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IN OLD KENTUCKY
A Story of the Bluegrass and the Mountains Founded on Charles T. Dazey's
Play
by
EDWARD MARSHALL and CHARLES T. DAZEY
Illustrations By CLARENCE ROWE
1910
[Illustration: SHE SAW THE STRANGER BREAK THROUGH THE UNDERGROWTH ABOUT
THE POOL.]
ILLUSTRATIONS.
She saw the stranger break through the undergrowth
about the pool. (Frontispiece)
A mighty leap had carried them beyond the blazing barrier.
"No man can cross this bridge, unless--unless--"
"Back! back! I'm a-comin' with Queen Bess!"
"I'm standin' face to face with my own father's murderer--Lem Lindsay."
CHAPTER I.
She was coming, singing, down the side of Nebo Mountain--"Old
Nebo"--mounted on an ox. Sun-kissed and rich her coloring; her flowing
hair was like spun light; her arms, bare to the elbows and above, might
have been the models to drive a sculptor to despair, as their muscles
played like pulsing liquid beneath the tinted, velvet skin of wrists and
forearms; her short skirt bared her shapely legs above the ankles
half-way to the knees; her feet, never pinched by shoes and now quite
bare, slender, graceful, patrician in their modelling, in strong
contrast to the linsey-woolsey of her gown and rough surroundings, were
as dainty as a dancing girl's in ancient Athens.
The ox, less stolid than is common with his kind, doubtless because of
ease of life, swung down the rocky path at a good gait, now and then
swaying his head from side to side to nip the tender shoots of freshly
leaving laurel. She sang:
"Woodpecker pecked as a woodpecker will,
Jim thought 'twas a knock on the door of the still,
He grabbed up his gun, and he went for to see,
The woodpecker laughed as he said: 'Jest me!'"
She laughed, now, not at the song, which was purely automatic, but in
sheer joy of living on that wonderful June day in those marvellous
Kentucky mountains. Their loneliness did not depress her; indeed, to
her, they were not lonely, but peopled by a host of lifelong friends who
had greeted her at birth, and would, she had every reason to suppose,
speed her when her end came. Their majesty did not overwhelm her,
although she felt it keenly, and respected it and loved it with a
certain dear, familiar awe. And everywhere about her was the Spring.
Laurel blossomed at the trail's sides, filling the whole air with
fragrance; the tardier blueberry bushes crowding low about it had begun
to show the light green of their bursting buds; young ferns were pushing
through the coverlet of last autumn's leaves which had kept them snug
against the winter's cold, and were beginning to uncurl their delicate
and wondrous spirals; maple and beech were showing their new leaves. The
air was full of bird-notes--the plaintively pleading or exultantly
triumphant cries of the mating season's joy and passion. Filmy clouds,
like scattered, snowy ostrich plumes, floated, far, far up above her on
a sea of richest blue; a fainter blue of springtime haze dimmed the
depths of the great valley which a wide pass gave her vision of off to
the left--and she was rather glad of this, for the haze, while,
certainly, it hid from her much beauty, also hid the ugly scars which
man was making there on nature's face, the cuts and gashes with which
the builders of the new railway were marring the rich pasture lands.
She turned from this to pleasanter and wilder prospects, close at hand,
as her path narrowed, and began to sing again in sheer joyousness of
spirit.
"Mr. Woodpecker laughed as a woodpecker will,
As Jim stood lookin' out of the door of the still,
'Mr. Jim,' he remarked, 'I have come for to ax
_Ef_ you'd give me a worm for my revenue tax'!"
The placid ox, plodding slowly down the trail, did not swerve when the
bushes parted suddenly at one side, as she finished this verse of her
song, but Madge Brierly looked about with a quick alertness. The sound
of the rustling leaves and crackling twigs might mean a friend's
approach, they might mean the coming of one of the very enemies whom the
song had hinted at so lightly, but against whom all the people of the
mountains keep perpetual watch, they might even mean a panther, hungry
after his short rations of the winter and recklessly determined on a
meal at any cost.
