"The Battle Cry"

By

Charles Neville Buck

New York

W. J. WATT & COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

Copyright 1914 by

W. J. WATT & COMPANY

TO

MY MOTHER

WHOSE HIGH NOBILITY AND GRACIOUS

SWEETNESS HAVE BEEN MY LIFELONG

INSPIRATION AND REWARD, THIS

BOOK IS LOVINGLY

DEDICATED

THE BATTLE CRY

CHAPTER I

AT that particular moment Juanita Holland could

feel nothing but pride and love for the young

man whose figure mingled with the other seven

In a picture of spirited color. Against the verdant back-

ground of the polo field there were eight, but all save

one seemed negligible.

The afternoon sun was sloping in amber drifts across

the space where the ponies kicked up the turf and the

silks of the team colors snapped like pennants about the

straining shoulders of the players. It caught and

edged the new springtime greenery with a margin of

soft yellow. It flashed brightly upon pongee helmets

and blue silk caps and splashed against the reeking

flanks of the ponies. Of the hats and gowns along

the white flags toned terrace of the Bryn Mawr club-

house, it made a great bouquet of nodding flowers, a

bouquet which it caressed.

Juanita Holland sat near the front and as some of

the other girls smiled knowingly at her parted lips and

fixed eyes, their glances traveled to an engagement

ring and the fashion in which the slender hand it

adorned clenched itself in the tensity of her interest.

The board announced a score of four to three and a

quarter in favor of the Reds and the man whom her eyes

followed played Number Two for the Blues. In the

fraction of another minute the referee's whistle would

end the last period and the game w^ould be over. So

when, from a tangled scrimmage and a stamping con-

fusion in midfield, the girl saw the comet-like outshoot

of a willow ball followed, close as a shadow follows, by

the shapes of a pony and a man she knew, it is not won-

derful that her blue eyes flashed into sparkle and the

tender curves of her lips tightened, then parted.

There was now a chance; a small, remote embryo of

a chance for turning defeat into victory just on the

fringe of the combat — with a truly driven goal.

Juanita Holland herself knew the feel of a polo mal-

let and the intricacies of the game, and she knew that

such a reversal of the issue could come only from a

jockey's judgment of pace and a blacksmith's power of

hitting.

The blossoming hats nodded like an old-fashioned

garden stirred in a sudden breeze. The men broke off

talk with words half finished. The white ball had risen

and soared like a wingless bird and had come to earth

rolling onward in a true line toward the goal posts.

Seven ponies wheeled, scampering, and dashed with

eight mallets held forward and upstretched above their

necks, but a few yards in their lead raced a blood-bay

mare with her forelegs tucked under her safe from the

mallet's play. Across the field one could make out

the red spot of an eagerly distended nostril and the

strain of satin-coated muscles. Bending forward from

her saddle with his eye fixed on the traveling ball, rode

Roger Malcolm, menaced a length behind by the Red

Number Three, who was driving his mount to its last

ounce of stamina. There, too, cutting out at an angle

to meet them, came the Red goal guardian making a

heroic effort to get up and slash the ball back out of

peril. It was one of those tense, hard-breathing,

leather-creaking moments when the issue hangs on a

split-hair balance of steady nerve and lightning speed.

Then as the Red Number Three brought his pony's

muzzle to the blood bay's rump, the Red goal guardian

slashed viciously at the willow sphere — and passed by

with a misjudged stroke. A cry went up from the

gallery and again the sharp, clear impact of mallet on

ball snapped across the field like the crack of a mule-

whip and again the ball rose and soared — this time

cleanly between the goal posts. As the man who had

saved the day for the Blues wheeled his pony and

started to canter back to the center of the field, the

final whistle shrilled the finish.

" One of Roger Malcolm's miracles," commented a

Red sympathizer with a shrug. " Four and a quarter,

to four ; but I'm bound to say they won it neatly. The

man's a wiz."

Leisurely the crowd began drifting from its center

toward club-house and parked vehicles, but as Juanita

Holland's glance fell on the diamond she wore her eyes

abruptly lost their trance-like eagerness and deepened

into involuntary betrayal of pain, as of one who is

awakened from a pleasant dream to unwelcome reality.

" He was at his best then," she said to herself with-

out words. " He is always at his best — when he

plays."

She stood idly waiting for him while the crowd

thinned, and her face still wore a troubled abstraction.

She saw him dismount and turn his pony over to a

groom. She watched him shouldering his way toward

her, impatient even of the delays caused by those who

insisted on handshakes of congratulation. Though she

was much younger than he, the curve of her lips shaped

a faint smile of indulgence, such as one may wear for an

eager child, as she read the boyish glow of his eyes and

realized how much all this meant to him.

He was a clean, fine type — if all a man need be is

honest, courteous and accomplished. He was strong

and played his games with reckless abandon, if the

strength of courage can exist in a soul that demands

nothing more than the playing of games. He had al-

ways been deferentially anxious to do whatever she

had asked of him — except to grow up. Of these things

she thought as he made his way tO' her side.

" Dearest," he whispered, " will you wait for me

while I change and let me drive you home? "

She shook her head, and realizing that she alone had

not congratulated him, forced a radiant graciousness

into her smile.

" It was splendid, Roger," she declared with an echo

of transitory enthusiasm in her eyes, which lighted

them like violets in the sun. " I don't believe any one

else could have done it."

The young man's face glowed though he responded

with self-deprecation.

" We all have our lucky moments. It was pretty

much of an accident."

" In polo — " the thrill for a moment died in the girl's

voice — " one mus't make the lucky moment. You do it

uncommonly well — in polo."

He caught the separate emphasis of her last two

words and his brows contracted in an expression of

sudden pain. " Meaning," he inquired quietly,

" that I do only the trivial things well? I cite you

the Biblical injunction, dear. 'What thy hand

findeth to do—'"

" One's hand might hunt for things to do, but I'm

not going to lecture you now. I'm saving that for

this evening."

" Meanwhile may I drive you honie? "

" Not to-day, Roger. I want to think and so I'm

going to walk, but you can come over to dinner. There

won't be any one else, the evening will be devoted to — "

she paused, then added — " to your lecture."

The man smiled and made an impulsive movement to

reach for her hand, then realizing that the terrace was

not yet quite deserted, he restrained the impulse and

laughed.

" Is it so serious as all that? "

The girl met his laughter with wide and very seri-

ous eyes. It even seemed to Malcolm that there was a

little catch in her voice.

" It is to me," she said quietly. " I shall look for

you at seven."

Juanita nodded and started toward the gates, and

after a moment the man also turned and made his way

to the showers.

As she followed the gravel walks roses were massed

along her way and hedges sparkled with a delicacy

which the sun had not yet burned. The last of the

polo ponies went by, blanketed and led by grooms. As

they paraded to the stables they picked up their feet

gingerly and pranced in dainty scorn of fatigue. In

them as in their riders there seemed to dwell the para-

mount instinct of sportsmanship.

It was all very pleasant and full of charm : the chann

of glad young summer and trimmed lawns and lengthen-

ing velvety shadows : of opulence and ease.

At the stone gateposts of her own grounds where

honeysuckle clambered and where a little stream

trickled down through the trimmed box-rows, her great

Dane stood waiting to meet her, wriggling his tawny

body as he waved his tail in greeting.

He lumbered about her and thrust up his huge muz-

zle to her cool fingers while his eyes glowed with an

affection that gave a ludicrous lie to the ferocity of

their reddened haws. When she handed him a glove

to carry he set it gingerly between his leonine fangs

and strutted at her side with the exaggerated pomp of

a canine cake-walker.

" Danny Holland ! " she suddenly exclaimed, and a

choke came into her voice. " Roger gave you to me

the same day he gave me my ring. That was a year

ago and I was very happy. I'm not happy any more,

Danny-dog, and you are the first person I've told about

it. In that year you've grown up from a puppy, but in

many years he hasn't grown at all."

She glanced about her, but she and the dog were

between the shrubberies of the lawn and cut off from

the turnpike by the tall box hedge. They were quite

alone. Suddenly the girl dropped to her knees and

seized her great, clumsy confidant about his mastiff

neck.

" I'm afraid — I'm terribly, sickeningly afraid,

Danny Holland, he never will grow up — and so I'm

going away to leave you both."

If the dog realized the true enormity of that threat,

he masked his grief as a chivalric dog should mask his

deeper emotions. He waved his tail with grave, un-

hurried dignity and thrust his head around to gaze

sympathetically into his mistress's face. If for the

moment he forgot his low caste and the high estate of

the beautiful lady and allowed himself to caress her

bowed chin with his big tongue, the impertinence may

have been pardonable.

