Her laugh, too, roused more than vagrant birds into attention. She had
emerged from the abrupt little valley and was entering upon a plateau
which had been left comparatively open by the removal of great trees,
sacrificed to furnish ties for the new railroad building in the
lowlands. The place was littered with the discarded tops of pines and
other woodland rubbish and seemed forlorn and wrecked. She swept her
eyes about with the glance of a proprietor, for Madge Brierly owned all
of this as well as most of the land through which the brook which
deepened into the pool of her adventure flowed. Indeed the girl was
counted rich among her fellows and owned, also, land down in the valley
on which she would not live, but which she rented for an annual sum to
her significant, although it would not have kept a lowland belle in
caramels.
In the center of the disordered clearing just before her, was the person
who, like the birds, had been roused to keen attention by the maiden's
ringing laugh. She saw him first while he was peering here and there,
astonished, to learn whence the sound had come, and, with the
instinctive caution of the mountain-bred, she quickly stepped behind a
clump of laurel, through which she peered at him.
He was a man of sixty years, or thereabouts, wiry, tough and well
preserved. His hair, of grizzled grey, was longer than most men wore
theirs, even among the mountains, where there are few conventionalities
in male attire. He was dressed in the ordinary garb of the Kentucky
planter of the better class--broad soft hat, flowing necktie, long
frock-coat, which formed a striking contrast to the coarse high-boots
into the tops of which his trousers had been tucked--and yet he hardly
seemed to her to belong to the class of gentlemen to which his dress
apparently assigned him. His face was coarse and hard, his eyes, as he
peered about in search of her, were "shifty," she assured herself. His
hands were large and crudely fashioned.
"'Pears like 'most ev'ry one is roamin' 'round my land to-day," she
thought. "I wonder what _this_ one is up to, thar?"
For fully fifteen minutes her curiosity remained unsatisfied, for,
startled by the ringing laugh, the stranger spent at least a quarter of
an hour in furtive peering, here and there, about the clearing, plainly
searching for the laughter. At no time, however, did he approach her
hiding place near enough to see her, and, finally, apparently satisfied
that his ears had fooled him, or that whoever it had been who had
disturbed him with the merry peal had gone away, he went back to his
work.
Just what this work could be was what she waited curiously to see. She
felt not the least resentment of the trespass it involved, for the land
was wild, and on it, as elsewhere in the mountains, any one was free to
come and go who did not commit the foolishness of neglecting camp fires,
likely to start forests into blaze, or the supreme treachery of giving
information to the revenue officials about hidden stills. Her eager
curiosity was aroused, more by the mysterious nature of the stranger's
operations than by the fact that they were conducted on her land.
Having satisfied himself that no one, now, was near, and, therefore,
that he was not watched, the unpleasantly mysterious old man went back
to the work which evidently had brought him hither. With utmost care he
moved about the place, scrutinizing outcropping rocks, and this, as they
were everywhere, meant a minute examination of the land. In his hand he
carried a small hammer, and, with this, now and then, after a careful
visual examination of a rock, he knicked it, here and there,
investigating carefully and even eagerly the scars he made, the bits of
rock which were clipped off, now and then even looking at the latter
through a magnifying glass, which he took for the purpose from a pocket
of his vest.
She had watched these operations, fascinated, for, possibly, a full half
hour, despite the discomfort of damp clothing, which had begun to chill
her, when she saw signs of violent excitement on the old man's face and
in his actions, after he had chipped a rock, from which he first had had
to scrape a thin superstratum of light soil.
Like a miner who has found the gold for which, for years, he has been
searching, he arose, with the tiny fragments in his hand, to look at
them with greedy eyes, in a more comfortable, upright posture. His face
had very plainly paled and in his eyes was an expression of such
avaricious eagerness and satisfaction as she had never seen before upon
a human countenance.
Before he made a sound she knew that he had found that thing for which
he had been seeking. His grizzled countenance, intent as any alchemist's
of old upon his search, and, as its absorption grew, continually less a
pleasant face to contemplate, now twisted, suddenly, into an expression
of incredulous joy. He took the fragment he had been examining in both
his hands and held it close before his eyes. Then he made a minute
search of it with his little magnifying glass. Then he fell upon his
knees, and, with his clawlike fingers, scraped more earth from the rock
whence he had chipped it.