But it was Joe Lorey's face which greeted her as she abruptly turned to
see. His coon-skin cap, his jerkin and trousers of faded blue-jeans, his
high, rusty boots matched perfectly with his primitive environments. As
he appeared only the old-fashioned Winchester, which he carried cradled
in his crooked elbow, spoke of the Nineteenth century. His face, though
handsome in a crudely modelled way, had been weather-beaten into a
rough, semi-fierceness by the storms through which he had watched the
mountain-passes during the long winter for the raiders who were ever on
his trail. The slightly reddened lids of his dark, restless eyes, told
of long nights during which the rising fumes of moonshine whisky
stealthily brewing in his furtive still, cave-hidden, had made them
smart and sting. Even as, smilingly, he came up to the strangely mounted
maid, there was on his face the strong trace of that hunted look which
furtive consciousness of continual and unrelenting pursuit gives to the
lawbreaker--even to the lawbreaker who believes the laws he breaks are
wrong and to be violated without sin and righteously.
"That you, Joe?" said the girl. "You skeered me."
"Did I?" he replied, grinning broadly. "Didn't plan to."
From far below there came the crash of bursting powder. Quick and lithe
as a panther the man whirled, ready with his rifle. The girl laughed.
"Nothin' but the railroad blastin' down there in the valley," she said
with amusement. "Ain't you uset to that, yet?"
"No," said he, "I ain't--an' never will be."
His tone was definitely bitter. Never were the "sounds of progress more
ungraciously received than there among the mountains by the folk who
had, hedged in by their fastnesses, become almost a race apart,
ignorant of the outside world's progressions and distrustful and
suspicious of them.
"Where you goin', Madge?" he asked, plodding on beside the lurching ox.
"I ain't tellin'," she said briefly. "But you can go part ways--you can
go fur as th' pasture bars."
"Why can't I go as fur as you go?"
"Because," said she, and laughed. "I reckon maybe that th' water's
started to warm up down in the pool, ain't it?" she cried, and laughed
again.
"Oh!" said he, a bit abashed, and evidently understanding.
They did not pursue the subject.
"What you got there?" he inquired, a few moments later, as they were
approaching the old pasture. He pointed to a package carefully wrapped
in a clean apron, which she hugged beneath her arm.
"Spellin' book," said Madge, as, just before the bars she slid down from
her perch upon the ox. "I'm learnin'."
His lip curled with the mountaineer's contempt for books and all they
have to teach.
"What you want to _learn_ for?"
He had gently shouldered her aside as she had stooped to raise the bars
back to position, and, with a certain crude gallantry, had done the task
himself.
"Bleeged," she said briefly, and then, standing with one brown and
rounded arm upon the topmost rail, paused in consideration of an answer
to his question.
The ox stopped, dully, close within the closed gap in the rough fence.
She went closer to him and patted his side kindly. "Go on, old Buck,"
she said. "I'm through with you for quite a while. Go on and have some
fun or rest, whichever you like best. You certainly can stand a lot of
rest! And here is new spring grass, Buck. I should think you would be
crazy to git at it."
As if he understood, the old ox turned away, and, slowly, with careful
searching for the newest and the tenderest of the forage blades which
had pushed up to meet the pleasant sunshine, showed he was well fed at
all times.
"What do I want to learn for?" the girl repeated, returning to Joe's
question. "Why--why--I don't know, exactly. There's a longin' stirrin'
in me.
"While you was over yon" (she waved her hand in a broad sweep to
indicate the mountain's other side). "I had to go down into town
after--after quite a lot of things." She looked at him somewhat
furtively, as if she feared this statement might give rise to some
unwelcome questioning, but it did not. "I saw what queer things they are
doin'--th' men that work there on that railroad buildin'. Wonderful
things, lots of 'em, and the bed-rock of 'em all was learnin'. I watched
a gang of 'em for near plum half a day. There wasn't a thing they did
that they didn't first read from a sheet of paper about. If they hadn't
had them sheets and if they couldn't read what had been written on 'em,
why, they couldn't never _build_ no railroad. And not only that--they
got all kinds of comfort out of it. They have their books that tell 'em
what other men have done before 'em, they have their newspapers that
tell 'em--_everyday_, Joe--what other men are doin', everywhere, fur as
th' earth is spread.
"They _know_ things, them men do, and they're heaps happier because of
it." She paused, leaning on the old worn fence.
