
steps, pulling two or three dirty bills from his pocket with one hand
and unbuckling his pistol belt with the other.

"Me an' my nag'll work fer ye an' I'll wear gal's stockin's an' a
poke-bonnet an' do a gal's work, if you'll jus' l'arn me whut I want to
know."




XV

The funeral of old Hiram Sudduth, Marjorie's grandfather on her
mother's side, was over. The old man had been laid to rest, by the side
of his father and his pioneer grandfather, in the cedar-filled
burying-ground on the broad farm that had belonged in turn to the three
in an adjoining county that was the last stronghold of conservatism in
the Blue-grass world, and John Burnham, the school-master, who had
spent the night with an old friend after the funeral, was driving home.
Not that there had not been many changes in that stronghold, too, but
they were fewer than elsewhere and unmodern, and whatever profit was
possible through these changes was reaped by men of the land like old
Hiram and not by strangers. For the war there, as elsewhere, had done
its deadly work. With the negro quarters empty, the elders were too old
to change their ways, the young would not accept the new and hard
conditions, and as mortgages slowly ate up farm after farm, quiet,
thrifty, hard-working old Hiram would gradually take them in, depleting
the old Stonewall neighborhood of its families one by one, and sending
them West, never to come back. The old man, John Burnham knew, had
bitterly opposed the marriage of his daughter with a "spendthrift
Pendleton," and he wondered if now the old man's will would show that
he had carried that opposition to the grave. It was more than likely,
for Marjorie's father had gone his careless, generous, magnificent way
in spite of the curb that the inherited thrift and inherited passion
for land in his Sudduth wife had put upon him. Old Hiram knew,
moreover, the parental purpose where Gray and Marjorie were concerned,
and it was not likely that he would thwart one generation and tempt the
succeeding one to go on in its reckless way. Right now Burnham knew
that trouble was imminent for Gray's father, and he began to wonder
what for him and his kind the end would be, for no change that came or
was coming to his beloved land ever escaped his watchful eye. From the
crest of the Cumberland to the yellow flood of the Ohio he knew that
land, and he loved every acre of it, whether blue-grass, bear-grass,
peavine, or pennyroyal, and he knew its history from Daniel Boone to
the little Boones who still trapped skunk, mink, and muskrat, and shot
squirrels in the hills with the same old-fashioned rifle, and he loved
its people--his people--whether they wore silk and slippers, homespun
and brogans, patent leathers and broadcloth, or cowhide boots and
jeans. And now serious troubles were threatening them. A new man with a
new political method had entered the arena and had boldly offered an
election bill which, if passed and enforced, would create a State-wide
revolution, for it would rob the people of local self-government and
centralize power in the hands of a triumvirate that would be the
creature of his government and, under the control of no court or jury,
the supreme master of the State and absolute master of the people. And
Burnham knew that, in such a crisis, ties of blood, kinship,
friendship, religion, business, would count no more in the Blue-grass
than they did during the Civil War, and that now, as then, father and
son, brother and brother, neighbor and neighbor, would each think and
act for himself, though the house divided against itself should fall to
rise no more. Nor was that all. In the farmer's fight against the
staggering crop of mortgages that had slowly sprung up from the
long-ago sowing of the dragon's teeth Burnham saw with a heavy heart
the telling signs of the land's slow descent from the strength of hemp
to the weakness of tobacco--the ravage of the woodlands, the incoming
of the tenant from the river-valley counties, the scars on the
beautiful face of the land, the scars on the body social of the
region--and now he knew another deadlier crisis, both social and
economic, must some day come.

In the toll-gate war, long over, the law had been merely a little too
awkward and slow. County sentiment had been a little lazy, but it had
got active in a hurry, and several gentlemen, among them Gray's father,
had ridden into town and deposited bits of gilt-scrolled paper to be
appraised and taken over by the county, and the whole problem had been
quickly solved, but the school-master, looking back, could not help
wondering what lawless seeds the firebrand had then sowed in the hearts
of the people and what weeds might not spring from those seeds even
now; for the trust element of the toll-gate troubles had been
accidental, unintentional, even unconscious, unrecognized; and now the
real spirit of a real trust from the outside world was making itself
felt. Courteous emissaries were smilingly fixing their own price on the
Kentuckian's own tobacco and assuring him that he not only could not
get a higher price elsewhere, but that if he declined he would be
offered less next time, which he would have to accept or he could not
sell at all. And the incredulous, fiery, independent Kentuckian found
his crop mysteriously shadowed on its way to the big town markets,
marked with an invisible "noli me tangere" except at the price that he
was offered at home. And so he had to sell it in a rage at just that
price, and he went home puzzled and fighting-mad. If, then, the
Blue-grass people had handled with the firebrand corporate
aggrandizement of toll-gate owners who were neighbors and friends, how
would they treat meddlesome interference from strangers? Already one
courteous emissary in one county had fled the people's wrath on a swift
thoroughbred, and Burnham smiled sadly to himself and shook his head.