At all events she did not rebuke him. She only

picked up the glove he had dropped and gave it back

into his keeping. She dashed her hand self-con-

temptuously across her eyes and when she went into

the door to dress for dinner no one could have guessed

that a few minutes before she had been on the verge of

tears.

• •••••••

The moon was near her fullest argency that evening

and the clambering roses nodded in her light in Juanita

Holland's garden. Shadows laid black velvet patches

across a stretch of silver gray.

From the nearest house, separated by grounds that

were in reality small parks, came a happy chorus of

young voices, and the songs that they sung were suited

to the night ; a night when spring fancies itself sum-

mer.

In the soft luminance and the dusky shadow-smudges

the girl and the man came out to a stone bench, and

as Juanita Holland took her seat she fell for a mo-

ment into an attitude of drooping misery. Then im-

mediately the shoulders that showed above her dark

evening gown came back with a military stanchness and

she held them so ; as firm and white as ivory, and raised

her chin resolutely. ^Malcolm, a wraith-like shape in

his flannels, drew out a cigar and lighted it, and as the

match died it caught a whimsical smile on his lips.

With one foot on the stone bench and an elbow resting

on his knee he began banteringly.

" So now it's the lecture, dearest, is it.'' Proceed.

* I've a heart for any fate.' "

" Have you ? " She put the query quietly, almost

listlessly, and after that she was silent for a moment.

Then she drew the engagement ring from her finger and

held it out to him. A little splinter of light was tossed

from one of the facets.

" That's the first thing, Roger," she went on. " It

isn't an easy thing either, but I've got to do it."

Her companion did not extend his hand. His face

in the white light was suddenly rigid and stunned. At

last he asked, pronouncing each word very carefully

and distinctly, " Have you stopped loving me? "

The girl shook her head with the weariness of a long

fought uncertainty.

" I wish I knew. But it isn't just a question of lov-

ing you, Roger. It's a question of marrying, too, and

I can't marry you."

She could not help watching with an impersonal in.-

tentness how the fingers of the hand that drooped across

his knee stiffened and opened and stiffened again and

how he studied them as if they were the fingers of an-

other man.

'* You have promised — and you promised of your own

free will."

She nodded. He had spoken, not argumentatively,

but as one gently reminding her of something which

she had seemed to forget.

" I promised because I wanted to. If I refuse now

it's not exactly because I want to."

"Then what is it?"

'* It's a very hard thing to tell you. If it hurts

you, It has hurt me, too, and hurt me rather

terribly . , . the reason, Roger, is yourself."

" I suppose," he said with an effort, his voice still

rather dazed and stunned, " there are a good many

things the matter with me, but what particular fault

do you find fatal? Of course you know — " his utter-

ance suddenly grew fervent — " that if it's humanly pos-

sible I'll change it."

Again the shake of her head denoted the hopeless-

ness of argument. ** It's nothing that you can change.

Perhaps the fault is altogether mine . . . perhaps I'm

just the sort of girl that sees things wrong. ... I

was proud of you this afternoon on the polo field . . .

but life isn't just a polo field." She leaned forward and

her hands went out in a somewhat pathetic gesture.

" You mustn't think it's easy for me. Maybe if I

loved you it wouldn't matter what you were or what

you weren't. Maybe I'm not capable of real love —

but I've always thought I loved you. I have never

loved any one else. I wonder if we've both been mis-

taken about it all the while."

*' I haven't been mistaken," he denied Indignantly.

" There is no question about my love for you."

In the moon he saw that her lashes were wet.

" Of course," he very gravely went on, " I couldn't

hold you to any promise that your heart repudiates,

of course there's no question of that, but can't you

make it just a little clearer .f^ Precisely how do I fall

short? "

Juanlta sat silently studying his pallid face and

set jaw. Some men would have been reproachful. In

his generous attitude he appeared almost at his best

and it was very hard to let him go.

She was already hurting him enough. How could

she tell him what was in her mind? "You are the

gentleman, polished and letter-perfect, yet you are not

after all — quite a man."

She turned and gazed off at the sky which the stars

would have made effervescent with their bubbles of

splintered light had the moon not dimmed them. Her

intertwined fingers were tightly locked and her words

came slowly and with difficulty. They came not in

her own phrases, but In quotation:

" * That self-same instant, underneath,

The Duke rode past in his idle way,

Empty and fine like a swordless sheath.'

There was a pause and her voice was very faint when

she added:

" I want my husband not to be a swordless

sheath."

The man nodded miserably and he asked, " Must I

only ride past then, dear? Don't you remember other

lines a little further on? The Duke saw a woman

and loved her —

" * And lo, a blade for a knight's emprise

Filled the fine empty sheath of a man, —

The Duke grew straightway brave and wise.'

" The poet said so and yet — " she shook her head

resolutely as if to shake away webs of clouding inde-

cision — " and yet at the end of the poem he had done

nothing.'

Roger Malcolm moved a step toward her, then halted.

" Will you wait here a few minutes ? " he begged.

*' It has all come so suddenly — I must try to think."

She nodded and while from the bench she looked back,

as she believed, on the ruins of all her life's air castles,

she saw him pacing measuredly back and forth across

the moonlit lawn. His hands were tight-held at his

back and as he walked the great Dane shambled, with a

sort of hulking stateliness, at his heels.

''It seems," he said, when he rejoined her, "that I

have been weighed and found wanting. If it's a light

matter to you — if it costs you nothing to exile me

from your life, I suppose I should accept my sentence

without whimpering. But how about youf You

aren't the sort of woman who fancies herself in love

only to forget it in an instant. What does it mean to

you ? "

The girl's lips parted, but for a moment no sound

came from them except a little gasp. She covered her

face with her hands and her response came faintly

from behind her fingers. " I think that when tins ends,

my life ends. Afterwards it will be only existence."

At once he was kneeling by her side and liad caught

both her hands in his own, wresting them away from

her face. His voice was now a-thrill once more with

fervor. " Then you still love me ! You love me whether

you know it or not, and I'll not release you. ... I

know I've been weak in a hundred ways. I've never

been hypocrite enough to deny that. ... I know I'm

self-indulgent and given to following the easiest

course. . . . I've never had to fight to keep my head

above water, but I'll change it all — everything. Give

me the chance, dearest ! Look at it fairly. Analyze

yourself as well as me."

She smiled wistfully down into his eager face.

" You analyze me," she suggested.

" In your veins run two strains of blood," he be-

gan vehemently. " Your people have been soldiers and

scholars. The soldiers have given you an exaggerated

admiration for sheer untempered and unreasoning cour-

age ; the scholars have bequeathed you an over-bal-

anced seriousness of thought. You grew up in a

womanless family. You were mistress of your house

when you were practically a baby. Since you were a

little girl you were always with your grandfather, and

your grandfather lived with abstractions for playmates

to the day of his death."

" At least they were noble abstractions," she an-

swered proudly.

" They were noble enough, but none the less ab-

stractions. For example, a school in the far away

Appalachian Mountains appeared a nearer concern to

him than an honest city government here in Phila-

delphia. He educated you as he might have educated

a trained nurse or a medical missionary, stuffing your

little head, too, with abstract things ; you who had

never dressed or undressed yourself without a maid!

I believe in my heart the old gentleman had an idea

that you could go down there single-handed into that

God-forgotten wilderness and teach the bare-footed lit-

tle feudists to read and write ! "

" They need schools badly down there," she said

thoughtfully. '' I know that he wanted me to devote

a good part of his fortune to giving their starved

minds and souls a chance. I know that I am expected

to be his stewardess in carrying on his work. I'm very

proud of that."

" That's all right," argued the man stoutly. " It's

splendid, but just the same it shows that your judg-

ment may be a little warped, dearest, with a life spent

so close to ideals that it's far away from facts. Per-

haps it may make you a trifle unjust to the ordinary,

every-day sort of man that just lives normally and

tries to be fairly decent about it. We can't all be

Coeur de Lions, you know."

" Do you know why my grandfather was so inter-

ested in those mountaineers ? " she loyally defended.

" Do you realize that for two hundred years the clear-

est strain of Anglo-Saxon blood in America has been

cut off, isolated, and left to rot in those hills.'' "

" I'm arguing now," he reminded her, " for what is,

to me, the most vital issue in life, and these men and

women have nothing to do with that. Please, dear,

let me at least have my day in court."

From across the way came the gay chorus of the

young people's song, contralto and bass and tenor, but

by the stone bench there was silence. Malcolm had

risen and stood waiting, and finally Juanita spoke

again low and seriously.

" Those men and women have something to do with

you, Roger. , . . This isn't a sudden decision, . , .