"An' their wimmen knows things," she went on. "I'm goin' to, too. It's
th' greatest comfort that they've got. I'm goin' to _have_ that comfort,
Joe!"
She patted the new spelling book as if it were a precious thing.
"I'm goin' to have that comfort," she continued. "I'm goin' to know th'
ins an' outs o' readin' an'" (she sighed and paused a second, as if this
next seemed more appalling) "an' of writin'. Dellaw! That's hard! All
sorts of curves an' twists an' ups an' downs an' things, an' ev'ry one
means somethin'!"
Joe looked at her, half in admiration, half in apprehension. "You goin'
to git too good fer these here mountings?" he inquired.
She gazed about her with a little intake of the breath, a little sign of
ecstasy, of her appreciation of the wondrous view.
"Too good for these here mountings?" she said thoughtfully. "Learnin'
couldn't make me that! It might show me how to love 'em more. Nothin' in
th' world, Joe, could make me love 'em less!"
He became more definite, a bit insistent. It had been plain, for long,
that it had required some self-control for him to walk as he had walked,
close by her side, without some demonstration of his admiration for her,
to stand there with her at the bars without some sign that in her
presence he found happiness much greater than he had ever known, could
ever know, elsewhere.
"You goin' to git too good fer--me?" he asked.
She turned toward him impulsively. Great friendship shone frankly in her
fine eyes. On her face was that expression of complete and understanding
comradery which one child chum may show another. Almost she said as much
of him as she had said of the surrounding mountains, but there was that
upon his face which stopped her. It was too plain that friendship was
not what he wanted, would not satisfy him. There was a hungry yearning
in his eyes, mute, respectful, worshipful, not for comradery, but for a
closer tie. She had watched this grow in him within the recent months,
with worry and regret. It seemed to her a tragedy that their old
friendship should ever prove inadequate.
"No," she answered gently, "I shall never get too good for you, Joe--for
any of my friends."
He looked, almost with aversion, at the book she held so closely. He
distrusted books. Instinctively he felt them to be enemies.
"If you get them there ideas about learnin', an' all that, you will!" he
gruffly said. "Leastways you'll be goin' off, some day an' leavin'
us--me, the mountings an'--an' all yer friends up here."
An expression of great earnestness, of almost fierce intensity grew in
his face. "Madge," he said, "Madge Brierly, you're makin' a mistake!
You're plannin' things to take you off from here; you're plannin' things
to make you suffer, later on. You're gettin' bluegrass notions, an'
bluegrass notions never did no mounting-born no good." He stepped closer
to her.
The latent fires in his approaching eyes were warning for her and she
stepped back hastily. "Joe Lorey, you behave yourself!" said she. "I--"
"Can't ye see I love ye, Madge?" he asked, and then the fires died down,
leaving in his eyes the pleading, worried look alone. "Why, Madge, I--"
She tried to make a joke of it. "Joe Lorey," she said, laughing, "I
reckon you're _plum_ crazy. An' you ain't givin' me a chance to do what
'twas that I come down for."
"But--"
"I ain't goin' to listen to another word, to-day," said she, and waved
him off.
He went obediently, but slowly and unhappily, his rifle snuggling in
the crook of his left elbow, his heavy boots finding firm footing in the
rough and rocky trail as if by instinct of their own, without assistance
from his brain. A "revenuer," coming up, just then, to bother him about
his still and its unlawful product of raw whisky, would have met small
mercy at his hands. He would have been a bad man, then, to quarrel with.
His temper would have flared at slightest provocation. He would not let
it flare at her; but, unseeing any of the beauties which so vividly
appealed to her, the bitter foretaste of defeat was in his heart; and in
his soul was fierce revolt and disappointment. He had not the slightest
thought, however, of accepting this defeat as final.
Madge watched him go with a look of keen distress upon her fresh and
beautiful young face. She must not let him say what he had almost said,
for she shrank from the thought of wounding him with the answer she felt
in her heart that she would have to make. He had slouched off, half-way
down the trail and out of sight, before she put the thoughts of the
unpleasant situation from her mind and turned again to the great matter
which had brought her there, that day.
