I.

It was a great property, reckoned by metes and bounds. A day's journey

might hardly suffice to traverse the whole of his domain. Yet there

was no commensurate money value attaching to these leagues of mountain

wilderness, that bore indeed a merely nominal price, and Kenneth

Kenniston's was hardly the temperament to experience an æsthetic

gratulation that his were those majestic domes which touched the clouds

and withstood the lightnings and lifted up an awesome voice to answer

the thunder, or that his title-deeds called for all the vast slopes

thence down to the unimagined abysses of the abandoned mine in the

depths of the gorge. It was the spirit of speculation that informed

his glance with a certain respect for them, as he turned his eye

upon the mountains, and bethought himself how these austere craggy

splendors were calculated to impress the shallow gaze of the wandering

human swallow. He even appraised, in the interest of possible summer

sojourners, the rare, pure, soft air with which his lungs expanded.

Science was presently set a-prying about the margins of rocky springs,

hitherto undiscovered and unnoticed save by oread or deer; a few

blasts of dynamite, a great outgushing of exhaustless mineral waters,

a triumphant chemical analysis ensued, and an infusion of enthusiasm

began to pervade his consciousness. Such resources--infinitely smaller

resources--elsewhere in the world meant a fortune; why not here?

He was an architect by profession, and the aspect of the world seemed

to him parceled out in available sites. It cost his imagination,

trained by study and enriched by travel, no conscious effort to

perceive standing in fair proportions, turreted and terraced, finished

to the last finial, the perfected structure of his projected summer

hotel, on that level space above craggy heights, facing the moon and

the valley, with the background of still greater heights, ever rising,

heavily wooded, to the peak towering above. He saw it, as a true

architect, in completion; as the wren sees his builded nest, not as the

single straw or wisp of hair. Yet the day of small things must needs be

overpassed,--of straws and wisps,--of struts and purlins, plates and

tie-beams. His day of small things was full of wrangling and bitter

bafflings, heart-burnings and discouragements. His partners in the

undertaking had not been induced to cast their lot with his save by the

exercise of infinite suavities of crafty eloquence, overpowering doubt

and fear, and indisputable demonstrations of disproportionate profits

in the very air. One was a seer in a commercial sort, an adept in

prognosticating unexpected expenses for which no covenant of provision

had been entered into, and he beheld full-armed disaster menacing every

plan save that of his own preference. The other had no imagination

whatever, architectural or otherwise. He recognized no needs which

required adornment, and measured the taste of the public by his own

disposition to spend money to gratify it. That Kenniston's plans

should have come through the ordeal of their councils, with the ever

lopping-off incidents common to the moneyed non-professional, retaining

any element of symmetry or grace or beauty argued much for their

pristine value. He regarded them for a time with a sort of pity and

affronted tenderness for their maimed estate, but little by little the

original intentions faded from his mental view, and he could see with

renewed satisfaction the flag flying from the tower without remembering

that he had held this octagonal gaud upon the building by main force,

as it were, against the iconoclastic grasp of the practical men.

Nevertheless he was relieved to be free from their presence. He felt

that it was well that their legitimate business--one as a stock-broker,

the other a real-estate agent--held them to their desks in the city of

Bretonville. The manifest purpose of their creation, he thought, was

fully served in their furnishing forth their quota of the sinews of

war. He was much younger than either, but he had learned something

beyond their knowledge in this internecine strife, and when it

became necessary to provide for them occupation, to prevent further

interference in the venture which had come to be of most hopeful

interest to both, he wrote to them touching the finding of a suitable

man to keep the hotel when built, certain that in this quest for a

Boniface he had set them by the ears, and relying on their different

temperaments to keep them wrangling together and to leave him in peace.

Every sylvan detail of the scene pleased his artistic and receptive

sense, as he stood on the great natural terrace, the site of the

future building, and surveyed the landscape. It was a phenomenally

felicitous opportunity. This plateau projected from a lateral spur of

the Great Smoky chain, and faced the southeast. Thus the main body of

the mountain range, diagonally across the Cove, seemed strangely near

at hand; one could study its chasms and abysses, its jungles of laurel

and vast forests, as it were from mid-air; it was the point of view of

a bird. Through a gap lower down, the parallel lines of the eastern

ranges became visible, elsewhere hidden by the great boundary ridge,--a

wonderful fantasy painted in every gradation of blue, from the slaty

grayish hue near at hand under the shadow of a cloud, the velvet-like

tones of ultramarine beyond, and still further the metallic hardness

of tint as of lapis lazuli, till the most delicate azure outline of

peaks faintly obliterated its identity against the azure eastern sky.