Satisfied by what he saw there, after he had done this, he rose with a
new expression on his face--so crafty, so exultant, and, withal, so
evil, that Madge involuntarily shrank back to better screening in her
leafy hiding place.
The old man, with sweeping movements of his heavily booted feet, swept
the thin earth he had scraped from the rock's surface back into its
place, thrust the fragments deep into his pocket, and started hurriedly
away, plainly greatly pleased, along the trail which led into the
valley. She watched him with a beating heart, much puzzled.
What could it be that he had found, there, on her land? Visions of gold
mines and of diamonds, rose within her mind, crude, unformed, childish,
based on the imperfect knowledge she had gained of such things from the
story-tellers of the mountains. As mountain people go she was, already,
a rich woman, but now dreams of mightier wealth swept through her brain
tumultuously. Ah, she would buy happiness for all her friends when she
had, later on, unearthed the secret treasures of her backwoods clearing!
Maybe she would, sometime, have a _real silk dress_!
She hurried forward in a stooping run to make examination of the place,
as soon as the old man had vanished down the mountain side, to see (she
thoroughly expected it) the glitter of bright gems or yellow gold
beneath the sand which he had with such care spread back upon the little
scar which he had made there in the earth. With trembling fingers she
pushed back the yellow earth, and found--nothing but black rock,
uncouth, and unattractive.
She sat there on the ground in her damp skirts, too disappointed, for a
moment, to make an exclamation. In many ways the girl, although well
past her sixteenth year, was but a child. The reaction from the mighty
dreams of fortune she had built almost unnerved her.
It was her native humor which now saved her. Instead of weeping she
burst into sudden laughter.
"Dellaw!" said she, aloud. "Ain't I a fool? The man was just a crazy!"
For some time she sat there in the rocky clearing amidst the litter of
pine-tops and small undergrowth, contemplating her own silliness with
keen amusement.
"Why, he had me that stirred up," said she, "that I reckoned I was rich
a'ready!"
But she put the joke aside, to be told upon herself when the first
chance came. Her long hiding in the thicket while she watched the queer
proceedings of the stranger had chilled her through and through.
Close to the black rock which had so excited him and which she had
uncovered after he had gone, a little forked stick stood upright, and in
its fork, with one end slanted to the ground, a twig of green
witch-hazel still reposed. Beneath the twig a tiny spiral of arizing
smoke showed that here, with these primitive appliances, the treasure
seeker had prepared his dinner, later carefully covering his fire.
"No matter how queer he was dressed, or what queer things he did," she
told herself, "he sure was mountain-born. This here's a mountain
fireplace, sartin sure."
She broke dead branches from a pine-top, not far away, but still far
enough so that, with reasonable watching, it would not be endangered by
a fire built on this spot (the old man plainly had considered this when
he made the fire, for the place was almost the only one in all the
clearing free enough from dry pine branches to make fire building safe)
and laid them on the coals which he had buried, but which she now had
carefully uncovered. She would, she had decided, dry her clothes before
she started on the long, cool, woods-road climb up to her cabin.
Kneeling by the coals and blowing on them, skillfully adjusting
splinters so that they would catch the draft, she soon had started a
small flame. Fed carefully, this grew rapidly. Within five minutes there
was burning on the site of the old man's little cooking-fire a cheerful
blaze of size. Its rushing warmth was very grateful to her, and she held
her hands out to it, then her feet, one after the other, with skirts
lifted daintily, so that her chilled limbs might catch the warmth.
Invigorated by the pleasant heat, she once more yielded to the urgings
of the bounding spirit of rich youth within her. Even as she had sported
in the water ere the interloper came to interrupt her sylvan bath, now
she sported there about the fire in an impromptu dance, never for a
second uncouth, despite the fact that she was quite untrained; scarcely
less graceful than her merrymaking in the water, although then she had
not been, as now, hampered in her grace of movement by the unlovely
draperies of homespun linsey-woolsey. As she had been a water-nymph, so,
now, she might have been some Druid maid dancing by an altar fire. The
roughness of the ground did not annoy her--her feet had not known
dancing upon polished waxen wood; the lack of spectators did not deter
her--those whom she had learned to know and love, the mountains, trees,
the squirrels, and birds, were there.