With a last glance at the gap in the rail fence, to make sure that it
had been carefully replaced, so that there could be no danger of finding
her ox gone when she returned, she started down the mountain, by a path
different from that which Joe had taken.
She had not gone very far, when, from a clump of bunch-grass just in
front of her, only partly, yet, renewed by the new season, a hare hopped
awkwardly, endeavoring to make off. Its progress was one-sided,
difficult.
Instantly she saw that it was wounded and with a little cry she ran
toward it and caught it. Instinctively the tiny animal seemed to
recognize her as a friend and ceased to struggle. One of its fore legs
had been broken, as she quickly saw.
With a little exclamation of compassion, she sat down upon a hummock,
tore from her skirt a bit of cloth, found, on the ground, two twigs,
made of these crude materials rude splints and bandages, bound the
wounded creature, and sent it on its painful way again. She sighed as,
after having watched it for a moment, she arose.
"Pears like us human bein's always was a-hurtin' somethin'," she
soliloquized, distressed. "Thar some chap has left that rabbit in misery
behind him, and here I've sent Joe Lorey down the mountain with a worse
hurt than it's got." She sighed. "It certain air a funny world!" she
said.
The subject of the wounded rabbit did not leave her mind until she had
clambered down the rocky path half-way to the small stream which she
sought below. She was ever ready with compassion for the suffering,
especially for dumb and helpless suffering animals, and, besides, the
episode had puzzled her. Who was there in those mountains who would
_wound_ a rabbit? Joe might have shot one, as might any other of the
mountain dwellers who chanced to take a sudden fancy for a rabbit stew
for supper, but Joe nor any of the other natives would have left it
wounded and in suffering behind him. Too sure their markmanship, too
careful their use of ammunition, for such a happening as that. Trained
in the logic of the woods, the presence of the little suffering animal
was a proof to her that strangers were about. The people of the
mountains regard all strangers with suspicion. Half-a-dozen times she
stopped to listen, half-a-dozen times she started on again without
having heard an alien sound. Once, from the far distance, she did catch
a faint metallic clinking, as of the striking of a hammer against rock,
but it occurred once only, and she finally attributed it to the
mysterious doings of the railroad people in the valley.
Down the path she sped, now, rapidly and eagerly. It was plain that
something which she planned to do when she reached her destination
filled her with anticipation of delight, for her red lips parted in a
smile of expectation as charming as a little child's, her breath came in
eager pantings not due wholly to the mere exertion of the rapid downward
climb. When, beyond a sudden turn in the rude trail, she suddenly saw
spread before her the smooth waters of a pool, formed by the creek in a
hill-pocket, she cried aloud with pleasure.
"Ah," said she. "Ah! Now here we be!"
But it was not at this first pool she stopped. Leaving the path she
skirted its soft edge, instead, and, after having passed down stream
some twenty yards or more, pushed her skilled way between the little
trees of a dense thicket and into a dim, shadowy woods chamber on
beyond, where lay another pool, velvety, en-dusked, save for the flicker
of the sunlight through dense foliage.
Here her delight was boundless. She ran forward with the eagerness of a
thirsty bird, and, leaning on the bank, supported by bent arms, bent
down and drank with keenest relish of the cool spring waters gathered in
the "cove," then dabbled her brown slender fingers in the shining
depths, watching, with a smile, concentric, widening ripples as they
hurried out across the glassy surface, to the ferned bank beyond. A few
yards away a hidden cascade murmured musically. Through the sparse and
tender foliage of spring above her, the sunlight flickered in bright,
moving patches of golden brilliance, falling on the breast of her rough,
homespun gown, like decorations given by a fairy queen. Around the
water's edges budding plants and deep-hued mosses made a border lovely
everywhere, and for long spaces deep and soft as velvet pile. A thrush
called softly from the forest depths behind her. From the other side
his mate replied in a soft twittering that told of love and confidence
and comfort. A squirrel scampered up the trunk of a young beech, near
by, and sat in the first crotch to look down at her, chattering. A light
breeze sighed among the branches, swaying them in languorous rhythm,
rustling them in soft and ceaseless whisperings.