I've fought it all out in my own mind and the verdict

has been hard to reach, but it's reached now and it's

final. All you say may be true. I may have taken

too serious a view, but it's my view. Yet I've danced

and ridden and played tennis and polo as much as any

other girl. I've laughed as often, and as light-

heartedly as any of them and I haven't been altogether

without a sense of humor."

" You're the best sportswoman in the world ; you

have the keenest sense of humor in the world and you're

altogether the most delectable girl in the world — but

you aren't precisely infallible. Perhaps even your

judgment of me is not infallible."

" I'm very fallible, but for six months I've been pon-

dering this question. We're not meant for each other,

Roger. There's no escaping it. If there had been

I'd have escaped. I've been running here and there,

looking wildly for a loop-hole . . . but now I know

there is none. You asked me what giving you up

means to me. I'll tell you. If I'd lived some centuries

ago I'd have betaken me to a nunnery. I can't go on

living in our world without you. I admit that freely,

dear»"

" Thank God you didn't live several centuries ago,"

came his fervent exclamation. " And you don't have

to live without me."

Juanita shook her head again, the wistful smile

deepened her eyes and twisted one corner of her

lips.

" And so," she added suddenly, " I'm going to be-

take me to a more useful sort of nunnery, Roger, dear.

I'm going to betake me to the Cumberland Mountains,

to teach the ' bare-footed little feudists ' how to read

and write and wash their faces and comb their hair.

I'm going to try to teach them to forget some things

they already know; principally assassination from

ambush."

CHAPTER II

FOR just an instant Roger Malcolm stood trans-

fixed with amazement. When his voice came

it was as charged with dumfounded incredulity

as his attitude.

" The Cumberland Mountains ? You ? " he ques-

tioned dully.

" Yes."

With the passionate vehemence of one struggling to

break a paralyzing spell he was at her side and had

swept her into his arms. His excitement tensed his

muscles so fiercely that as the girl fluttered vainly in

his grasp she gave a low exclamation of pain. The

mastiff, deeply puzzled and torn between two alle-

giances, growled deep in his throat and took a stiff-

legged step forward while the bristles rose along his

quarters.

" By God, you shall do nothing of the sort ! " Mal-

colm spoke in a hoarse whisper. " It's too damnably

absurd. You are not going. Do you hear me? You

are not going ! "

" Please let me go, — you are hurting me," she said

quietly and he found himself standing back and sud-

denly trembling, for as her face had almost brushed his,

he had read her eyes and knew that in the end all ar-

gument would fail.

" My mind is finally made up," she reiterated gently.

** That, too, is a thing I've been weighing and ponder-

ing these last six months."

"And mine is made up, too." He leaned forward

and for just a moment thrilled her with a new com-

mand of pose and voice. " As God Hves I sha'n't let

you go. You're throwing my life away as well as

your own, and I don't mean to let you do it."

"Don't you?" The girl stood leaning against a

stone coping and just a hint of hope that she had un-

derestimated him stole flickeringly into her pupils.

" If you can stop me, do it. That will prove that the

sheath is really filled with ' a blade for a knight's em-

prise.' "

But even as he stood there in the moonlight with

her eyes fixed on him the set of his jaw and resolute

dominance of his eye melted into suffering of hope-

lessness which she ached to comfort. On the heels of

fierce command followed expostulation and pleading.

" Juanita, your grandfather never meant that you

should go into that lawless hell. He meant you to be

the directing mind, not the laborer in the field. It's

a life of squalor and dreariness. It would kill you."

He paused, then rushed on in headlong dissuasion.

" Your life has been the normal life of your sort ; of

ease and play and of a deliciously rhythmic personal-

ity. This idea is absurdly incongruous. It is mad-

ness."

" Is that the way you are going to stop me ? " she

queried a little scornfully. " You say I have the blood

of soldiers and scholars. The combination ought to

give a touch of the crusader, don't you think? "

" For a hundred years, dearest, courts and juries

and the bayonets of militiamen have struggled to tame

and civilize those barbaric people, and for a hundred

years they have utterly failed. There is one god down

there and his name is Implacable Hatred."

" Don't you think it's almost time they had another

God? I sha'n't go with juries or bayonets."

" You would have to go without knowing them,

with no knowledge of their ways, their point of view."

" I don't know them now, but I will know them."

" You haven't even a letter of introduction."

" I never heard," her voice rang with a note against

which he knew the futility of argument, " that the

Saviour needed letters of introduction."

She had moved out of the shadow now and the moon-

light fell on her white shoulders and the slender neck

that held her little head so fearlessly poised. From

the hair that the soft light kissed to the tips of her

satin slippers she was delicate, exquisite and flower-

like. The pearls on her throat rose and fell with the

agitation of her breathing, but her eyes were as steady

in their straight-gazing resolve as were ever the eyes

of Jeanne d'Arc. The man whose blood was scalding

his temples knew that he had lost and that she would

go.

" You are carried away with the hallucination of

an exalted mission," he protested. " They are not

worth it. Only yesterday I was reading in a paper the

biography of one of their feud leaders, a man named

' Bad Anse ' Havey. He has not even the excuse of

illiteracy. He has served in the State Assembly and

he holds his minions in the hollow of his blood-stained

hand. He lives like a murder lord, dealing out sen-

tences of death at will, while all the power of the State

seems helpless to curb him."

" I read about him, too," she said, " and the fact

that such a man can wield power like that is only the

greater reason for carrying to them a better code."

" You sha'n't go," he reiterated. " You sha'n't 1 "

" Stop me then, Roger dear," she said slowly.

" At all events I'm not going to-night. It's getting

chilly out here. Let's go indoors."

• ?••••••

The leaves of poplar and oak hung still and limp,

for no ghost of breeze found its way down there to stir

them into movement or whisper. Banks of rhododen-

dron breaking into a foam of bloom gave the seeming

?of green and whitecaped waves arrested and solidified

by some sudden paralysis of nature. Sound itself ap-

peared dead, save for hushed minors that only accen-

tuated the stillness of the Cumberland forest.

There was the low buzz of a bumble bee hanging near

the chalice of the catalpa's blossom and a drowsy ca-

dence drifting from the green-blanketed slopes of the

mountains ; the plaintive call of the nesting dove.

Even the little waters that slipped and shimmered

over a shaly creek bed, crept noiselessly down to their

destiny of feeding rivers as though their mission was

surreptitious.

Now as evening sent her warning with gathering

shadows that began to lurk in the valleys, two mounted

figures, traveling that way, made no sound either save

when a hoof splashed on a slippery surface or saddle

leather creaked under the patient scrambling of their

animals.

In front rode a battered mountaineer astride a rusty-

brown mule. He himself was as rusty and brown as

his beast, and to casual sight as spiritless. Lean shoul-

ders sagged and a thin, weary-eyed face was thrust

forward on a long, collarless neck with something sug-

gestive of a turtle's head in its aquiline contour. His

clothing, from shapeless hat to unlaced brogans, was

sun-gnawed and wind-bitten into absolute neutrality of

color. His uncertain age might have been anything

except young — for he had crossed the boundary where

a mountaineer bids an early farewell to youth and goes

under the aging yoke of hardship and drudgery.

The second figure came some yards behind, care-

fully following in his w^ake on a mule which limped and

drooped its head because it had cast its shoe in the

morning and toiled over mountains all day through a

smithless territory.

But it was the figure itself which would have arrested

observation with its seeming contradiction to the en-

vironment. It had startled into quaint exclamation

those men and women in jeans and linsey-woolsey who

had appeared now and then in tilting cornfields along

the mountain-sides. They had " rested their hoes "

and stood at gaze, for the second mule bore a woman,

riding astride. She was a young woman, and if just

now her slender shoulders also drooped a little, still

even in their droop they hinted at a gallant grace of

carriage.

The girl was very slender and though convoyed by

the drab missionary, " Good Anse " Talbott, though

astride a lame mule and accoutered with saddle-bags

and blanket roll, her clothes were not of mountain

calico, but of good fabric, and skillfully tailored, and

she carried her head differently. There was uncon-

scious pride of race and purpose in the uptilt of that

girl's chin, and though now she was very tired and her

delicately curving lips fell into a somewhat pathetic

droop; though her eyes wore a hint of furrow be-

tween their brows, still the lips were subtly and sweetly

carved by their Creator and the eyes were worthy mir-

rors for the sky high above the topmost crest of the

ridges.

Indubitably this was a " furriner," one of those

women from the other world of Down-below; the world

that lay beyond the ridges to the east and west, of

which the hill people had only a vague conception. She

was an outlander to be, at first glance, viewed with

the suspicion that resents the coming of innovation to

a land which has long stood unaltered and unalterable.