In the very midst of the abandon of this rustic symphony of movement,
the thought came to her that the precious spelling-book was lying on the
rock, near by, quite soaked, neglected. She sped to it and took it to
the fire's edge, where, opening its pages one by one, so that each would
get the warmth, she held it as close as she opined was safe. Having
dried it until she no longer feared the wetting it had had would
seriously harm its usefulness (the lovely smoothness of its magic leaves
was gone, alas! beyond recall) she paused there for a moment, herself
still far from dry, with a bare foot held out to the blaze, and studied
curiously one of the book's pages.
Thereon the letters of the alphabet, large, ominous, suggestive to her
mind of nothing in the world but curlycues, loomed, mystifying. For the
first time it occurred to her that in securing the small volume she had
not, as she had thought to do, solved the problem of an education. The
characters, she saw to her dismay, meant nothing to her. In the absence
of a teacher she could not learn from them!
Alas, alas! The matter was a tragedy to her. How could she have been so
stupid as to fail to think of this at first? She stood there with
flushed face, despairing, looking at the mystic symbols with slowly
sinking heart.
Suddenly, though the crackling of the fire filled her ears, she was
aware, by some subtle sense, that she was now not wholly solitary there.
Without a sound to tell her, she was conscious that some other person
had within the moment come into the clearing. Hastily she looked about.
To her amazement, and, for a moment, to her great dismay, she saw,
standing on the clearing's edge, the young man who had, not long before,
unknowingly invaded her seclusion at the pool.
Instantly her body became fiercely conscious. Prickling thrills, not due
to bonfire heat, shot over it. Shame sent the blood in mantling blushes
to her cheeks, although she tried to stop it. Why should she blush at
sight of him? True, she had been there in the water, bare as any
new-born babe, when he had reached the pool's edge--but he had not seen
her. To him she, quite undoubtedly, was a mere strange mountain maid,
unrecognized. Self-consciousness then was quite absurd.
And this man was a stranger and was on her land. She must not forget her
mountain courtesy and fail to make him welcome.
"Howdy," she said briefly.
"Howdy, little girl?" said he, and looked at her and smiled.
This form of address much amused her. She was not far beyond sixteen,
but sixteen is counted womanhood, there in the mountains, and often is
an age for wife--and motherhood as well. "Little girl," to her, seemed
laughable. But then she suddenly remembered that to stop their flapping,
when they were all soaked, against her ankles, she had pinned her skirts
up--and she was not tall. The mistake, perhaps, was natural.
"Got a fire here?" he inquired, inanely, for the fire was very much in
evidence.
"Looks like it, don't it?" she said somewhat saucily, but robbed the
comment of offense by smiling somewhat shyly at him as he stood there.
He was better looking, she reflected, now that she had an unobstructed
view of him, even than he had appeared when she had peered at him from
her concealment behind the log and barricade of rushes. Of course he
was a "foreigner," and, therefore, a mere weakling, not to be considered
seriously as a specimen of sturdy manhood (how often had she heard the
mountain men speak of the lowlands men with scorn as weaklings?) but,
none the less, he interested and attracted her, even if he did not
inspire her with respect.
He laughed. "It does," said he, "looks very much like it. Been burning
brush?"
"No," she replied, "jest warmin' up a little."
"Why, it's not cold."
"I--I was wet."
"_Wet?_" said he, astonished.
She saw her slip, and flushed. "Fell in the crik," she answered briefly,
hastily and falsely.
"Why, that's too bad," said he, with ready sympathy, unfeigned and real.
All the time the girl was eying him through often-lowered lashes, and
the more she looked at him the more she felt that he was not, like many
"foreigners," to be distrusted and be held aloof. His clothes did not
suggest to her the "revenuer," although they certainly were different
from any she had ever seen before on man or beast (his knee breeches
gave her some amusement), and he was totally unarmed, having laid his
rifle down and left it at a distance, leaning against a stump.