All these familiar, pleasant sights and sounds delighted her. During the
long winter she had been shut away from this, her favorite spot among
the many lovely bits of wilderness about her, and now its every detail
filled her with a fresh and keen delight. She looked and listened
greedily, as happy as a city child, seated, for the first time in a
space of months, before a brightly lighted stage to watch a pantomime. A
dozen times she ran with little, bird-like cries to bend above some
opening wild-flower, a space she spent in watching two intently busy
king-birds, already fashioning their nest. Another squirrel charmed her
beyond measure by sitting, for a moment, on a limb to gaze at her in
bright-eyed curiosity, and then, with a swift run down the trunk, quite
near to her, as if entirely satisfied that he saw in her a certain
friend, scuttling to the water's edge for drink. She had never seen a
squirrel drink before--few people have--and she stood, as motionless as
might a maid of marble, watching him, until, having had his fill, he
gave his tail a saucy flirt and darted back to his beech fortress, to
sit again upon his limb and chatter gossip at her.
After he had gone back to his tree she looked carefully about her. It
now became apparent that she had come there to the pool for some
especial purpose and that she wished to be quite sure of privacy before
she put it into execution, for she went first to the path by which she
had descended, there to listen long, intently, then, with a lithe spring
where the brook narrowed at the pool's mouth, to the other side, where,
at some distance in the forest, by another woods-path's edge, she stood
again, intent and harkening.
Apparently quite satisfied that so far as human beings went her solitude
was quite complete, she returned, now, to the pool's edge and stood
gazing down upon its polished surface. Soon she dipped the toe of one
brown, slender foot into it, evidently prepared to draw back hastily in
case of too low temperature, but tempted, when she found the water warm,
she gently thrust the whole foot in, and then, gathering her skirt
daintily up to her knees, actually stepped into the water, wading with
little shrill screams of delight.
For a moment she stood poised there, both hands busy with her skirt,
which was pulled back tight against her knees. Then, after another hasty
glance around, she sprang out upon the bank with a quick gesture of
determination, and, close by the thicket's edge, disrobed entirely and
came back to the water as lovely as the dream of any ancient sculptor,
as alluring as the finest fancy of the greatest painter who has ever
touched a brush.
Slim, graceful, sinuous, utterly unconscious of her loveliness, but
palpitating with the sensuous joy of living, she might have been a wood
nymph, issuing vivid, vital, from the fancy of a mediaeval poet. The
sunlight flecked her beautiful young body with fluttering patches as of
palpitant gold leaf. The crystal water splashed in answer to the play of
her lithe limbs and fell about her as in showers of diamonds. Flowers
and ferns upon the pool's edge, caught by the little waves of overflow,
her sport sent shoreward, bowed to her as in a merry homage to her
grace, her fitness for the spot and for the sport to which she now
abandoned herself utterly, plunging gaily into the deepest waters of the
basin. From side to side of its narrow depths she sped rapidly, the
blue-white of the spring water showing her lithe limbs in perfect grace
of motion made mystically indefinite and shimmering by refraction
through the little rippling waves her progress raised. She raced and
strained, from the pure love of effort, as if a stake of magnitude
depended on her speed.
Then, suddenly, this fever for fast movement left her and she slowed to
languorous movement, no less lovely.
The trout, which had been frightened into hiding by the splashing of her
early progress, came timidly, again, from their dim lurking places, to
eye this new companion of the bath with less distrust, more curiosity.
With sinuous stroke, so slow it scarcely made a ripple, so strong it
sent her steadily and firmly on her zig-zag way, she swam, now, back and
forth, around about, from side to side and end to end in the deep pool,
with keen enjoyment, each movement a new loveliness, each second
bringing to her fascinating face some new expression of delight and
satisfaction. Behind her streamed her flowing hair, unbound and free to
ripple, fan-like, on the water; before her dainty chin a little wave
progressed, unbreaking, running back on either hand beside her,
V-shaped. Her hands rose in the water, caught it in cupped palms and
pushed it down and backward with the splashless pulsing thrust of the
truly expert swimmer.