All unflushed the sky was here, although to the right the clouds were

red above the western mountains. They closely hemmed in the Cove,

heavy, massive, purple and bronze and deeply green, in such limited

latitude of color as their lowering shadows would permit. Far down

their slopes the river ran, threading the deep forests with elusive

steely glimmers. He could not hear its voice, but from great cliffs

hard by the silvery melody of the mineral springs beat upon the air

with a rhythm inexpressibly sweet and wild and alluring. So definite

it was that it seemed odd that one did not "catch the tune." In an

open space some scattered sheep were feeding,--the effect pastoral

and pictorial. The whole scene, with its blended solemnity and beauty

and dignity, would well accord with the castellated edifice his fancy

had set in its midst. It might indeed be a mediæval world upon which

the windows should look, instead of the prosaic nineteenth century,

so far it would appear from sordid to-day, so well would the fashion

of the building aid the illusion, were it not for a section of the

foreground immediately below the cliffs of the terrace, where there

stood, bare and open and unsheltered, a primitive log cabin, a stretch

of cornfields, a horse-lot, a pig-pen, and all the accessories of

most modern and unimpressive American poverty and ignorance. Being

near, and bearing human significance, the prosaic little home seemed

the most salient point, in its incongruity, in the whole magnificent

landscape. The methods of the mountaineer furthered, too, the effect

of antagonism. Along the side of one of the ranges near at hand, a

great gaunt blackened area bore token of a "fire-scald." Kenniston's

eyes rested frowningly on this deep burnt scar upon the face of

nature. It came from the pernicious habit of "setting out fire in the

woods" in the autumn, to burn away the undergrowth and dead leaves,

in order to give freer pasturage to wandering cattle. Here, as is not

unfrequently the case, the fire, instead of merely consuming leaves,

twigs, and shoots, had gathered strength and fury, burning the giant

trees to great blackened, deadened skeletons, bleakly standing, and had

devastated some hundred acres. He could see in the sparse shadows the

cattle feeding on the lush herbage, and he ground his teeth to reflect

upon the alarm any future conflagration would spread among the autumnal

lingerers of summer sojourners and the catastrophe that might ensue to

the chateau on the rocks.

"We _must_ buy him out," he muttered. "He _must_ be made to

go."

Kenniston's heart was as heavy with presage as if his flimsy chateau

stood on the cliffs behind him; for it was not to be mediæval in point

of strength of materials.

The project of buying out Luther Tems seemed hardly so feasible as when

first presented to the minds of the company. The proposition to this

effect had already been made to the astounded mountaineer, and rejected

with a plump No. A second and better considered effort, coupled with a

disproportionately large pecuniary consideration, had fared no better.

There Luther Tems was, and there he meant to stay, as his father and

his grandfather had before him to a great age, till Death bethought

himself at last of these loiterers in so obscure a corner of the world,

and, although belated, gathered them in. The company was now at its

wits' end. The place was an eyesore, a trail of the serpent in this

seeming Paradise. It was, too, a source of danger and discomfort, and

to seek to remove it was one of Kenniston's errands here, as well as

to confer with the contractor, in his dictatorial character as one of

the company rather than the architect. His visit was so timed that

he was on the ground a day or so in advance of his coadjutor, and in

furtherance of his project had asked for quarters in Luther Tems's

house.

Far was it from Luther Tems, the fear of being over-persuaded. He was

a lugubrious presentment of obstinacy, as he sat at his hearthstone.

The immovable determination expressed in the lines of his face and the

curve of his lips was incongruous with the other characteristics of his

aspect. He was not of the gigantic build common among the mountaineers.

He was singularly spare and alert, and there was something in his

movements and in the lines of his figure which betokened that when

endowed with more flesh it had expressed an unusual grace. His

features were absolutely regular, and although the eye, sunken amidst

a multitude of wrinkles and half hidden by the beetling eyebrow, no

longer showed the fine lines of its setting and its pristine color

and brilliancy, and his jaw was lank from the loss of teeth, and

his well-cut lips were contorted over his quid of tobacco, he still

exhibited to the discerning gaze of the architect enough traces of

the beauty of his younger days to justify the feminine sobriquet of

"Lucy." A good joke it had been in the Cove forty years before, but

custom had dulled its edge and hallowed its use, and now he would have

had to think twice before he saw aught incongruous in the appellation.

It was a convenience in some sort, too, and averted misunderstandings,

for his son bore his name of Luther. Although inheriting a share of

his father's good looks, it had been admixed with the "favor" of the

Tates, his mother's people, who were a tall, burly folk. He was heavier

far than his father, and slower at twenty-four than "Lucy" Tems would

be at eighty. The strong resemblance in their faces ended there, for

naught could be more unlike the elder than the meditative composure

with which the younger man sat and smoked his pipe, and now slowly rose

and replenished the fire and seated himself anew. He had nothing in

look or motion of the panther-like, dangerous intimation that informed

the old man's every gesture and glance. But this expressed itself

with a certain supple, feline effect in his daughter, a tall girl,

in whom the beauty of his youth was duplicated. She had the chestnut

hair, the exquisitely fair complexion with its shifting roseate

suffusion, the large beautifully set dark blue eye, the high narrow

forehead from which the hair grew backward, but lying on the temples

in delicate fibrous waves,--all the fine detail that had graced her

father's youth, and that had seemed so wasted on the wild scapegrace

boy of the mountains, merely attaining the recognition of ridicule

among his fellows, and unvalued by its possessor. She wore a dark blue

homespun dress that enhanced her fairness, and she sat in a low chair

in the firelit log room and busied herself, with a monotonous gesture

and a certain sleek aspect, in carding cotton. Kenniston had seen her

previously, and in his preoccupied mind she roused no interest, neither

then nor now.

He sat down by the fire, among them, much nettled to observe that there

was a stranger, a man whom he had never before seen here, ensconced

on the opposite side of the hearth. The shadow of the primitive

mantelshelf obscured his face, and even when the fire flashed up it

barely sufficed to show his burly figure in an attitude of composed

waiting and observation.

His presence added an element of doubt and difficulty to the already

troublous negotiation, and Kenniston, accustomed to civilized methods,

and having expected to carry all before him, felt a sinking of the

heart out of proportion to the value of the property he coveted. He

had, in his experience, conducted delicate and difficult negotiations,

involving large considerations, many parties in interest, and

conflicting claims, to a successful issue. And yet, what enterprise

so unpromising as to buy from a man who will not sell! So did the

half-masked presence of the stranger in the shadow shake his confidence

that he did not at once open the subject nearest his heart. A short

silence ensued upon the greetings, and he was fain to lay hold upon the

weather as a subterfuge.

"It holds fair, colonel," he said.