His hands and face were not sunburned--indeed, his hands were delicately
fashioned and much whiter than any she had ever seen before on man or
woman. His appearance certainly did not, to her, convey the thought of
strength--and manhood, there among the mountains, is thought to find its
first and last expression through its muscle; yet, for some reason,
although her first glance made her think he was a puny creature, she
neither scorned nor pitied him. He was, perhaps, too smoothly dressed,
too carefully shaved; the gun he had laid down so carelessly had too
much "bright work" on it--but on the whole, she liked him. A city maiden
might have well been dazzled by the really handsome chap. This simple
country girl was not--but, on the whole, she liked him.
Her hand which held the spelling-book dropped, unconsciously, so that
the open pages of the volume were revealed, upside down, against her
knee.
"Studying your lessons?" he inquired, quite casually, good-naturedly,
coming nearer.
Again her disappointment rushed upon her. Impulsively she told him of
it.
"Oh," said she, "I don't know how! I bought me this yere book down in
th' settlement, an' thought I'd learn things outen it. But how'm I goin'
to learn? I can't make nothin' out of it to get a start with."
Instantly the pathos of this situation, not its humor, made appeal to
him.
"Isn't there a school here?" he inquired.
"Nearest school is twenty mile acrost, over on Turkey Creek," she said
briefly. "Oncet there was a nearer one, but teacher was a Hatfield, and
McCoys got him, of course. This was McCoy kentry 'fore they all got so
killed off. He ought to 'a' knowed better than come over here to teach."
This casual reference to a famous feud--news of whose infamy had spread
far, far beyond the mountains which had hatched it--from the lips of one
so young and lovely (for he had long ago admitted to himself that as she
stood there she was lovelier than any being he had ever seen before)
appalled Frank Layson, son of level regions, graduate of Harvard, casual
sportsman, amateur mountaineer, who had come to look over his patrimony
and the country round about.
"Ah--yes," said he, and frowned. And then: "It leaves you in hard luck,
though, doesn't it, if you want to learn and can't," said he.
"It sartin does, for--oh, I _do_ hanker powerful to learn!"
"May I stay here by the fire with you a while and get warm, too," he
asked. (The unaccustomed exercise of tramping through the mountains had
kept him in a fever heat all day.)
"An' welcome," she said cordially, moving aside a bit, so that he could
approach without the circumnavigation of a mighty stump.
He could not tell whether or not she had made note of many sweat-beads
on his brow and wondered at them on a chilly man.
"Perhaps," said he, "I might, in a few minutes, show you a little about
what you want to know. I've been lucky. I have had a chance to learn."
She liked the way he said it. There was no hint of superiority about it.
He was not "stuck up," in his claim of knowledge. He "had had a chance,"
and took no credit to himself for it. This pleased her, won her
confidence--if, already, that had not been done by his frank face, in
spite of his fancy clothes and her assumption that he was a namby-pamby
weakling.
"Oh--if you would!" she said, so eagerly that it seemed to him most
pitiful.
So, five minutes later, when all her clothing save her heavy outer
skirt, had been quite dried there by the fire, and that same fire's
abounding warmth had sent his temperature up to high discomfort mark,
they sat down, side by side, upon a log, the spelling-book between them,
and he began the pleasant task of teaching her her A, B, Cs.
"'A,'" said he, "is this one at the very start."
"The peaked one," said she.
"Yes, that one.
"And 'B,'" he went on, much amused, but with a perfectly grave face, "is
this one with two loops fastened, so, to a straight stalk."
"I know where thar _is_ a bee-tree," she remarked, irrelevantly.
"It will help recall this in your mind," said he, maintaining perfect
gravity, "imagine it with two big loops of rope fastened to one side of
it--"
"Rope wouldn't stick out that-a-way," said she, "it would just droop.
They'd have to be of somethin' stiffen"
"Well--" said he, and tried to think of something.
"You could use that railroad-iron that I saw 'em heat red-hot an' bend,
down in the valley," she suggested.