But who was she and why had she come?

Yet, had she known it, word had gone ahead of her

and been duly reported to the one man who knew things

hereabouts ; who made it a point to know things, and

whose name stood as a challenge to innovation in the

mountains. When at morning she had started out

from the shack town at the end of the rails " Bad Anse "

Havey's informers had ridden not far behind her.

Later they had pushed ahead and relayed their mes-

sage to their chief.

Like one of the untamable eagles that circled the

windy crests of his mountains, Anse Havey watched,

with eyes that could gaze unblinking into the sun, all

men who came and went through the highlands where

his eyrie perched. Those whom he hated, unless they,

too, were of the eagle breed, fierce and resourceful and

strong of talon, could not remain there. And with

strong wings as well as strong talons he and his sort

laughed at all law which they did not themselves make

and fancied themselves above it — creatures of the

heights.

This slender young woman, astnde a mule, was

coming as the avowed outrider of a new order. She

meant to wage war on the whole fabric of illiteracy

and squalid ignorance which lay entrenched here.

Consequently her arrival would interest Bad Anse

Havey.

Once that day when they had stopped at a wayside

mill to let their mules pant at the water-trough, she

had caught a scrap of conversation that was not meant

for her ears ; a scrap laughingly tossed from bearded

lip to bearded lip among the hickory-shirted loiterers

at the mill door.

" Reckon thet thar's the fotched-on woman what

aims ter start a school over on the head of Tribulation,"

drawled one native ; " I heered tell of her t'other day."

With a somewhat derisive laugh another had con-

tributed,

" Mebby she hain't talked thet projeck over with

Bad Anse yit. Reckon he don't 'low ter tolerate no

sich foolery es thet."

As she had stiffened in her saddle with resentment

and fighting spirit a third voice had pensively volun-

teered the suggestion : " Hit mout be a right-good idee

fer thet gal ter go on back down below, whar she

b'longs at."

The girl was thinking of all that now as she rode in

the wake of her silent escort. Muscles which had never

before proclaimed themselves were waking into a rack

of pain in her back and neck and limbs and it is diffi-

cult to be gallant and resolute when one is tired. Sud-

denly it seemed to her that she bore on the shoulders of

a girl fresh from college, and reared to ease, a burden

which Atlas should be hefting.

Thej came ploddingly to a higher strip of road, and

she clutched at her pommel and swayed a little in her

saddle under a dizzying wave of physical exhaustion.

Now the mountains opened from their choking close-

ness and ahead lay a broad vista.

Even the sprays of elder and the flare of the trumpet

flower carried a color note of weed-like lawlessness.

That such lawlessness as held these hills locked in its

grip could exist in her century had always seemed to

her incredible. Now the sun was sinking into a bank

of somber clouds through a rift in the ridges, and the

clouds were crimsoned at their marges as though with

the blood of this people's ferocity. Why had the po-

tent wave of civilization always broken here in shat-

tered foam? This morning she had asked herself that

question. This afternoon, she looked at the mountains

and the mountains were the answer. There they stood

before her rock-ribbed and titanic. They were beau-

tiful beyond words, but unshakably sullen and inex-

pressibly grim. These were the hills she had come to

change ; hills fixed and invincible ; hills that had halted

and deflected the restless flow of civilization as armor

plate might turn a rocket's fire.

They had nourished mediaevalism unaltered through

two centuries; they had been ancient when the Alps

and Himalayas yet slept in the womb of the sea ; old

before the Andes were conceived! And as she rode her

hobbling mule into their depths with wilting confidence,

it seemed to her that the human incarnation of this

great lawlessness stood mocking her in the fierce, con-

temptuous visage which her imagination had painted

as that of Bad Anse Havey. Here was a desperado,

defying all law whom a sovereign commonwealth could

not or would not rise and crush.

In a moment of almost cringing despair she wished

indeed that she were " back thar down below whar she

b'longed at."

Then almost fiercely drawing back her aching shoul-

ders, she cast her eyes about on the darkening coves

and the creeping shadows of the broad panorama from

which came no thread of smoke, no sign of human

habitation and raised her voice in anxious inquiry.

" How much further do we have to go ? "

The man riding ahead did not turn his face, but

flung his answer apathetically backward over his shoul-

der. " We got to keep right on twell we comes ter a

dwellin'-house. I'm aimin' fer old man Fletch Mc-

Nash's cabin a leetle ther rise of a mile frum hyar.

I 'low mebby he mout shelter us twell mornin'."

"And if he doesn't?" demanded the girl.

" Ef he doesn't we've got ter ride on a spell fur-

ther."

The girl closed her eyes for a moment and pressed

her lip between her teeth.

At last a sudden turn in the road brought to view a

wretched patch of bare clay circled by a dilapidated

paling fence within which gloomed a squalid and un-

lighted cabin of logs. At sight of its desolation, the

girl's heart sank. No note of cheery light gave com-

fort to her weariness. A square hovel, windowless and

obviously of one room, held up a wretched lean-to that

sagged drunkenly against its end. The open door

was merely a patch of greater darkness in the gray

picture. Behind it loomed the mountain like a crouch-

ing Colossus.

At first she thought it an abandoned shack, but as

they drew rein near the stile which one must cross into

the yard and which a gnarled sycamore shaded, a dark

object lazily rose, resolving itself into a small boy of

perhaps eleven, who had been sitting hunched up there

at gaze with his hands clasped around his thin knees.

As he came to his feet, he revealed a thin stature

swallowed up in a hickory shirt and an over-ample pair

of butternut trousers that had evidently come down

in honorable heritage from elder brethren. His small

face wore a sharp, prematurely old expression, as he

stood staring up at the new arrivals and hitching at

the single " gallus " which supported the family

breeches.

" Airy one o' ye folks got a chaw o' terbaccy.'^ " he

demanded tersely, then added in plaintive after-note,

" I hain't had a chaw ter-day."

" Sonny," announced the colorless mountaineer with

equal succinctness, " we want ter be took in. We're

benighted."

" Ye mout axe Fletch," was the stolid reply, " only

he hain't hyar. . . . Hes airy one o' ye folks got a

chaw o' terbaccy? "

" I don't chaw, ner drink, ner smoke," answered the

horseman quietly, with the manner of one who teaches

by precept. " I'm a preacher of ther Gawspel. Air

ye Fletch's boy ? "

" Huh-huh. Hain't thet woman got no terbaccy

nuther ? '*

Evidently whatever other characteristics went into

this youth's nature he was admirably gifted with

tenacity and singleness of purpose. Juanita Holland

smiled, as she shook her head and replied, " I'm a

woman and I don't use tobacco."

" The hell ye don't ! " The boy paused, then added

scornfully, " My mammy chaws and smokes, too — but

she don't straddle no boss." After that administra-

tion of rebuke he deigned once more to recognize the

missionary's insistent queries, though with the laconic

impatience of extreme ennui.

" I tell ye Fletch hain't hyar." The boy started dis-

gustedly away, but paused in passing to jerk his head

toward the house and added, " Ye mout axe thet woman

ef ye've a mind ter."

The travelers raised their eyes and saw a second

figure standing with hands on hips staring at them

from the distance. It was the slovenly figure of a

woman, clad in a colorless and shapeless skirt and an

equally shapeless jacket which hung unbelted about

her thick waist. As she came slowly forward the girl

began to take in other details. The woman was bare-

footed and walked with a shambling gait which made

Juanita think of bears pacing their barred enclosures

in a zoo. Her face was hard and unsmiling, and the

wrinkles about her eyes were those of anxious and

lean years, but the eyes themselves were not unkind.

Her lips were tight clamped on the stem of a clay

pipe.

" Evenin', ma'am," began the mountaineer. " I'm

Good Anse Talbott. I reckon mebby ye've heered tell

of me. This lady is Miss Holland from down below.

I 'lowed Flech mout let us tarry hyar till sun-up."

" I reckon he mout — ef he war hyar, though we

don't foller takin' in strangers," was the dubious re-

ply ; '' but he hain't hyar."

"Where air he at?"

" Don't know. Didn't ye see him down the road as

ye rid along? "

" Wall, now — " drawled the missionary, " I hain't

skeercely as well acquainted hyarabouts as further up

Tribulation. What manner o' lookin' man air he ? "

" He don't look like nothin' much," replied his wife

morosely. " He's jest an ornery-lookin' old man."

" Whither did he sot out ter go when he left hyar? "

The woman shook her head, then a grim flash of

latent wrath broke in her eyes.