Rounding a hill a few minutes later, the school-master saw far ahead
the ancestral home of the Pendletons, where the stern old head of the
house, but lately passed in his ninetieth year, had wielded patriarchal
power. The old general had entered the Mexican War a lieutenant and
come out a colonel, and from the Civil War he had emerged a
major-general. He had two sons--twins--and for the twin brothers he had
built twin houses on either side of the turnpike and had given each
five hundred acres of land. And these houses had literally grown from
the soil, for the soil had given every stick of timber in them and
every brick and stone. The twin brothers had married sisters, and thus
as the results of those unions Gray's father and Marjorie's father were
double cousins, and like twin brothers had been reared, and the
school-master marvelled afresh when he thought of the cleavage made in
that one family by the terrible Civil War. For the old general carried
but one of his twin sons into the Confederacy with him--the other went
with the Union--and his grandsons, the double cousins, who were just
entering college, went not only against each other, but each against
his own father, and there was the extraordinary fact of three
generations serving in the same war, cousin against cousin, brother
against brother, and father against son. The twin brothers each gave up
his life for his cause. After the war the cousins lived on like
brothers, married late, and, naturally, each was called uncle by the
other's only child. In time the two took their fathers' places in the
heart of the old general, and in the twin houses on the hills. Gray's
father had married an aristocrat, who survived the birth of Gray only a
few years, and Marjorie's father died of an old wound but a year or two
after she was born. And so the balked affection of the old man dropped
down through three generations to centre on Marjorie, and his
passionate family pride to concentrate on Gray.

Now the old Roman was gone, and John Burnham looked with sad eyes at
the last stronghold of him and his kind--the rambling old house
stuccoed with aged brown and covered with ancient vines, knotted and
gnarled like an old man's hand; the walls three feet thick and built as
for a fort, as was doubtless the intent in pioneer days; the big yard
of unmown blue-grass and filled with cedars and forest trees; the
numerous servants' quarters, the spacious hen-house, the stables with
gables and long sloping roofs and the arched gateway to them for the
thoroughbreds, under which no hybrid mule or lowly work-horse was ever
allowed to pass; the spring-house with its dripping green walls, the
long-silent blacksmith-shop; the still windmill; and over all the
atmosphere of careless, magnificent luxury and slow decay; the stucco
peeled off in great patches, the stable roofs sagging, the windmill
wheelless, the fences following the line of a drunken man's walk, the
trees storm-torn, and the mournful cedars harping with every passing
wind a requiem for the glory that was gone. As he looked, the memory of
the old man's funeral came to Burnham: the white old face in the
coffin--haughty, noble, proud, and the spirit of it unconquered even by
death; the long procession of carriages, the slow way to the cemetery,
the stops on that way, the creaking of wheels and harness, and the awe
of it all to the boy, Gray, who rode with him. Then the hospitable
doors of the princely old house were closed and the princely life that
had made merry for so long within its walls came sharply to an end, and
it stood now, desolate, gloomy, haunted, the last link between the life
that was gone and the life that was now breaking just ahead. A mile on,
the twin-pillared houses of brick jutted from a long swelling knoll on
each side of the road. In each the same spirit had lived and was yet
alive.

In Gray's home it had gone on unchecked toward the same tragedy, but in
Marjorie's the thrifty, quiet force of her mother's hand had been in
power, and in the little girl the same force was plain. Her father was
a Pendleton of the Pendletons, too, but the same gentle force had,
without curb or check-rein, so guided him that while he lived he led
proudly with never a suspicion that he was being led. And since the
death of Gray's mother and Marjorie's father each that was left had
been faithful to the partner gone, and in spite of prediction and
gossip, the common neighborhood prophecy had remained unfulfilled.