He used the title in secret derision, as the usual sobriquet of men

of dignity and substance in the lowlands. He had scant faith in the

existence of any discerning perceptions and delicate sentiments in

the minds or hearts of people in homespun; it had served to amuse him

at his first meeting with old Tems, when he had not dreamed that so

uncouth a character had a part to play upon the elaborate stage of

his own future, which was a-building with such care and thought and

hope, and he had laughed in his sleeve to observe the simplicity and

acquiescence with which the fine title was accepted. He intended its

use in no military sense, and he did not learn till afterward that

old Tems bore a veritable title, which he had earned on stricken

battlefields, and had later commanded a band of guerrillas whose name

was a terror and a threat.

Tems took his pipe from between his lips. "It holds fair," he

echoed drawlingly; then, "Dunno fur how long," as if to admonish

any speculator in the weather to be not too happy in a vale of such

incertitude.

"All signs favor!" A sudden singing feminine tone pervaded the

conversation.

Kenniston glanced up. In one corner, a stairway from the attic above

came down into the room. A young girl, whom he had not before noticed,

was sitting on the steps midway. From this coigne of vantage she

overlooked the room, and participated in the conversation when moved to

do so.

Kenniston fancied that from some real or affected rustic shyness

because of his presence she had sought this retirement, for she flushed

deeply at his glance, and bent her head over a piece of rough mending

which she seemed to be perpetrating on a jeans coat with a gigantic

needle and a very coarse thread. She could hardly have seen very well

to set the stitches, and as her side was toward him he could ill

distinguish her face for the shadow and her industrious attitude and

her falling hair.

Julia Tems looked up at her with a laughing glance, half raillery, half

sneer. But the brother took up the question with an air of contention;

he wanted rain for his corn crop, and he believed the clouds must

surely hold it in trust for him.

"The fog war a-getherin' along the mountings this evenin', an' I seen

'bout a hour ago a thunder-head a-loafin' round over Piomingo," he

averred with a certain bitterness, as if to protest against the arguing

away of these prospects.

"Waal," the singing voice, curiously vibrant, broke forth once more,

"we air likely ter git a good full rain, ez would holp up the crap

'fore long, but we ain't goin' ter hev no steady set o' bad weather

now. Signs don't favor it."

The old man again took his pipe from his mouth.

"Ye-es. An' a body mought b'lieve from yer talk that ef Satan war ter

cotch us by the right leg this week, he'd be mighty likely ter turn us

loose by the lef leg nex' week." He laughed sarcastically. "All of us

air s'prisin' apt ter be suited, no matter how things turn out." He

replaced his pipe, adding, with the stem between his teeth, "That's

Ad'licia's notion," and then smoked imperturbably.

The little optimist looked at him with an indignant, affronted gaze for

a moment, then bent once more to her sewing.

She had forgotten Kenniston, and her face was fully revealed in the

moment that she had turned it on her critic,--an oval face, with a

little round unassertive chin, a thin, delicate, aquiline nose, a small

mouth with full lips, the indenture in the upper one so deep as to make

it truly like a bow, and widely opened gray eyes that resembled nothing

so much as moss agates. They were veiled by long, reddish lashes, and

the hair that hung curling down about the nape of her neck was of a

dull copper hue. Her complexion was exceedingly white, and she had that

thin-skinned look which is incompatible with freckles as annuals; in

those milk-white spaces about the eyes were sundry tokens of the sunny

weather which even the dark days of winter would not obliterate. Her

figure was slender, and she did not look strong. She wore a brown

homespun dress, and she bit the coarse thread with a double row of

small perfect white teeth as she addressed herself to threading her big

needle anew.

"Studyin' 'bout the weather, an' gittin' onhappy 'bout yer buildin'?"

demanded old Tems of his guest.

There was a slight twist of the lips, suggestive of covert ridicule on

his part, as he asked the question.

Kenniston was totally unaware of furnishing in his proper person

amusement to the mountaineer, but to his host he seemed a fool more

bountifully endowed with folly than any other specimen of the genus

with whom Tems had ever been brought into contact, and the projected

hotel was accounted a ludicrous impossibility. It was Tems's secret

persuasion that most of the population of this country had been slain

in the war; he had himself seen much slaughter in its grim actuality.

The idea that there were people who would wish to come long journeys

to fill that vast projected structure seemed the most preposterous

vaporing of imbecility.

"Ain't they got nowhar ter bide?" he would demand, in incredulous pity

for the homeless summer birds.

He had come at last to treat it in his own mind as a bubble, a mere

brainless figment, and only his courteous instincts prevented this

from becoming apparent, although now and again it was perilously near

revelation.

"Well, no; I think the weather won't affect my building for a good

while yet," answered Kenniston. Then, with a sudden afterthought, and

perceiving the opening, "I'm troubled, though, about the blasting for

the coal cellars and wine cellar. There will of necessity be quite

an avalanche of fragments of the rock falling into the valley, and I

wanted to give you warning of it before it begins."

The look of attention deepened on the old face. The thin old head

suavely nodded.

"Thanky, sir. I feel obligated." And old Tems relapsed into silence.

Kenniston was baffled for a moment, but presently he returned to the

charge.

"You and your family could leave the premises while the blasting was in

progress. It might be inconvenient, but"--

"Yes--ye-es--ef so minded," the ancient householder acquiesced.

"By all means," Kenniston pursued with more energy, stroking his brown

whiskers with one hand, while he looked, keenly interrogative, at his

interlocutor. "There might be danger, positive danger, in remaining."

Then, seeking an ally, and taking hope from the quiescent silence of

the stranger in the corner, "_You_ agree with me surely?"

The stranger laughed, a round, vigorous, elastic tone.

"Waal, I reckon old Cap'n Lucy is about ez good a jedge ez ter the

dangers in dealin' in gunpowder ez ye'll meet up with this side o'

Jordan. I'd be willin' ter leave sech ter him."