" I'll jest let ye hev the truth, stranger. Some triflin'

fellers done sa'ntered past hyar with a jug of licker,

an' thet fool Fletch hes jest done follered 'em off.

Thet's all thar is to hit an' he hain't got no license

ter ack thetaway nuther. I reckon by now he's a-layin'

drunk somewhars."

For a moment there was silence through which

drifted the distant tinkle of cowbells down the creek.

Beyond the crests lingered only a lemon afterglow as

relict of the dead day. The brown, colorless man

astride his mule sat stupidly looking down at the brown

colorless woman across the stile. The waiting girl

heard the preacher surmising that " mebby he'd better

sot out in s'arch of Fletch." The words seemed to come

from a great distance and her head swam giddily.

Then overcome with disgust and weariness, Juanita

Holland saw the afterglow turn slowly to pale gray

and then to black shot through with orange spots.

She grew suddenly indifferent to the situation. She

swayed in her saddle and slipped limply to the ground.

The young woman who had come to conquer the moun-

tains and carry a torch of enlightenment to their

??Jiteracy, had fainted from heartsickness and weari-

ness at the tlireshold of her invasion.

CHAPTER III

THE weariness which caused the fainting spell

must have lengthened its duration, for when

Juanita's lashes flickered upward again and her

brain came gropingly back to consciousness she was

no longer out by the stile. Yet there could not have

been a great interval either for now as the girl looked

up the parallelogram of a door frame showed that

though the twilight was dying the twilight's ghost

still lingered. At the top of the opening was yet a

streak of afterglow, paling and graying, and over it

hung a single, diamond-clear star.

, She noticed that detail before she became aware of

nearer things. Gradually consciousness ceased to be

fragmentary. She was lying in the smothering soft-

ness of a feather bed. On her palate and tongue lin-

gered an unfamiliar, sweetish taste, while through her

veins she felt the coursing of a warm glow. Over her

stood the woman who had been across the stile when

she fainted. Her attitude was anxiously watchful.

In one hand she held a stone jug, and in the other a

gourd dipper. So that accounted for the taste and the

glow, and as Juanita took in the circumstance she

heard the high nasal voice, pitched none the less in a

tone of kindly reassurance.

" Ye'll be spry as a squirrel in a leetle spell, honey.

Don't fret yoreself none. Ye war jest plumb tuckered

out an' ye swooned. I've been a rubbin' yore hands

an' a pourin' a little white licker down yore throat.

Don't worrit yoreself none. We're pore folks an' we

hain't got much, but I reckon we kin mek out ter en-

joy ye somehow."

The four walls of the cabin might have been the

rocky confines of a mountain cavern, so completely did

they merge into the impalpable and sooty murk that

hung between them, obliterating all remoter outline.

Only things in a narrow circle grew visible and at the

center of this lighted area was the slender figure of a

girl, holding up a lard taper, whose radius of light was

yellow and flickering.

The girl on the bed smiled and murmured her thanks,

and as the other girl, younger and unspeakably shy,

felt the eyes of the strange woman from the great un-

known world upon her, her own dark lashes fell timidly

and the hand that held the taper trembled, while into

her cheeks crept a carmine self-consciousness. She was

looking at the most beautiful creature she had ever

seen, and the diffidence with which her isolated little

life had been always fettered grew as poignant as

though she were in the presence of some rare and su-

perior being. And Juanita, for her part, felt in her

veins a new and subtler glow than that which the moon-

shine whiskey had quickened. The men and women

of the hills had made her heart-sick with their stolid

and animal-like coarseness. Now she saw a slender

figure in which the lines were yet transitory between

the straightness of childhood and the budding curves

of womanhood. She saw a well-borne head surmounted

by a mass of tangled hair which the taper lighted into

an aureole about a face delicately beautiful. The lips

were poppy-red and the eyes were as blue as her own,

while below the ragged hem of the short calico skirt

bare and slender feet twisted with the restless shyness

of a fawn's.

It w^as to such children of the hills as this that

Juanita Holland was to bring the new teachings. But

even as she smiled, the child, for she seemed to be only

fifteen or sixteen, surrendered to her shyness and

thrusting the taper into her mother's hand, shrunk out

of sight in some shadowed comer of the place.

Then Juanita's eyes occupied themselves with what

fragmentary details the faint light revealed. There

was something like a rough stone grotto which she

knew to be the fireplace. The barrel of a rifle caught

the weak flare and glittered. The uncarpeted floor of

rude puncheon slabs was a thing of gaping cracks, and

overhead there was a vague feeling of low rafters from

which hung strings of ancient and shriveled peppers

and a few crinkled " hands " of " natural leaf." But

as her senses wakened she was most conscious of a

reek such as that which clings about a shed where hams

are cured ; the reek of a windowless house in which

the chimney has smoked until the timbprs are dark-

ened.

" Dawn," commanded the woman, " take yore foot

in yore hand an' light out ter ther barn an' see ef ye

kin find some aigs." Then as Juanita watched the

door she caught a glimpse of a slight figure that van-

ished with the same quick noiselessness as that with

which a beaver slips into water.

" I reckon ye kin jest lay thar a spell," apologized

the woman, " whilst I goes out an' see what victuals I

kin skeer up."

Left alone, the girl from Philadelphia ran over the

events of the day and seemed to smother under a weight

of squalor and foreboding. The taper had gone with

the hostess and even the door darkened with the thick-

ening of twilight. Once or twice she heard the sur-

reptitious fall of a cautious bare foot, and though at

first she could see nothing she knew that one of the

children of the household had crept in to lie fascinatedly

gazing toward her from one of the other beds. As her

eyes slowly accustomed themselves to the darkness un-

til their widening pupils could recognize degrees of

pitchiness — separating comparative from superla-

tive — she could make them out, in strange immovable

little shapes of black. Even in their idle curiosity

there was that note which had all day been growing to

an obsession with her ; the note which strikes the

stranger in the hills, of never ending and grim sus-

pense; of being constantly watched and followed by

unseen eyes.

At length from the road came loud shouts of drunken

laughter broken by the evident remonstrances of a com-

panion who sought to enjoin quiet, and by these tokens

the " furrin " woman knew that the lord of the squalid

manor was returning, and that he was coming under

convoy. She shrunk from an immediate meeting with

Fletch McNash whose ribald laughter proclaimed his

condition, but if she went out by the only door she

knew, she would have to confront him, so she lay still,

shrinking with distaste as she heard her hostess berat-

ing the delinquent consort, and heard also the interjec-

tions of another voice whose words she could not catch,

so low pitched and quiet was the manner of their utter-

ance.

Fletch had been deposited in one of the split-bottom

chairs about the broken mill-stone which served in lieu

of a doorstep, and palpably his drink had left him

mellow and genial, beyond vulnerability to badgering.

"I jest went over thar ter borry a hoe," he excul-

pated. " An' I met up with some fellers thet wouldn't

hardly leave me go. Thar was all manner of free

licker. They had white licker an' bottled-in-bond

licker an' none of hit didn't cost nothin'. Them fellers

jest wouldn't hardly suffer me ter come away."

" An' whilest ye war a-soakin' up thet thar free

licker them potater sets was a-dryin' up, waitin' ter be

sot out," came the ironical wifely reminder.

" I knows thet. I hadn't hardly ought ter of did

hit — but them fellers they jest wouldn't hardly suffer

me ter leave thar."

" Well," the woman's voice was contemptuous, " I

jest took them pertater sets an' flung 'em in ther crick.

Next time mebby ye'll know better."

" Aw, pshaw ! ole woman," Fletch's voice was un-

ruffled, " ye didn't do no sich of a fool thing. Ye're

jest a-lyin'."

Between the strident voices, came every now and

then the softly modulated tones of the stranger whose

words Juanita lost. Yet somehow whenever she heard

their cadence, she felt soothed, and after each of these

utterances the woman outside also spoke in softer

tones.

Whoever the stranger w^as, he carried in his voice

a reassuring quality, so that without having seen him

the girl felt that in his presence there was an element

of strength and safeguarding.

At last from one of the beds she heard a scuffling

sound and a moment later a childish form opened a

door at the back of the cabin and slipped out into the

darkness.

That revealed an avenue of escape. Juanita had

not known that these windowless cabins are usually sup-

plied with two doors and that the one into which the

wind does not drive stands open for light on winter

days. Now she, too, rose noiselessly and went out of

the close and musty room. It was quite dark out

there and she could feel, rather than see the densely

foliaged side of the mountain that loomed upward at

her back.

Off to one side she could make out, by virtue of lan-

tern-glow between its cracks, the barn, where some one

was still busy with the stock.

All about her was impenetrable murk and she sank

down on a large rock which she found in her path.