"That's it," said he. "Two loops of railroad-iron fastened to a
bee-tree" (he pointed) "just as these loops, here, are fastened to the
straight black stem. That's 'B.'"
"I won't forget," said she, her beautiful young brow puckered earnestly
as she stored the knowledge in her brain.
"And this is 'C,'" said he.
"'C,' 'C'" said she. "Jest take off one of th' loops an' use it by
itself."
"That's so," said he. "And here is 'D'"
"Cut off th' top th' tree," said she. "Just cut it plumb off, loop an'
all."
He laughed. It was clear that she would be an earnest and quick-thinking
pupil to whomever had the task of giving her her education.
As he looked at her, now, he for the first time fully realized her
beauty. He had known, from the first, that she was most attractive, most
unusual for a mountain maid; but now, laughing, although her head was
still bent to the book, her big eyes, sparkling with her merriment,
raised frankly to his face, were revelations to him. He had not seen
such eyes before, and all the old-time similes for deep-brown orbs
sprang instantly to mind. "Fathomless pools," "translucent amber"--no
simile would really describe them. Late hours had never dimmed them,
illness had never made them heavy, he was sure a lie had never made them
shift from their straight gaze for one short second. He had not seen
such eyes in cities!
And from careful contemplation of the eyes, he kept on with a careful
contemplation of the other beauties of his fair and unexpected pupil.
Her homespun gown, always ill-shaped and now unusually protuberant in
spots, unusually tight in others, because of its late wetting and
impromptu, partial drying, could not hide the sylvan grave of her
small-boned and lissome figure, just budding into womanhood. Her feet,
crossed on the ground, were as patrician in their nakedness as any
bluegrass belle's in satin slippers. Her ankles, scratched by casual
thorns and already beginning to blush brown from the June sun's ardent
kisses, were as delicate as any he had ever seen enmeshed in silken
hose. Her hands, long, slender, taper-fingered, actually dainty,
although brown and roughened by hard labor, were, it seemed to him,
better fitted for the fingering of a piano's keys than for the coarse
and heavy tasks to which he knew they must be well accustomed. He gazed
at her in veritable wonder. How had she blossomed, thus, here in this
wilderness?
"Where do you live?" he asked, interrupting their scholastic efforts.
"Up thar," she pointed, and, above, he could just see the top of a
mud-and-stick chimney rise above a crag between the trees.
"Have you brothers or sisters?"
"Ain't got nobody," she answered, and to her face there came a look of
keen resentment rather than of sorrow or of resignation. "I'm all th'
feud left," she said simply. She looked at Layson quickly, wondering if
he would be surprised that she should not have fought and also died.
"Girl cain't fight alone, much," she went on, in hurried explanation,
or, rather, quick excuse. "I might take a shot if I should git a chanst,
but I ain't had none, an', besides, I guess it air plum wrong to kill,
even if there's blood scores to be settled up. I toted 'round a rifle
with me till last fall, but then I give it up. They won't git me--but
maybe you don't know what feuds are in the mountings, here."
He was looking at her with new interest. All his life he had heard much
about the dreadful mountain feuds. As the bogey-man is used in Eastern
nurseries, so are the mountaineers used in the nurseries of old Kentucky
and of Tennessee to frighten children with. Their family fights, not
less persistent or less deadly than the enmities between the warring
barons of the Rhine in middle ages, form a magnificent foundation for
dire tales.
"Yes," said he, "I know about the feuds, of course. But you--"
It did not seem possible to him, even after her frank statements, that
this bright and joyous creature could in any way be joined to such a
bloody history as he knew the histories of some of these long feuds to
be.
"It's been thirty years an' better," said the girl, "since the Brierlys
and Lindsays had some trouble about a claybank filly an' took to
shootin' one another--shootin' straight an' shootin' often an' to kill.
For years th' fight went on. They fired on sight, an' sometimes 'twas a
Lindsay went an' sometimes 'twas a Brierly. Bimeby there was just two
men left--my pappy an' Lem Lindsay.
"One day Lem sent word to my pappy to meet him without no weepons an'
shake han's an' make it up."
Her face took on a look of bitterness and hate which almost made her
hearer shiver, so foreign was it to the fresh, young brightness he had
watched till now.