A mile farther onward, the face of the land on each side changed
suddenly and sharply and became park-like. Not a ploughed acre was
visible, no tree-top was shattered, no broken boughs hung down. The
worm fence disappeared and neat white lines flashed divisions of
pastures, it seemed, for miles. A great amphitheatrical red barn sat on
every little hill or a great red rectangular tobacco barn. A huge dairy
was building of brick. Paddocks and stables were everywhere,
macadamized roads ran from the main highway through the fields, and on
the highest hill visible stood a great villa--a colossal architectural
stranger in the land--and Burnham was driving by a row of neat red
cottages, strangers, too, in the land. In the old Stonewall
neighborhood that Burnham had left the gradual depopulation around old
Hiram left him almost as alone as his pioneer grandfather had been, and
the home of the small farmers about him had been filled by the tobacco
tenant. From the big villa emanated a similar force with a similar
tendency, but old Hiram, compared with old Morton Sanders, was as a
slow fire to a lightning-bolt. Sanders was from the East, had unlimited
wealth, and loved race-horses. Purchasing a farm for them, the Saxon
virus in his Kentucky blood for land had gotten hold of him, and he,
too, had started depopulating the country; only where old Hiram bought
roods, he bought acres; and where Hiram bagged the small farmer for
game, Sanders gunned for the aristocrat as well. It was for Sanders
that Colonel Pendleton had gone to the mountains long ago to gobble
coal lands. It was to him that the roof over little Jason's head and
the earth under his feet had been sold, and the school-master smiled a
little bitterly when he turned at last into a gate and drove toward a
stately old home in the midst of ancient cedars, for he was thinking of
the little mountaineer and of the letter St. Hilda had sent him years
ago.

"Jason has come back," she wrote, "to learn some way o' gittin' his
land back.'"

For the school-master's reflections during his long drive had not been
wholly impersonal. With his own family there had been the same change,
the same passing, the workings of the same force in the same
remorseless way, and to him, too, the same doom had come. The home to
which he was driving had been his, but it was Morton Sanders's now. His
brother lived there as manager of Sanders's flocks, herds, and acres,
and in the house of his fathers the school-master now paid his own
brother for his board.




XVI

The boy was curled up on the rear seat of the smoking-car. His face was
upturned to the glare of light above him, the train bumped, jerked, and
swayed; smoke and dust rolled in at the open window and cinders stung
his face, but he slept as peacefully as though he were in one of the
huge feather-beds at his grandfather's house--slept until the conductor
shook him by the shoulder, when he opened his eyes, grunted, and closed
them again. The train stopped, a brakeman yanked him roughly to his
feet, put a cheap suit-case into his hand, and pushed him, still dazed,
into the chill morning air. The train rumbled on and left him blinking
into a lantern held up to his face, but he did not look promising as a
hotel guest and the darky porter turned abruptly; and the boy yawned
long and deeply, with his arms stretched above his head, dropped on the
frosty bars of a baggage-truck and rose again shivering. Cocks were
crowing, light was showing in the east, the sea of mist that he well
knew was about him, but no mountains loomed above it, and St. Hilda's
prize pupil, Jason Hawn, woke sharply at last with a tingling that went
from head to foot. Once more he was in the land of the Blue-grass, his
journey was almost over, and in a few hours he would put his confident
feet on a new level and march on upward. Gradually, as the lad paced
the platform, the mist thinned and the outlines of things came out. A
mysterious dark bulk high in the air showed as a water-tank, roofs new
to mountain eyes jutted upward, trees softly emerged, a desolate dusty
street opened before him, and the cocks crowed on lustily all around
him and from farm-houses far away. The crowing made him hungry, and he
went to the light of a little eating-house and asked the price of the
things he saw on the counter there, but the price was too high. He
shook his head and went out, but his pangs were so keen that he went
back for a cup of coffee and a hard-boiled egg, and then he heard the
coming thunder of his train. The sun was rising as he sped on through
the breaking mist toward the Blue-grass town that in pioneer days was
known as the Athens of the West. In a few minutes the train slackened
in mid-air and on a cloud of mist between jutting cliffs, it seemed,
and the startled lad, looking far down through it, saw a winding yellow
light, and he was rushing through autumn fields again before he
realized that the yellow light was the Kentucky River surging down from
the hills. Back up the stream surged his memories, making him faint
with homesickness, for it was the last link that bound him to the
mountains. But both home and hills were behind him now, and he shook
himself sharply and lost him-self again in the fields of grass and
grain, the grazing stock and the fences, houses, and barns that reeled
past his window. Steve Hawn met him at the station with a rattle-trap
buggy and, stared at him long and hard.

"I'd hardly knowed ye--you've growed like a weed."

"How's the folks?" asked Jason.

"Stirrin'."

Silently they rattled down the street, each side of which was lined
with big wagons loaded with tobacco and covered with cotton
cloth--there seemed to be hundreds of them.