Only the warm blood of perfect health could have endured the temperature
of that shaded mountain pool so long, and soon even she felt its chill
gripping her young muscles, and, as unconscious of her wholly revealed
loveliness as any nymph of old mythology, scrambled from the water to
the bank and stood there where a shaft of comfortable sunshine found its
welcome way through rifted foliage above. To this she turned first one
bare shoulder, then the other, with as evident a sensuous delight as she
had shown when the cool water first closed over her. Then, throwing back
her head, she stood full in the brilliance, and, inhaling deeply, let
the sunlight fall upon the loveliness of her young chest. The delight of
this was far too great for voiceless pleasure, and her deep, rich
laughter rippled out as liquid and as musical as the tones of the tiny
waterfall above the pool. She raised a knee and then the other to let
the vitalizing sunlight fall upon them; then, with head drooped forward
on her breast, stood with her sturdy but delicious shoulders in its
shining path. Her happiness was perfect and she smiled continually, even
when she was not giving vent to audible expressions of enjoyment.
Suddenly, however, this idyllic scene was interrupted. In the woods she
heard the crashing of an awkward footstep and a muttered word or two in
a strange voice, as might come from a lowlander whose face has suffered
from the sting of a back-snapping branch.
For an instant she poised, frightened, on the bank. The intruder's
crashing progress was bringing him, as her ears plainly told her,
steadily in her direction. Panic-stricken, for a moment, she crouched,
hugging her bare limbs in an ecstasy of fear. To get her clothes and put
them on before he reached the pool would be impossible, a hasty glance
about her showed no cover thick enough to flee to.
One concealment only offered perfect hiding--the very pool from which
she had so recently emerged. She poised to slip again into the water
noiselessly and then caught sight of her disordered clothing on the
bank. To leave it there would as certainly reveal her presence as to
remain on the bank herself! Hastily she gathered it and the new spelling
book into her arms, and, with not ten seconds of spare time to find the
cover which she so desperately needed, endeavored to slip quietly into
the pool again.
Her certainty of movement failed her, this time, though, and one foot
slipped. Into the pool she went, half-falling, and with a splash which,
she was certain, would be audible a hundred yards away. Terrified anew
by this, she dived quickly to the bottom of the pool and with all a
trout's agility and fearlessness, her clothing and beloved book clasped
tight against her bosom by her crooked left arm, her right arm sending
her with rapid strokes, when she was quite submerged, the full length of
the pool to its far end. There a fallen tree, relic of some woodland
tempest of years gone by, extended quite from bank to bank,
moss-covered, half hidden by small rushes and a little group of other
water-plants. She dived beneath this log with the last atom of endurance
she possessed and rose, perforce, upon the other side, stifling her
gasps, but drawing in the air in long, luxurious breathings. With her
mouth not more than half-an-inch above the water and her feet upon hard
bottom, she crouched there, watching through the screen of plants, her
clothes and book still pressed against her breast.
As she peered across the log between the rushes, she saw the stranger,
with a wary step, break through the undergrowth about the
pool--cautiously, expectantly. The water heaved a bit about her chin,
for her hidden chest was palpitating with the short, sharp intakes of a
chuckling laughter.
"Thought I were a b'ar, most likely!" she thought merrily, quite certain
of the safety of her hiding place. "Some furriner." All strangers, in
the mountains, are spoken of as "foreigners" and regarded with a hundred
times the wonder and distrust shown in cities to the native of far
lands, remote.
Her guess was shrewd. The stranger had plainly been attracted by the
sounds of her delighted splashing and had hurried up with rifle ready
for a shot at some big game. Now he stood upon the granite edges of the
pool, disappointed even in his instinctive search for footprints, with
only the slowly widening circles left upon the surface by her hurried
flight to show him that he had not wholly been mistaken in his thought
that something most unusual had recently occurred there in the "cove."
Eagerly his disappointed glance roved around the circling
thicket--nowhere did it see a sign. When it neared the place of her
concealment the hidden girl ducked, softly, making no undue commotion in
the swiftly running water at the pool's outlet, and the searching
glance passed on, quite unsuspecting, before her breath failed and her
head emerged again.
"Confound it!" the deeply disappointed youth exclaimed. "I was dead
certain I heard something. I _did_ hear something, too." He sighed. "But
it is gone, now."
At length he turned away in a bad temper, and presently she heard him
crashing awkwardly through brush and brake, departing.