"My daddy come, at th' ap'inted time," she went on slowly, "but dad--he
knowed Lem Lindsay, an' never for a minute trusted him. He ast a friend
of his, Ben Lorey, to be a hidden witness. Ben hid behind a rock to
watch. 'Twas right near here--just over thar." She pointed.
"Soon Lem, he come along, a-smilin' like a Judast, an', after some fine
speakin', as daddy offered him his hand, Lem whipped out a knife,
an'--an' struck it into my daddy's heart."
The girl's recital had been tense, dramatic, not because she had tried
or thought to make it so--she had never learned not to be genuine--but
because of the real and tragic drama in the tale she told, the
matter-of-course way in which she told it.
It made Layson shudder. What sort of people were these mountaineers who
went armed to friendly meetings and struck down the men whose hands they
offered to clasp? Where was the other man while his friend's enemy was
at this dreadful work?
"But Lorey," said her fascinated listener, "the man who was in hiding as
a witness, made him pay for his outrageous act!"
"No," said the girl, with drooping head. "He stepped out from behind the
rock where he was hidin', an' he pulled the trigger of his rifle. But
luck was dead against us that day. Wet powder--somethin'--nobody knows
what. The gun did not go off. Before he got it well down from his
shoulder so's to find out what it was that ailed it, Lem Lindsay was
upon him like a mountain lion--an' he laid him thar beside my daddy. He
didn't mean that there should be no witnesses."
She paused so long that Layson was about to speak, feeling the silence
troublesome and painful, but before he had decided what to say in
comment on a tale so dreadful, she went on:
"He didn't mean there should be no witnesses, Lem Lindsay didn't, but as
it happened there was two. My mother, me clasped in her arms, had stole
after my daddy, fearin' that somethin' wicked would come out o' that
there meetin' with his old-time enemy. She spoke up sudden, an'
surprised th' murderer, standin' there by th' two poor men he'd killed.
At first it scared him. I can't remember everythin' about that awful
day, but I can see Lem Lindsay's face as she screamed at him, just as
plain this minute as I seed it then. I'll never forget that look if I
live a thousand years!
"At first he was struck dumb, but then that passed. He give a yell of
rage an' started toward us on th' run. She jumped, with me a-hinderin'
her. Like a mountain deer she run, in spite of that. She was lighter on
her feet than he was upon his, an' soon outdistanced him. He hadn't
stopped to pick his rifle up--he only had th' knife he'd done th'
killin' with, so he couldn't do what he'd 'a' liked to done--shoot down
a woman an' a baby!
"We lived where I live now, alone, an' then, as now, there was a little
bridge that took th' footpath over th' deep gully. Them days was wicked
ones in these here mountains, an' daddy'd had that foot-bridge fixed so
it would raise. My mother just had time to pull it up, when we had
crossed, before Lem Lindsay reached there. He stopped, to keep from
fallin' in the gully, but stood there, shakin' his bare fist an'
swearin' that he'd kill us yet. But that he couldn't do. Folks was
mightily roused, and he had to leave th' mountings, then an' thar, an'
ain't been in 'em since, so far as anybody knows."
Her brows drew down upon her eyes. Her sweet mouth hardened. "He'd
better _never_ come!" she added, grimly.
After a moment's pause she went on, slowly: "So, now, here we be--Joe
Lorey, Ben's son, an' me. My mother died, you see, not very many years
after Lindsay'd killed my daddy. Seein' of it done, that way, had been
too much for her. I reckon seein' it would have killed me, too, if I'd
been more'n a baby, but I wasn't, an' lived through it. Ben's lived
here, workin' his little mounting farm, an'--an'--"
She hesitated, evidently ill at ease, strangely stammering over an
apparently simple and unimportant statement of the condition of her
fellow orphan. She changed color slightly. Layson, watching her, decided
that the son of the one victim must be the sweetheart of the daughter of
the other, and would have smiled had not the very thought, to his
surprise, annoyed him unaccountably. Whether that was what had caused
her stammering, he could not quite decide, although he gave the matter
an absurd amount of thought. She went on quickly:
"He's lived here, workin' of his little mounting farm an'--an'--an'
doin' jobs aroun', an' such, an' I've lived here, a-workin' mine, a
little, but not much. After my mother died there was some folks down in
th' valley took keer of me for a while, but then they moved away, an' I
was old enough to want things bad, an' what I wanted was to come back
here, where I could see th' place where mother an' my daddy had both
loved me an' been happy. I've got some land down in th' valley--fifty
acres o' fine pasture--but I never cared to live down there. Th' rent I
get for that land makes me rich--I ain't never wanted for a single thing
but just th' love an' carin' that my daddy an' my mother would 'a' give
me if that wicked man hadn't killed 'em both. For he _did_ kill my
mother, just as much as he killed daddy. She died o' that an' that
alone."