She was wrapped in the depressing contemplation of

the task which lay ahead of her, and its stark contrast

with all which lay behind her, so that, in her brooding,

she lost account of time. The voices at the front

seemed now to have died into the same universal si-

lence which held the mountains throttled, and the night

chorus had not yet opened. Evidently no one had

missed her from the cabin. At last she heard a voice

sing out from the stile.

" I'm Jim White, an' I'm a-comin' in."

A thick welcome from Fletch McNash followed and

then again silence settled except for the weird strain

of a banjo which one of the children was thrumming

inside. The banjo carried to the Eastern girl's heart

a sense of lost soul isolation and eerie loneliness, for

the fingers that nursed its strings were slowly picking

out one of those mournful ballads which have filtered

down from the Scotland of Mary Stuart, and which

have survived nowhere else than in this desolate strong-

hold of the dead ages.

After a while as she sat there on her rock, with her

chin disconsolately in her hand, and her elbows on her

knees, Juanita became conscious of footsteps and knew

that some one was coming toward her. Whoever the

person or persons were the approach was very quiet

and at first she heard only the light crackle of chips

and twigs as they passed the chopping block in the

woodpile, but in another moment she caught the calm

voice which had already impressed her; the voice of

the stranger who had brought home the half-helpless

house-holder.

" I reckon we're out of earshot now. I reckon we

kin hev speech here, but heed your voice an' talk low."

In the face of such a preface the girl shrank back

with fresh panic. She had no wish to overhear private

conversation. She could think of nothing she dreaded

more than to be the recipient of any of the dark secrets

with which these hills seemed to be honey-combed. If

either one of the two men who were only shadows

bulked a little blacker than the general darkness,

should light a pipe, she would stand forth revealed with

all the guilty seeming of an eavesdropper.

She huddled back against the rock and cast an anx-

ious glance about her for a way to escape. Behind lay

the mountain wall with its jungle-like growth, where

her feet would sound an alarm of rustling branches

and disturbed deadwood. But the men were strolling

near her and to try to reach the house would require

crossing their path.

Then the second shadow spoke and its voice carried,

beside the nasal shrillness so common to the hills, the

tenseness of suppressed excitement.

" Thar's liable ter be hell ter-night."

The girl thought that the quiet stranger laughed,

though of that she could not be certain.

" I reckon ye mean concernin' Cal Douglas ? "

" Thet's hit, whin I rid outen Peril this a'ternoon

ther Jury hed done took ther case an' everybody 'lowed

they'd find a verdict afore sundown."

" I reckon," the taller of the two men answered

slowly, and into his softly modulated voice crept some-

thing of flinty finality. " I reckon I can tell ye what

that verdict's goin' to be. Cal will come clear."

" Thet hain't ther p'int," urged the messenger ex-

citedly. " Thet hain't why I've rid over hyar like a

bat outen hell ter cotch up with ye. I was aimin' ter

fotch word over ter ther dance, but es I come by hyar,

I seen yore boss hitched out thar in ther road so I lit

an' come in. . . , I reckon ye knows thet Co'te an'

thet Jury. Thet's yore business, but thet hain't all."

"Well, what's the balance of it.? Talk out. What

are ye aimin' to tell me ? "

" I met up with a feller in Job Heath's blind tiger

jest outside Peril. He'd drunk a lot of licker an' he

got ter talking mighty loose-tongued an' free." The

girl sickened a little as she felt that her fears were

being realized, and one hand went involuntarily up to

her breast and stayed there. The young man with

the shrill voice talked on impetuously.

" Ever sence the trial of Cal Douglas started good,

old Milt McBriar hain't been actin' like his-self. Him

an' Breck Havey's been stoppin' at ther same hotel

in Peril an' yit Milt hain't 'peared ter be a-bearin' no

grudge whatsoever. When ther Jury was med up, IMilt

didn't seek ter challenge fellers thet everybody knowed

was friends of Cal's. Milt didn't even seek ter raise

no hell when ther Jedge ruled favorable ter Cal right

along. This feller what I talked ter, 'lowed thet Milt

didn't keer ef Cal came cl'ar."

The listening man once more answered with a quiet

laugh. " Do ye 'low that that old rattlesnake, Milt

McBriar, aims to stand by an' not try ter hang or peni-

tentiary kin of mine for killin' kin of his? " he inquired

almost softly.

" Thet's just hit," the answer came quickly and ex-

citedly. " This feller 'lowed thet old Milt aimed ter

show ther world thet he couldn't git no jestice in a Co'te

thet b'longed ter Anse Havey, an' then he aimed ter

'tend ter his own jestice fer hisself. He 'lows ter hev

hit home-made."

CHAPTER IV

HOW is he aimin' to fix it? " The question was

a bit contemptuous.

" They figger thet when Cal comes cl'ar,

he'll ride lickety-split, with a bunch of Havey boys over

hyar ter this dance what's a-goin' forward at ther p'int.

Some of Milt's fellers aims ter slip over thar, too, an'

while Cal's celebratin' they aims ter git him ter-

night."

" Do they ? " The taller man's voice was velvety.

" Well, go on. What else? "

" They aims ter tell ther world thet they let ther

law take hit's co'se fust, but thet Bad Anse Havey

makes a mockery of ther law. This feller I talked with

was jest a boy an' ther licker hed made him brag mighty

heedless. I let on like I was State's evidence, same es

him an' he told me everything he knew. He 'lowed

thet the Haveys were aimin' ter make this dance a big

celebration — an' thet Old Milt aimed ter give 'em

somethin' ter celebrate right an' proper."

For a moment there was silence, and then the quiet

voice commented ironically : " My God, them fellers

lay a heap of deviltry up against Bad Anse, don't

they?"

After a moment of silence, through which Juanita

Holland was painfully conscious of the quick beat of

her own heart, she heard again the unexcited voice of

the tall stranger. Now it was the capable voice of a

general officer giving commands.

" Did ye give warnin' in Peril? "

" No — I couldn't get ter speak with Cal, He was

in co'te — and seein' as how they didn't figger on raisin'

no hell twell they git over hyar — I didn't turn back-

wards. I come straight through. I 'lowed this was

ther place ter fix things up."

" You ride over to the dancin' party. Get the older

fellers together. , . . Keep the boys quiet an' sober

. . . cold sober. Watch thet old fool, Bob McGreeger.

Don't spread these tidings till I get there. ... If Cal

comes over there tell him to keep outen sight. Nothin'

won't break loose before midnight. . . . That's my or-

ders. By God Almighty, I aim to have peace here-

about just now." The speaker's voice broke off and

the two men passed out of sight around the corner of

the house.

The girl rose and made her way unsteadily to the

back door and let herself in. She threw herself on the

bed and lay there rapidly thinking. It was obvious

that her absence had not been commented upon. A few

minutes later she heard the voice of Mrs. McNash sing-

ing out, " You folks kin all come in an' eat," and found

herself, outwardly calm, making her way around to the

shed addition which served jointly as kitchen and din-

ing-room.

When she entered the place Fletch McNash was al-

ready seated and sagged over his plate with the stupid

inertia of dulled senses. Gone now was his hilarity

and in its place was come the sleepy heaviness of re-

action. Even the sight of the " f otched-on woman "

elicited from him only a thickly muttered and incoher-

ent comment.

At the center of the miserable lean-to stood a home-

made table covered with red oil-cloth and nondescript

crockery. Light came from the roaring blaze of the

open hearth over which with pioneer make-shift the

cookery had gone forward. In the yellow and ver-

milion flare of the logs, the walls appeared to advance

and recede in tune to the upleapings of flame. Hud-

dling as far into the shadow of a comer as possible sat

the girl, Dawn, like a pink laurel-blossom in a sooty

place. Above her head hung several " sides of meat,"

and at her feet was a pile of potatoes and onions.

But Juanita dismissed with a quick view those figures

she had seen before. To Fletch McNash she accorded

a glance of veiled disgust. She found herself unac-

countably eager to see the tall stranger whose voice

had reassured her ; who had appeared first as the Samar-

itan bringing home the helpless ; then as the man whose

words gained prompt obedience — and finally as the

self-declared advocate of peace.

He was standing, as she entered, a little back from

the hearth, with the detached air of one who drops into

the background or comes to the fore with equal readi-

ness. She found that in appearance as in voice he

bore a rough sort of impressiveness about him. In the

brighter light stood the messenger, a gaunt youth in

whose wild, sharp features lurked cunning, cruelty and

endurance. But the other man, who stood a head

taller, fell into a pose of indolent ease which might wake

instantly into power.

On his clear-cut, rather lean face was a calm which

seemed remote from even the memory of excitement.