"Of course--of course," Kenniston agreed hastily. "Only I am anxious to

have no sort of responsibility,--moral responsibility, I mean,--in case

of an accident to members of his family."

He reflected that two of these were feminine, that the sex is to a unit

a coward by open confession, and he sought to play upon their fears.

But once more Adelicia interfered to show the more hopeful side of

things.

"It's toler'ble fur from hyar, a right good piece," she turned her head

to say before she again bit the thread.

"Not from the site of the first blasting; the wine cellar will be under

the billiard-room, which will be in the pavilion at this end of the

bluffs." He had waxed warm, excited. "The rock could easily be flung

as far as this, and even if no human life were endangered, might kill

horses or cows, or crash through the roof, or break down the chimney."

"Waal, the comp'ny is a good, solid, solvent comp'ny, ain't it?" said

the man in the corner unexpectedly,--"respons'ble in damages?"

Kenniston recoiled suddenly, and Tems pricked up his ears, like the old

war-horse that he was. The prospect of conflict in whatever sort was

grateful to his senses, and he snuffed the battle from afar. In this,

too, he saw his defense and his opportunity. Kenniston would hardly

have conceived it possible that, with such inconsiderable adversaries,

he could be routed in diplomacy. It was not, however, to bring matters

to this point of view that his schemes were designed.

"I hope there will be no need for a demand for damages," he said

stiffly. Then, driven back upon his last resource, the simple truth, he

continued, turning toward the man in the corner, "It has been partly to

avert all dangers and troubles that the company has been trying to buy

out Mr. Tems, at his own price."

"My h'a'thstone hain't got no price," said old Tems acridly.

Kenniston had thrown himself back in his chair with a dogged

exasperation of manner. His hands were thrust into the pockets of his

short flannel coat. His square chin, glimpsed in the parting of his

full beard, was deeply sunken in its lustrous fibres. His lowering blue

eyes were fixed on the fire, all aglow, for at this altitude the chill

summer nights cannot dispense with the smouldering back-log. His legs,

in their somewhat worn integuments of dark flannel and long boots,--for

there are penalties to footgear and garb in clambering about these

rough mountains,--were stretched out before him, and Adelicia's cat

found them convenient to rub against, as she arched her back and purred

in the dull red light. He felt at the moment irritated beyond measure.

This idea of a lawsuit, craftily interjected by the stranger whom he

himself had called into the conversation, might seriously embarrass

the proceedings of the company. It could be held _in terrorem_ at

every point. Nay, it might incite Tems to seek out occasion to make a

pretext of injury. It added a prospect of indefinite discomfort and

jeopardy to the already harassed present.

"I kin b'lieve that, Cap'n Lucy,--I kin b'lieve that," said the

stranger, with a sudden outpouring of his full, mellow, rich voice.

Its sonorousness and sweetness struck Kenniston only vaguely then, but

he remembered it afterward. "Ye want yer _home_, an' the company

wants yer _hut_."

"I don't want thar money,--ain't got no cur'osity 'bout the color of

it," old Tems said tartly.

Neither of the younger Temses uttered a word. Luther smoked

imperturbably, and Julia, as sleek, as lithe, as supple as a panther,

bent her beautiful, clear-cut, distinct face above the cards, which

she moved with a flexible elasticity that made it seem no labor.

Every line about her was sharply drawn; the very plaits of her glossy

hair showed their separate strands, over and under and over again, in

the coil at the back of her head. Against the dark wall, she had a

fixity, a definiteness of effect, like a cameo, in contrast with the

somewhat tousled head which Adelicia held back to observe her completed

industry. She lifted the mended coat in both hands before her, and

contemplated the patch, set on indeed as if it should never come off

again, but with what affront to the art of fine needlework!

She was not so absorbed, however, as to be unmindful of the disaffected

state of feeling in the room below, and she must needs seek to improve

it.

"We ain't so mighty easy tarrified, nohow," she remarked, suavely

addressing the information more directly to Kenniston's pretended fears

for their safety. "An' ez ter rocks fallin' an' sech,"--she turned her

head askew to better observe the effect of the flagrant patch,--"I hev

tuk notice ez trees streck by lightning mostly falls whar thar ain't no

house."

"'Kase thar be mighty few houses whar the trees be lef'," observed old

Tems, whose contradictory faculties were called into play every time

she spoke.

"Waal, fower hev fell, lightning-streck, sence we-uns hev been a-livin'

hyar, an' nare one teched us," she argued.

Kenniston caught his breath. "How long have you been living here,

colonel?" The secret gibe came back to him with the sudden secret

renewal of his hope.

"Five year, or thereabout," growled old Tems.

"Five year this comin' fall," put in Adelicia, with exactitude. "We-uns

lived then nigher sunrise, on the flat o' the mounting, over thar." She

nodded with her wealth of bronze curls toward the east to indicate the

direction of the locality.

"And if you would move then, colonel, why not now?" demanded Kenniston.

It seemed as if old Tems would not reply. So deep a scowl had

corrugated his face that in its wizard-like aspect not the faintest

vestige of his famous ancient beauty remained.

"Burnt out," he growled at last.

"The fire-scald, ye see," explained Adelicia, turning her oval face

upon Kenniston.

It had an old-fashioned, even a foreign cast, was his superficial

thought, as he gazed up at her in the dusky shadows of the staircase;

it reminded him of some antique miniature. But his recognized idea was

expressed in the words, echoed in surprise and with a touch of dismay,

"The fire-scald!"

"Fire war set out in the woods ter burn the bresh; but the wind sprung

up, it did, an' the fire tuk the house an' fence an' all. Ye mus' hev

noticed the fire-scald over yon?" Once more she nodded her head in

intimation of the direction. "Then we-uns moved hyar an' raised this

house."