Again she fell into a silence for a time, looking out at the tremendous
prospect spread before them, quite unseeing.
"Oh," she went on, at length, her face again darkened by a frown, her
small hands clenched, every muscle of her lithe young body drawn as taut
as a wild animal's before a spring. "I sometimes feel as if I'd like to
do as other mountain women have been known to do when killin' of that
sort has blackened all their lives--I sometimes feel as if I'd like to
take a rifle in my elbow an' go lookin' for that man--go lookin' for him
in th' mountings, in th' lowlands, anywhere--even if I had to cross th'
oceans that they tell about, in order to come up with him!"
Her voice had been intensely vibrant with strong passion as she said
this, and her quivering form told even plainer how deep-seated was the
hate that gave birth to her words. But soon she put all this excitement
from her and dropped her hands in a loose gesture of hopeless
relaxation.
"But I know such thoughts are foolish," she said drearily. "He got away.
A girl can't carry on a feud alone, nohow. There's nothin' I can do."
Again, now, with a passing thought, her features lighted as another
maiden's, whose young life had been cast by fate in gentler places might
have lighted at the thought of some great pleasure pending in the
future.
"There is a chance, though," she said, with a fierce joy, "that Lem
Lindsay, if he is alive, 'll git th' bullet that he earned that day. Joe
Lorey's livin'--that's Ben's son--an' he--well, maybe, some time--ah, he
can shoot as straight as anybody in these mountings!"
The look of a young tigress was on her face.
It made the young man who was listening to her shudder--the look upon
her face, the voice with which she said "And he can shoot as straight as
anybody in these mountings!" For a second it revolted him. Then,
getting a fairer point of view, he smiled at her with a deep sympathy,
and waited.
He had not to wait long before a gentler mood held dominance. It came,
indeed, almost at once.
"No," she said slowly, "a girl can't carry on a feud alone, nohow....
And, somehow, when I think of it most times, I really don't want to.
It's only now an' then I get stirred up, like this. Most times I'd
rather learn than--go on fightin' like we-all always have.... I'd rather
learn, somehow.... An'--an'--an' that's been mighty hard--_is_ mighty
hard"
"You--haven't had much chance," said he, looking at her pityingly.
She gave him a quick glance. Had she really thought he pitied her she
would have bitterly resented it.
"Had th' same chance other mounting girls have," she said quickly,
defending, not herself, but her country and her people.
She stood, now, at a distance from the fire, for it was blazing merrily,
but her face was flushed by its radiant heat, its lurid blaze made a
fine background for the supple, swaying beauty of her slim young body.
She raised her arms high, high above her head, with that same
genuineness of gesture, graceful and appealing, which he had seen in all
her movements from the first and then clasped them at her breast.
"But oh," said she, "somehow, I want to learn, now, terrible!"
"Let me help you while I'm in the mountains," he replied, impulsively.
"I'll be glad to help you every day."
"Would you?" she said. "I would be powerful thankful!" Her bright eyes
expressed the gratitude she felt.
While they had talked a strange paradox had come about there by the fire
without their notice. The long, black outcropping of rock against which
they had brought the old man's blaze to life, had, instead of keeping
the fire from spreading to the undergrowth, strangely permitted it to
pass.
It was the girl who first discovered this. She sprang up from her place
with a startled exclamation.
"Oh," said she, "th' fire is spreadin'!"
He rose quickly to his feet.