From a breadth of shoulder he tapered wedge-hke to the

waist and was knit with none of the shambling loose-

ness that Juanita had come to associate with the Cum-

berland type. In clothing he was much like the rest,

except that in a rather indefinable way he escaped their

seeming of slouchiness. She wondered where she had

seen some portrait that wore as his face did roughness

combined wdth dignity : crudeness with gentleness.

It w^as a face strongly and ruggedly chiseled, but

so dominated by unfaltering, gray eyes that one was

apt to forget all else, and carry away only a memory

of dark hair — and those eyes. Now as the girl met

their steady gaze, her own fell before it, yet she had

caught a feeling that although she had never looked

into such cool pupils there lay back of them a strong

impression of banked and sleeping fires.

" No I kain't hardly tarry," she heard the messenger

declaring in his nasal, high-pitched voice. " I reckon

I've got ter be gone."

As Juanita made her way to a chair at the rough

table the woman was saying in that old idiom of the

hills, which springs from days when matches were un-

known and dead fires must needs be rekindled from a

neighbor's hearth, " What's yore tormentin' haste, Jim ?

Ye acts like ye'd done come ter borry fire."

" I'm a leetle-bit oneasy," interposed the tall man

quietly, " lest those boys over at the dance might git

quarrelsome with licker, and I want Jim to ride over

an' keep an' eye on 'em till I git there. A dancin' party

ought rightly to be peaceable."

Then as they sat at table and the girl struggled

with her discomfiture over each unclean detail of the

food, she raised her eyes from time to time, always to

encounter upon her the steady, appraising gaze of the

dark stranger. In the desultory conversation of the

table he took no part, but sat as taciturn and as

wrapped about with his own thoughts as some warrior

of the Indians from whom his forefathers had wrested

these hills and from whom they had, to their shame,

learned their ethics of warfare.

When they had finished, the stranger drew Fletch,

now somewhat sobered by his meal, aside and the other

men retired to the chairs in the door-yard. Then the

girl from the East again slipped away and took up her

solitary place on the top of the stile, where she sat

thinking. The group about the door seemed a long

way off as their droning voices drifted to her in the

dark.

Slowly the smothering blackness of the barriers be-

gan to lighten. Beyond the eastern crests showed

the pale mistiness of silver which was precursor to the

moon. Stars that gleamed between the peaks like

diamond splinters grew less intensely 'clear. Then the

flat and pitchy curtain of night took faint form. The

edge of the moon peeped stealthily over the ridge and

after that the moon itself began to soar and work magic

changes. The black void out in front became a silvery

little valley through which the soft mirroring ribbon

of Tribulation caught and turned top-down the lacelike

fringe of the timber. Great shapeless masses modeled

themselves into clear-cut monuments of cobalt. Giant

plumes of pines and patterns of oak swam into sight

and the hollows were dream-wrapped pools of softened

moon-mist. Then as though in answer to the miracle

that had transformed the hopeless death of the night

into the tender nocturne of grays and silvers and dream-

blues, there boomed from the edges of the creek the

chorus of the full-throated frogs and from behind in

wooded slopes floated that plaintive note w^hich, once

known, leaves the ache of an unfulfilled desire over all

countries w^here it does not sound; the call of the whip-

poorwill.

Under these influences Juanita Holland was feeling

unspeakably soothed. The sick squalor and lawless-

ness of the hills seemed, for the moment, less important

than their serene beauty. After all where Nature

smiled like this, where from heavens and forests came

such a caress and benediction as moon-mist and star-

light were pouring over her, things could not be irre-

trievably bad.

There were blossom girls like little Dawn to be won

away from weed-wildness and taught. There were

young men like the eagle-eyed stranger who raised their

voices to declare as she had heard him declare, " I aim

to have peace hyarabouts." Somehow she felt that

what that voice announced, that man would do.

At last she was conscious of a presence besides her

own, as of scwne one standing silently at her back.

Rather nervously she turned her head and there with

one foot on the lower step of the stile stood the young

stranger himself. Once more their eyes met and with

a little start she dropped her own. She was not one

who ordinarily failed to sustain any glance, however

direct, and a sense of challenge usually brought to her

chin that upward tilt and to her pupils that faint flash

under which the other eyes fell away. Yet somehow

now, though she felt a half-mocking challenge and a

premonition of personal duel in his gaze, it was she who

surrendered.

She saw his horse, hitched outside, raise its head and

whinny as though in welcome to its master, and then

she looked back, and the mountaineer's steady apprais-

ing gaze was still fixed on her face, seeming to penetrate

her thoughts.

" I kinder hate to bother ye, ma'am," said the even

voice, " but I can't hardly get acrost thet stile whilst

ye're settin' on it."

There was no note of badinage or levity in his voice

and his clear-drawn features under the moonlight were

entirely serious.

Juanita rose. " I beg your pardon," she said hastily

as she went down the stile on the far side.

" Thet's all right, ma'am," replied the man easily,

still with a serious dignity as he, too, crossed to the

road.

While he was untying the knot in his bridle rein the

girl stood watching him. In the easy indolence of his

movements was the rippling quality that suggested the

leopard's frictionless strength. Inside, when she had

seen him standing by the hearth, she had been impressed,

but his eyes had so fascinated her that the rest of her

scrutiny had been insufficient and unsatisfactory. Now

in the moonlight and the breeze she felt cooler, steadier,

more analytical.

Even the raw-looking messenger had in an inferior

way struck her with a note of the individual, and she

had satisfied herself with the reflection that both these

men differed from all the men of her own world because

her acquamtances had gone under the leveling and soft-

ening influences of the conventional. They were

smoother and more alike while these more primitive

men w^ere types, each standing forth with something of

the sternness of their native crags.

The very quality that gave this young stranger

his picturesqueness and stamped him as vital and dy-

namic in his manhood, sprang from that wild rough-

ness which he shared with his eagles and Dawn shared

with her w^edlike flowers. And yet it was somehow

as though the man, whose voice was so calm, whose

movements so quiet, whose gaze so un-arrogant, were

crying out in a clarion challenge with every breath, " I

am a man ! "

It was as unnecessary for him to breathe a syllable

or strike an attitude to drive that declaration home as

it would be for a dreadnought to fire a broadside in an-

nouncement of the purpose for which it had been

launched.

The stranger's square-blocked face was smooth-shaven

and his clothes, in their careless roughness, seemed less

garments than an emphasis for the power and swiftness

of the muscles beneath them. She thought of them less

as clothes than as plumage — an eagle's plumage.

Instead of brogans tan boots were laced half way to

the knee and above them the trousers bulged squarely

like the feathers that break off^ close above an eagle's

talons. His throat and hands were of the clear smooth-

ness and clean hardness of bronze.

Yet brow and lips and nostrils seemed rather chiseled

than molded, with the little edges and angles left, so

that the contour suggested granite while the texture

seemed metal.

Dominating all the rest, the eyes, cool, but sentient

with latent passion and power, lighted from within

rather than from without, were always the first and last

things that one saw.

Suddenly she wondered if in him she might not find

an ally. She felt very lonely. To have counsel with

some one in these liills less stupidly phlegmatic than

Good Anse Talbott would bring comfort and reassur-

ance to her heart. She must cope with the powerful

chicane and resourcefulness of Bad Anse Havey, him

of the untamed ferocity and cold cruelty and subtle

intelligence. If some native son could share even a

little of her view-point she would find in him a tower

of strength.

She would have liked to tell him how her loneliness

called out for comprehension and friendship, yet she

did not know how to start. Then while she stood there

still hesitant, still very beautiful and slim and wraith-

like under the moon, he spoke in his reassuring steadi-

ness of voice.

Perhaps he had yielded to the unspoken appeal of

the deep rangeful eyes that were always blue, yet never

twice the same blue, and the sweetly sensitive lips so

tantalizingly charming, because they were fashioned for

smiles and were now drooping instead. Perhaps the

wild masculine in him responded to the pliant curves

that spoke of strength and stamina in a figure so lithely

slender.

" I reckon," he said, " you find it right diff 'rent from

down below, don't you ? "

She nodded. " But it's very beautiful," she added as

she swept her hand about in a gesture of admiration.

It was he who nodded at that, very gravely, and al-

most reverently, though at the next moment his laugh

was short and almost ironical.

" I reckon God never fashioned anything better —

nor worse," he told her. " When you've breathed it an'

seen it an' lived it, no other place is fit to dwell in, an'

yet sometimes I 'low that God didn't mean it to be the

habitation of men an' women. It's cut out for eagles

an' hawks an' wild things. It belongs to the winds an'

storms. It puts fire into veins meant for blood, an' the

only crop it raises much is hell."