Old Tems's surly, disaffected look caught her attention. "But this hyar

house air a heap better 'n the burnt one; that war old, fur true, an' I

tell ye the wind used ter shake it whenst stormin'. Roof leaked, too.

Roof war so old that the clapboards war fastened on with wooden paigs

stiddier nails. My great-gran'dad--Cap'n Lucy's gran'dad--didn't hev

much modern improvemints, leastwise in blacksmith's gear, when he kem

hyar ter settle from old Car'liny."

She glanced down, smiling. Her strangely old-fashioned little face was

lovely in smiling, but Kenniston did not heed; he did not even hear her

words; he was absorbed in a train of thought that came to him as she

talked.

She looked slightly ill at ease for a moment, perceiving the defection

of his attention; then, as if to make the best of it, she turned her

head and glanced over her shoulder at the man in the corner.

"Ye hev hearn that?" she said.

He nodded. She saw the gleam of his full blue eye. "They called East

Tennessee the 'Washington Deestric',' arter them days," he said, his

big voice booming out. Then he went on to tell of an old house which he

knew, in which wooden pegs also served as nails, as a set-off, it might

seem, to the ancient dwelling that perished in the "fire-scald," and

presently he was wrangling with old Tems as to the precise route that

certain early settlers were said to have taken through the mountains,

in which discussion even the silent Luther joined, and Kenniston was

left undisturbed to his thoughts.

These thoughts were significant enough. He had seen this vast property

of his only once before in all the years that it had been in his

possession. It had descended to him in due course, with the rest of the

paternal estate, at the death of his father, who had been a successful

merchant of Bretonville. He had had some little but well-restrained

inclination for speculation, and these miles of mountain fastnesses

were a single instance of it, looking to the future development of

mineral resources. The abandoned mine in the gorge expressed the

failure of hopes of silver and lead, which had led him only for a

little while and only a short distance. He himself had never laid

eyes on his purchase; but once, in a college vacation, the son, on a

pedestrian tour, had explored to some purpose the woods up and down

these steeps and across the line. Kenniston remembered now for the

first time how the face of the country had impressed him then, for the

fire-scald had so altered its aspect. The slope where the quaint little

ante-Revolutionary house was perched had then seemed high and steep. In

building anew, Luther Tems had selected a site on more level ground,

considerably removed from the area of the burnt district. Possibly

the fear of disaster when those blackened and decaying trees should

finally complete their doom and fall, or the vicinage of springs for

the essential water supply for man and beast, had served to influence

his decision; but he had certainly made a very considerable journey

from his former situation, and cut a large cantle out of the Cove in

his present settlement.

Kenniston's mind was hard upon the trail of the boundary lines, as

his absorbed eyes dwelt on the red fire. They were ill defined in his

memory, for when the great body of a man's land, numbering thousands of

acres, bears a merely nominal price, a few furlongs amiss here or there

in the wild jungle of the laurel are hardly worth the counting. In this

particular instance the accuracy of metes and bounds made a difference

all apart from actual values. It was his recollection that his lines

included all those slopes to the "backbone," a high craggy ridge that

ran like a spinal column adown the mountain mass. If this were the

case, old Tems had inadvertently set up his staff of rest on his

neighbor's land, was himself a mere trespasser, and might be ejected

without difficulty in due process of law.

Kenniston stirred uneasily as he contemplated this possibility. In its

extreme unpopularity there was a very definite menace. He could ill

afford to antagonize the whole countryside. The lawless, illogical

mountain population would be arrayed as a unit against his interests.

Even single-handed, old Cap'n Lucy seemed formidable, when active

aggressions were contemplated. And he could appreciate, too, the

seeming injustice, from the rustic standpoint, that, for the frivolous

and flippant desire of keeping the landscape sightly for the fastidious

gaze of the gentlefolk, an old man and his family must be turned out

of house and home. Kenniston knew that although he might pay the full

value of Cap'n Lucy's improvements, the popular censor would account

this naught if the mountaineer were forced to quit his home against his

will.

Nevertheless law is law, and Kenniston could easily forecast the

triumphant result of a legal arbitrament. Tems had not been ensconced

here, within his own inclosures, claiming as his own, long enough to

acquire any title under the statute of limitations, even if he could

establish adverse possession. The property was his own, and he would

satisfy even every moral claim upon him in paying the interloper the

full value of his improvements. At all events he would have the line

run out, and perhaps the land formally processioned.

At the idea of prompt action in the matter, his full red lips, only

partially visible through his beard and mustache, were pressed together

firmly; his teeth met with a certain stiffening of the jaw into a

hard, determined expression; his eyes were cast up suddenly over the

primitive humble interior of the cabin with a certain impatience of

its uncouthness, so at variance with the gala trim of modern comforts,

so homely, so American, so hopelessly, desperately, the presentment

of the unprogressive backwoods. Built five years ago, said they!