Shivering from her long submersion in the gelid waters of the mountain
stream, she cautiously emerged, struggling between light-hearted
laughter at the comedy of her escape and rueful worry about the fact
that she was not only deeply chilled but had no clothes which were not
wet. Her soaked spelling-book, also, gave her much concern. Before she
spread her clothing out in the sparse sunlight, she took the dripping
volume to the warmest little patch of brilliance on any of the rocks
surrounding, and, as she opened its leaves to catch the sunshine,
examined it with loving solicitude to find how badly it was damaged.
"Fast color," she said happily, looking at the mighty letters of its
coarse black print. "Ain't faded none, nor run, a mite." This plainly
give her great relief. Deftly she turned each leaf, using the extremest
care to avoid tearing them, handling them with loving touch. Between
them she laid little pine cones, so that air might circulate among them
and assist the process of their drying. Then, having wrung her clothing
till her strong, brown, slender wrists ached, she spread that out in
turn, but on less favored rocks, and, as her feeling of security
increased, fell into an unconscious dance, born of the necessity of
warmth from exercise, but so full of grace, abandon, joy, that a poet
might have fancied her a river-nymph, tripping to the reed-born music of
the goat-hoofed Pan.
When, later, she had slowly dressed, and was kneeling at the pool's
edge, using the now placid surface of the water as a mirror to assist
her in rough-fashioning her hair into a graceful knot, she heard again,
from a great distance, a metallic "tink, tink-tink," which had caught
her ear when she had first stood on the pool's edge. It came, she knew,
from far, however, and so did not rouse her apprehension, but, mildly,
it aroused her curiosity.
"Hull kentry's 'full o' furriners," she mused. "That railroad buildin'
business in the valley brings 'em. Woods ain't private no more." Again
the tink, tink-tink. "Sounds like hammerin' on rocks," she thought.
"It's nearer than th' railroad builders, too. I wonder what--but then,
them furriners are wonderful for findin' out concernin' ev'rythin'."
She hugged her pulpy spelling book against her breast with a little
shiver of determination. "_I'm_ goin' to l'arn, too," she said with firm
decision as she scrambled up the rough and rocky mountain path.
For a time, as she progressed, her thoughts remained afield, wandering
in wonder of what that "furriner" might be up to with the tink-tink of
his hammer upon rocks. This soon passed, however, and they dwelt again
on the pool episode.
She had never seen a man dressed as the stranger had been. A carefully
made shooting-jacket had covered broad and well-poised shoulders which
were free of that unlovely stoop which comes so early to the
mountaineer's. A peaked cap of similar material had shaded slightly a
broad brow with skin as white as hers and whiter. Beneath it, eyes,
which, although they were engaged in anxious search when she had seen
them, she knew could, upon occasion, twinkle merrily, had gazed, clear,
calm, and brown. A carefully trimmed mustache had hidden the man's upper
lip, but his chin, again a contrast to the mountaineers' whom she had
spent her life among, showed blue from constant and close shaving. Yet,
different as he was from her people of the mountains, as she recalled
that face she could not hate him or distrust him.
She had never in her life seen any one in knickerbockers and leggins
before, and the memory of his amused her somewhat, yet she admitted to
herself that they had seemed quite "peart" as she peered at them through
the reeds.
But it was the modern up-to-date Winchester which he had held, all
poised to fly up to the ready shoulder should he find the splashing
animal which had attracted his attention by its noise, which, next to
his handsome, clean-cut face, had most aroused her admiration.
"Lordy! Joe'd give his eyes to hev a gun like that," she said.
And then she made a pun, unconscious of what the outer world calls such
things, but quite conscious of its humor. "Thought I was a b'ar," she
chuckled. "Well, I certainly _was_ b'ar!"
Feeling no further fear of any one, defiant, now that she was fully
clothed, of "furriners," rather hoping, as a matter of fact that she
might sometime meet this one again, she let her laugh ring out
unrestrained. A cat-bird answered it with a harsh cry; a blue-jay
answered him with a still harsher note. But then a brown thrush burst
into unaccustomed post-meridian song. Even his throbbing trills and
thrilling, liquid quaverings, had not more melody in them, however, than
had her ringing laughter.