"Hell's a-comin' about that terbaccer up here," said Steve.

"Hell's a-comin' in the mountains if that robber up here at the capital
steals the next election for governor," said Jason, and Steve looked up
quickly and with some uneasiness. He himself had heard vaguely that
somebody, somewhere, and in some way, had robbed his own party of their
rights and would go on robbing at the polls, but this new Jason seemed
to know all about it, so Steve nodded wisely.

"Yes, my feller."

Through town they drove, and when they started out into the country
they met more wagons of tobacco coming in.

"How's the folks in the mountains?"

"About the same as usual," said the boy, "Grandpap's poorly. The war's
over just now--folks 'r' busy makin' money. Uncle Arch's still takin'
up options. The railroad's comin' up the river"--the lad's face
darkened--"an' land's sellin' fer three times as much as you sold me
out fer."

Steve's face darkened too, but he was silent.

"Found out yit who killed yo' daddy?"

Jason's answer was short.

"If I had I wouldn't tell you."

"Must be purty good shot now?"

"I hain't shot a pistol off fer four year," said the lad again shortly,
and Steve stared.

"Whut devilmint are you in up here now?" asked Jason calmly and with no
apparent notice of the start Steve gave.

"Who's been a-tellin' you lies about me?" asked Steve with angry
suspicion.

"I hain't heerd a word," said Jason  coolly. "I bet you burned that
toll-gate the morning I left here. Thar's devilmint goin' on everywhar,
an' if there's any around you I know you can't keep out o' it."

Steve laughed with relief.

"You can't git away with devilmint here like you can in the mountains,
an' I'm 'tendin' to my own business."

Jason made no comment and Steve went on:

"I've paid fer this hoss an' buggy an' I got things hung up at home an'
a leetle money in the bank, an' yo' ma says she wouldn't go back to the
mountains fer nothin'."

"How's Mavis?" asked Jason abruptly.

"Reckon you wouldn't know her. She's al'ays runnin' aroun' with that
Pendleton boy an' gal, an' she's chuck-full o' new-fangled notions.
She's the purtiest gal I ever seed, an'," he added slyly, "looks like
that Pendleton boy's plumb crazy 'bout her."

Jason made no answer and showed no sign of interest, much less
jealousy, and yet, though he was thinking of the Pendleton girl and
wanted to ask some question about her, a little inconsistent rankling
started deep within him at the news of Mavis's disloyalty to him. They
were approaching the lane that led to Steve's house now, and beyond the
big twin houses were visible.

"Yo' Uncle Arch's been here a good deal, an' he's tuk a powerful fancy
to Mavis an' he's goin' to send her to the same college school in town
whar you're goin'. Marjorie and Gray is a-goin' thar too, I reckon."

Jason's heart beat fast at these words. Gray had the start of him, but
he would give the Blue-grass boy a race now in school and without. As
they turned into the lane, he could see the woods--could almost see the
tree around which he had circled drunk, raging, and shooting his
pistol, and his face burned with the memory. And over in the hollow he
had met Marjorie on her pony, and he could see the tears in her eyes,
hear her voice, and feel the clasp of her hand again. Though neither
knew it, a new life had started for him there and then. He had kept his
promise, and he wondered if she would remember and be glad.

His mother was on the porch, waiting and watching for him, with one
hand shading her eyes. She rushed for the gate, and when he stepped
slowly from the buggy she gave a look of wondering surprise and pride,
burst into tears, and for the first time in her life threw her arms
around him and kissed him, to his great confusion and shame. In the
doorway stood a tall, slender girl with a mass of black hair, and she,
too, with shining eyes rushed toward him, stopping defiantly short
within a few feet of him when she met his cool, clear gaze, and,
without even speaking his name, held out her hand. Then with intuitive
suspicion she flashed a look at Steve and knew that his tongue had been
wagging. She flushed angrily, but with feminine swiftness caught her
lost poise and, lifting her head, smiled.

"I wouldn't 'a' known ye," she said.

"An' I wouldn't 'a' known you," said Jason.

The girl said no more, and the father looked at his daughter and the
mother at her son, puzzled by the domestic tragedy so common in this
land of ours, where the gates of opportunity swing wide for the passing
on of the young. But of the two, Steve Hawn was the more puzzled and
uneasy, for Jason, like himself, was a product of the hills and had had
less chance than even he to know the outside world.

The older mountaineer wore store clothes, but so did Jason. He had gone
to meet the boy, self-assured and with the purpose of patronage and
counsel, and he had met more assurance than his own and a calm air of
superiority 

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