It might have graced the "Washington Deestric'." His white teeth

showed, as he half sneered and half laughed. He would, if he might,

with a wave of the hand, have swept it and all it represented out of

existence; nay, into oblivion. As his eyes came once more to their

former point of rest, the fire, they suddenly encountered the intent

gaze of the man in the corner. It discomfited Kenniston in some sort,

although he could not have said why. His glance fell; he nervously

uncrossed and recrossed his legs, and thrust his hands deeper into

his pockets. A vague sense of sustaining covert enmity had begun to

pervade his consciousness. He could not say whether this were induced

by the mere inception of the unpopular idea of eviction, or whether

it were a subtle perception of something antagonistic in the mental

attitude toward him of the composed, watchful man who sat in the

corner. It was not a furtive observation. It dwelt upon him openly,

deliberately, steadily. It held no element of offensiveness; it was

so calm, so incidental, so apparently, so naturally, the concomitant

of the thoughtful, contemplative pipe, which now and again his hand

steadied, or removed to release a wreath of the strong tobacco smoke

which pervaded the apartment. Yet Kenniston felt, oddly enough,

that it was not an incidental observation. It was charged with much

discernment. A discriminating analysis was, he instinctively knew,

coupled with it. He began, on his part, to more definitely gauge the

two or three fragmentary contributions which the stranger had flung

into the talk. The allusion to the solvency of a company and its

responsibility in damages savored of a knowledge far beyond the ken

of the Cove, this region of primitive barter where there is neither

currency nor commerce; where the operations of far-away courts are

but faintly echoed, as of retribution overtaking some reckless and

unwary criminal, and the provisions of the law seem merely futile and

disregarded devices of lawyers who seek to live upon the people by

their enforcement. Then the crafty contrast of the differing estimates

of the house, the one as a home, the other as a hut, intimated some

definite capacity to play upon the springs of human emotions. He

wondered if he had ever before seen this man. He had a good memory,

but he did not charge it with the various mountaineers he met, and

sometimes he forgot their names and occasionally their personality.

He was restive under this slow, reflective gaze, and he pushed back

his chair suddenly and walked away to the door. It was open and widely

flaring, and he stood there as if scanning the weather signs.

For so long he had seen the castellated walls of his new building rise

upon the great natural terrace of the mountain, above the series of

crags, that he experienced a sort of subacute surprise to mark the

loneliness and melancholy of the landscape. Only the pinnacles of

the mists glimmered in the moon, as unsubstantial as the turrets of

his fancy. Below were all the darkling spaces of the night-shadowed

forests. Above, the heavily wooded slopes loomed vaguely in the

dim light, for the moon was in her first quarter, here showing the

gaunt face of a crag, and there a ravine made visible by thronging

spectre-like vapors. The stars were bright. Near the great dome he

marked the scintillating circlet of the Northern Crown; its splendors

seemed enhanced, he thought, by the vicinage of that towering densely

dark mass beneath. So still it all was! He heard the silvery tinkle of

the liberated mountain springs near his own site sounding with such

freshness, with such elfin spontaneity, with such flexible fantasies

of cadence, that one would have imagined he must surely have bethought

him how featly the chorusing oreads were singing; it only brought to

his mind anew the chemical analysis, and the hordes of valetudinarians

waiting to bring all their ills, real and imaginary, to lay them, with

more valuable considerations, at the shrine of his Spa.

His sense of difficulties and discouragements took on a new lease, and

as he turned impatiently away from the door he almost ran against young

Luther Tems, who had come to gaze upon the clouds with that humble,

expectant wistfulness characteristic of those votaries of the weather,

the farmer class.

"Would you-uns jedge thar war rain in that batch o' clouds settin'

ter the south?" he drawled seductively, as if he sought to influence

favorably the unprejudiced opinion he asked.

"I'm no judge of weather signs," Kenniston returned succinctly,

although in another mood it would have suited well his satiric bent to

invent and promulgate a formula of fictitious barometrical science.

As he glanced loweringly toward the fireside group, thrusting his

hands into his pockets and advancing with long steps to his former

chair, he was quick to observe that the man in the corner seemed

to have determined on a leisurely departure. He had risen, and was

returning to his pocket a brier-root pipe, taking the sedulous care

to knock all the ashes out of it on the jamb of the fireplace, which

betrays him whose pocket linings have more than once been the scene

of an incipient conflagration. Kenniston regarded him, as he stood in

the full light, with a disaffected interest, a sort of responsive

enmity. And yet there was nothing of itself inimical in this man's

bearing. On the contrary, suggestions of good fellowship predominated

in his open manner and clear blue eye. He was exceedingly tall, not

judging by Cap'n Lucy's elegant and slight proportions, nor by the

burlier Luther's height, but by actual measurement. It had been long

since he had shaved,--his full yellow beard hung like a golden fleece

far down over the breast of his brown jeans coat; his long, straight

yellow hair, of the same tint, had its edges upturned in the semblance

of curl by the obstacle of his collar. He had a large, bony, hooked

nose, which gave a certain strength to his countenance. The fashion of

the feature was such as to suggest sagacity in some sort, as of keen

instinctive faculties, but its expression was as ferocious as that of

an eagle's beak. His mustache hid his lips and was lost in his beard.

He wore great spurred boots drawn high over his brown jeans trousers,

and a wide-brimmed black wool hat. A faded red handkerchief about his

neck now and again showed amidst the hirsute abundance, for he turned

his head quickly and vigilantly. He had an air of self-confidence

which was somewhat imposing. It constrained in his interlocutor a sort

of reluctant acceptance of his own estimate of himself. Kenniston,

looking at him with an unacknowledged respect for the untrained natural

forces his personality expressed, felt him to be formidable; how, or

why, or when it was not manifest, nor in what sort his conciliation

might be compassed, nor how it should be worth the effort. His bland

phrases of departure set the man of etiquette ill at ease. Kenniston

was accustomed to uncouthness in the mountaineers, even to lowering

looks and open expressions of enmity when he or his plans impinged

on their prejudices; polite duplicity, the native of drawing-rooms,

seemed strangely out of place in this region of paradisaic simplicity

of feeling and manner. His own acute social sense and his valued

commercial acumen had given him an intuition of this man's aversion

to him or his projects, or both; but his hand was feeling yet the

stranger's cordial grip, and the sonorous invitation, "Obligated ter

hev a visit over at Lost Time," was ringing in his ears.

"Who is that man?" he abruptly demanded of his host, as soon as the

jingle of the spurs and the sound of the horse's hoofs were silent on

the air. Then, seeking to make his question more incidental, he added,

"Seems to be a friend of yours."

Cap'n Lucy and Luther looked at each other, exchanging a grin of

derision. The two girls seemed unaccountably embarrassed.

"Waal, stranger," said the old man, "he's a widower, a sort of

perfessional widower."

Luther broke out laughing with a hearty joviality. It surely was not

he who had been deluded by the clouds and made the sport of the winds;

it hardly seemed possible that he could take so much pleasure in aught

save good prospects of the fruits of the earth.

"He hev gin me an' Luther a heap o' trouble, an' we-uns hev tuk a power

o' counsel tergether ez ter what we-uns war goin' ter do 'bout it," old

Tems continued.

Kenniston, conscious that he had roused some standing joke, cast his

slightly satirical glance from one to the other, and with a sort of

scornful patience waited their pleasure to enlighten him.

Adelicia, with heightened color and an affronted aspect, was making a

great show of inattention; while Julia, with her sleek, deft grace,

went on impassively carding cotton.

"He kems hyar a-visitin' the whole fambly, an' thar he sets an' sets;

an' Luther loses his sleep, till, follerin' the plough nex' day, he

dunno the share from the ploughtail, nor Gee from Haw; mighty nigh fit

ter fall in the furrow, jes' walkin' in his sleep."

Once more Luther's crude boyish laughter rang against the rafters; this

was at all events no somnambulistic demonstration.

"Ef thar was jes' _one_ gal in the fambly, Luther an' me would

git off gyard jewty: but ez fur ez he lets on he jes' kems ter visit

us all,--_all_; an' hyar we hev got ter set, an' watch him cast

sheep's-eyes fust at one gal, then at t'other, till Luther an' me air

plumb cross-eyed, looking two ways at once."

It was a great mutual possession to have so witty a father and so

appreciative a son.

"A' fust," continued the old man, when the filial hilarity had somewhat

subsided, "I jes' felt like I couldn't spar' either o' the gals.

Whenst my darter was born, the fust thing I done war ter buy me a

shootin' iron, express fur the fust feller ez kem a-sidlin' round,

talkin' 'bout marryin' her, an' takin' her away, an' tryin' ter make

her b'lieve ez he was a finer feller 'n her own dad: an' I didn't

know--the insurance o' some folks is powerful survigrous--but he

_mought_ set up ter purtend ter be _better lookin'_!"

His daughter might seem to have shown her appreciation of his famous

good looks by adopting them all. As she lifted her eyes and smiled

upon the narrator, the brilliant and spirited beauty of her face might

indeed be a welcome reminiscence of the time when he, too, wore so fair

a guise, and might impart a zestful relish of the resemblance.

"An' then Ad'licia, she kem hyar when her mother, my sister Amandy,

died. My sister hed married a second time, a mighty mean man, an'

whenst I tuk Ad'licia--she war 'bout three year old--I jes' said, 'Yer

mam didn't hev much jedgmint in marryin', an' I reckon ye'll take the

failin' arter her; an' ye'll show sech jedgmint ez ye kin l'arn in

marryin' nobody.' An' she agreed: she warn't very young at three, jes'

sorter youngish; an' though people mought think she hedn't hed a chance

ter view the world on sech a p'int, she hed her senses powerful well

in hand. So we made a solemn promise. An' I felt plumb sot up till

lately. I don't want nare one of 'em ter marry. A fust-rate man ain't

wuth a fifth-rate woman, much less a fust-rate woman," he declared

chivalrously. "Leastwise, ye can't git the gals' daddies ter think so.

An' now, jes' ez we air all so sot an' stiddy in our minds, hyar kems

this widower, this _perfessional_ widower; fur he don't show no

signs o' bein' nuthin' else! An' we dunno whether he kems ter listen at

Julia hold her tongue, or Ad'licia talk, or hear Luther praise God fur

the weather, or ter git my best advice on politics. We'd do ennything

ter git shet o' him. He mought hev air one o' the gals, ef he'd only

say _which_."

And he chuckled as he gazed into the fire.

"What's his business? Farmer, I suppose?" suggested Kenniston.

"Naw; he hev got a leetle store,--powerful leetle trade, 'count o' the

cross-roads store at the settlemint, though he trades right smart.

Liberal, too. He'll take ennything,--load o' corn, load o' wood, sech

like heavy truck ez thar ain't no sale fur ginerally, 'count o' the

wagonin' an' roads bein' so heavy. Whenst you-uns git yer railroad

put through,"--he gave him a rallying wink at this aberration, as he

esteemed the projected narrow gauge,--"ye'll mend all that."

"Oh, yes; you'll be in touch with the markets of the world then," said

Kenniston, with his satiric laugh. "Only a little question of freight

rates between you and New York."

This sarcasm did not cut so deeply as one might imagine. It would have

been impossible to insert the idea--save with an axe--into old "Lucy"

Tems's brain that New York was more important and metropolitan than

Colbury, or essentially more remote.

"This Lorenzo Taft ain't been so sociable till lately. That's what

makes me call him a _perfessional_ widower," old Tems went on,

with a peculiar relish for the designation. "He hev two childern, gal

an' boy, an' the gal hev been with her gran'mam down in Blount County

till the old woman died; an' now he hev got 'Sis,' ez he calls her,

with him, an' he wants a step-mammy fur her! He ain't a-courtin' a wife

fur hisself; he's courtin' a step-mammy fur 'Sis.' An' in course his

sheep's-eyes would go cornsider'ble furder with the gals than they do,

ef they didn't know that he air jes' out a-trappin' fur 'Sis.'"

"Waal," said Adelicia suddenly, "I dunno ez folks oughter think hard

of him fur that, 'kase 'Sis' did look powerful lonesome an' pitiful,

settin' up all by herself 'mongst all the men at the store."

"Thar, now!" exclaimed Cap'n Lucy triumphantly, "makin' excuses fur

folks agin! I told ye ez ye couldn't hold out till bedtime 'thout

excusin' this one fur that, an' t'other one fur which."

"Waal," said Adelicia, "it's a mighty late bedtime."

She was rolling up the coat as carefully as if a first-class triumph of

needlework had been accomplished upon it.

"'Sis' didn't 'pear ter me ter need enny lookin' arter whenst I seen

her," said old Tems heartlessly. "She 'peared ter be some fower or

five hunderd year old, an' stiddy an' settled ter accommodate."

"She be 'bout ten year old," said Adelicia gravely.

"I wonder," said Cap'n Lucy, with a twinkle of the eye, "I _do_

wonder ef that thar pernicious way o' makin' excuses fur folks's

faults would hold out ef Ad'licia war ter set out ter be somebody's

step-mammy!"

Luther suddenly held up his hand with an intent look, bespeaking

silence. The rain was coming. From far away one could hear the steady

march of its serried columns, now amongst the resonant woods, and

now through open spaces, and again threading narrow ravines. A bugle

blast of the wind issued suddenly from a rocky defile, and was silent

again, and once more only the sounds of that resistless multitudinous

advance pervaded the mountain wilderness. Already the influx of air

from the open door was freighted with dank suggestions commingled with

the odor of dust. For a panic was astir in the myriad particles that

lay in heaps in the sandy road; they seemed to seek a futile flight

in some inadequate current of the air, and were wafted a few paces

along, to fall again upon the ground, and finally to be annihilated

by the vanguard of the great body of the torrents. A tentative drop

here and there on the clapboards of the roof, increasing presently to

a brisk fusillade, and then all individuality of sound was lost in the

tumultuous downpour under which the cabin rocked.

Perhaps it was because he had seldom been brought into such close

intimacy with the elements that Kenniston found little sleep that night

under the reverberating roof. He could touch it by lifting his hand

in the tiny shed-room beneath the eaves, which was devoted to his use

as a guest-chamber. At arm's length, too, with but the thin barrier

of the clapboards intervening, was the wild, riotous rain. He seemed

in the midst of its continuous beat and thunderous splash, as its

aggregations swept from the eaves into the gullies below, so entirely

did its turmoils dominate his senses. Now and again the shrill fanfare

of the triumphant wind sounded, and a broad, innocuous glare of sheet

lightning illumined the little apartment through the multitudinous

crevices between its unplastered boards; for this addition to the

house was not of logs, like the main structure. He could see, too, at

intervals, as he lay in indescribable discomfort on the top of the

big feather bed, the landscape without through the open door; for the

heavy, close air had induced him to set it ajar. He found a certain

interest for a time in these weird illuminations: the great mountains,

slate-tinted in the searching yellow glare, with clouds of white vapor

hanging about them; the rain, visible in myriads of fine lines drawn

perpendicularly from zenith to valley, apparently stationary, as if it

were some permanent investiture of the atmosphere; the little porch,

low-browed, on which the door of his room opened, and which leaked with

a heavy, irregular pattering. Half a dozen dogs were lying there,

having taken refuge from the storm. A scraggy cedar-tree close beyond

held down its moisture-freighted branches, and amongst them he saw once

a great owl, business interrupted for the nonce, staring at him with

big yellow eyes, as it ruffled up its feathers against the rain.

He was conscious of sustaining the steady, sedate gaze of the nocturnal

fowl even when the whole world would disappear as with a bound into the

depths of darkness. As if the sound had been restrained by the presence

of light, the tumult of rain would seem redoubled upon the roof. The

unmannerly elements evidently disturbed no one else in the house. It

was as silent as if no life beat within the walls. The very dogs were

still. One of them, a fat, callow fellow, with an ill-appreciated sense

of a joke, roused them once by facetiously snapping at a sleeping

confrère's tail, set wagging by the propitious happenings of dreamland.

Whether it was that he had interrupted the gustful gnawing of a

visionary bone, or simply that his elder was of a vicious temperament,

he was soundly cuffed, rolled over on his fat, round sides, and sent

shrieking under the house. He came out after some indulgence of vocal

woe on a piercing key, and, perceiving Kenniston, sought to make his

acquaintance. Being a shaggy shepherd, his rain-laden hair diffused

a peculiarly canine odor throughout the little room; he was used to

rebuffs, and it required but a single tweak of the ear to send him,

depressed and discouraged, to prosaic slumbers among his kindred.

The lightnings failed. The world was plunged into unbroken gloom. The

hours wore on into the deeps of the night. Once, as Kenniston was on

the point of losing himself in sleep, he heard a shrill blood-curdling

cry, searching out every nerve of repulsion in his body,--a panther

shrieking from the terraces of his castle in the air. Even the fierce

dogs, lifting their heads to listen, only whined and huddled closer

together. When at last he dreamed, his mind clung close to the theme

that held his waking thoughts. It was of processioning those wild acres

of mountain fastnesses, and the serpentine lengths of the surveyor's

chain seemed alive as the chain-bearers dragged it writhing through

the grass. And again he was taking off the hospitable roof beneath

which he slept, and riving off the doors, and somehow Cap'n Lucy was

curiously helpless to resist this desolation of his roof-tree. But

the man in the corner was plotting against him, and seeking to excite

public animosity; and while he was busy in counterplotting, suddenly

Julia appeared, with a strange face, subtle and insidious and sinister,

leading the panther which he had heard filling the night with terror.

And he was frightened, and awoke.