" You — you've been out in the other world — down

below .f' " she questioned.

" Yes, but I couldn't stay down there. I couldn't

breathe hardly. I sultered an' sickened — an' I came

back."

She turned to him impulsively.

" I don't know who you are," she began hurriedly,

" but I know that you brought this man home when

he was not in a condition to come alone. I know that

you sent a man ahead of you to keep peace at the dance.

I know you have a heart, and it means something,

— means a great deal — to feel that some one in these

hills feels about it as I feel."

She broke off abruptly, realizing that she was allowing

too much appeal to creep into her voice; that she had

come to fight, not to sue for favor. He was standing,

making no offer to interrupt or answer until he was

quite sure she was through, but his attitude was that

of dignified, almost deferential attention.

"I — I thought maybe you would help me," she fin-

ished a little f alteringly. " Would you mind telling

me your name? "

He had unhitched his horse and stood with the reins

hanging from one hand.

" It's Havey," he said slowly, " but hereabouts I've

got another name that's better known." He paused,

then added with a hardened timber of voice as though

bent on making defiant what would otherwise sound like

confession : " It's Bad Anse."

The girl recoiled as though under a physical shock.

It seemed to her that every way she turned she was to

meet staggering disappointments. She had spoken

almost pleadingly to the man with whom she could make

no terms ; the man whose arrogant power and lawless in-

fluence she must break and paralyze before her own

regime could find standing room in these hills.

Yet as she looked at him standing there, and stiffened

resolutely, she could say nothing except, " Oh ! "

Into the monosyllable crept many things: repulsion,

defiance and chagrin for her mistake, and in recognition

of them all the bronzed features of the man hardened

a little and into the cool eyes snapped a sparkle of the

sleeping fires she had divined.

" I made my suggestion to the wrong man," she said

steadily. " I misunderstood you. I thought you said

you wanted peace."

He swung himself to the saddle, then as he gathered

up his reins he turned and in his utterance was immov-

able steadiness and glacial coldness, together with a

ring of contempt and restrained anger.

" I did say that and by God Almighty, I meant just

what I said. I do want peace in these mountains — but

I ain't never found no way yet ter get peace without

fightin' for it."

She saw him ride away into the moonhght, with his

shoulders very straight and the battered felt hat very

high, and he looked neither to right nor left as he went

until the mists had swallowed him.

CHAPTER V

FOR the rest of her life Juanita looked back upoi;

the remainder of that night as upon some lurid de-

lirium shot across with many hideous apparitions.

For a long while she sat there on the stile gazing

across the steep banks between which the waters of

Tribulation slipped along in a tide of tarnished quick-

silver, and beyond which rose the near ridges of blue

and the far dim ridges of gray. At her back she knew

that the family and the missionary were sitting in talk.

Their nasal, high-pitched voices drifted vaguely to her

and jarred upon her nerves. Jeb, the oldest boy, had

left after supper to go back to the dance — for in these

lonely back waters of the world any sort of entertain-

ment is too rare to be wasted. Down by the water the

frogs whose voices had a little while ago seemed mellow

were croaking dismally now, and when some soft-winged

and noiseless creature fluttered by near her face and

from the sycamore overhead quavered the long wistful

call of a " grave-yard owl " she shivered a little. Even

the message of the whippoorwill was changed. In-

stead of " Whippoorwill " the birds seemed to voice in

dirge-like monotony, " These poor hills ! These poor

hills ! "

She sat there with her hands clasped about her up-

drawn knees as she used to sit when some childliood

grief had weighed upon her. The moonlight caught

and sparkled on wet lashes and something suspiciously

like tears in her eyes, but there was no one to see except

the downy owl that blinked back from the bone-white

branch of the gnarled sycamore.

She could not shake out of her mind the humiliation

of having shown her weakest side to Bad Anse Havey.

It was some satisfaction to remember the offended stif-

fening of his shoulders and the dark fire in his eyes.

She had heard much of the easily hurt pride of these

mountain men ; a pride which made them walk in strange

surroundings with upright heads and eyes challenging

criticism of their uncouthness, their wildness. She had

first appealed to this man, but at least she had also

stung him with her scorn. Now they would be open

enemies.

And with thought of him, the whole situation grew

strangely complex. She could no longer think of him

as she had before thought of him, nor of his people as

she had before thought of them.

She knew that this young man in a country where

every man was poor and no man a pauper, owned great

tracts of land that yielded only sparse crops, with the

most arduous coaxing. She knew that under his rocky

acres slept a great wealth of coal and that above them

grew noble and virgin forests of hard wood. The com-

ing of railroads and development would make him a

rich man. Yet he stood there, seemingly prizing above

all those magnificent certainties the empty boast of

feudal chieftainship. He stood like an eagle on a tree-

top, jealously guarding the wild fastnesses of the crags

around him. Why? She asked herself and found no

answer. At all events he was a man. With that

thought came an unwelcome comparison and a catch in

her throat. The moon was full and when last it had

been full it had shone on a leave-taking between trimmed

hedges.

She drew herself up straight as she sat on the stile

and impatiently dashed away the moisture from her

eyes. If that other man had only had in him the iron

wasted on this desperado, Anse Havey!

The gods blend badly the elements in life's crucible,

she pondered. A mongrel dog strolled over to the stile

and sniffed at her ankles. She had heard Mrs. McNash

call the brute's name, and now she put out a friendly

hand and laid it on the upstretched muzzle. " It's

a pretty funny old world, Beardog, isn't it? " she

sighed and the mongrel wagged its stump tail in ready

affinnation. Then she rose and went unwillingly back

to the cabin.

She did not know that in drawing off to herself and

denying her isolated entertainers the novelty of her

society she had been guilty of a grave discourtesy.

And they did not intimate to her that their pride was

wounded for in the Cumberlands a law which is above

other laws guarantees to the guest under one's roof-tree

all that the meager possibilities afford, and returns even

for slighting appreciation a homely dignity of welcome.

From the lean-to kitchen Mrs. McNash had brought

a pan of live coals and the cavernous recesses of the

smoke-blackened chimney roared with a great fire. The

air had taken on the night chill of the liigh places al-

though it was June, and now in the illumination from

the hearth Juanlta saw for the first time the ugly pic-

ture of the single room.

The floor was grimy and in each corner stood a huge

four-post bed so that only about the hearth was a cir-

cumscribed space for the crowded chairs. Close to the

door leaned an ancient spinning wheel and everywhere

was the dust and soot of an unlighted place where a

gust of downward wind drives the smoke inward. One

note only was modem. Propped against the wall near

the head of one bed, evidently that of Fletch and his

wife, was a rifle, ready to hand, and as the fire burned

high and the corners of the room came into sight, the

light played and flickered on its barrel and stock and

caught the blue metal of a heavy revolver which hung

in belt and holster from the bed-post.

The host sat barefooted before the blaze and talked

with the missionary. The girl heard their conversa-

tion through the dullness of fatigue, wondering how

she was to sleep in this pigsty, yet restrained from

asking permission to retire only by her embarrassment

and unfamiliarity with the native code.

" I'm plumb pleased ter know ye. Brother Talbott,"

Fletch McNash, now apparently recovered from his

day's carousal, was gravely assuring the missionary.

" I've heerd tell about ye fer years. Hit seems qu'ar

I hain't never met up with ye afore now. Folks says,

that afore ye repented an' foun' grace they used ter

call ye Hell-cat Talbott, an' thet in the old Talbott-

Hawkins war ye war a mighty vi'lent man."

The missionary sighed. " Thet war afore the speret

<^^5cended on me. Nowadays folks calls me ' Good

Anse.' I hopes I be."

At last Juanita heard Brother Talbott suggest,

" Hit's gittin' on ter be late an' we've got a tol'able long

way ter journey ter-morrer. I reckon we'd better lay

down."

Juanita began nervously counting heads. There

were eight in the room and the boy Jeb yet to return

from the dance, and while she was still trying to work

out the problem the woman pointed to a comer bed and

suggested, " I reckon you'd better bundle in with Dawn."

She saw the girl crawl into the four-poster just as

she was and the missionary kick off his brogans and shed

his coat, so taking off her own boots and jacket she

slipped between the faded '' coverlets " of the sheetless

bed and tried to banish hateful comparisons.

In five minutes the taper was out and the place was

silent save for the crackle and sputter of the logs. The

little girl at her side lay quiet and her regular breath-

ing proclaimed her already asleep. In another five

minutes Juanita with closed eyes and burning lids, and

aching muscles, heard the nasal chorus of snoring sleep-

ers. She alone was awake in the house.

She opened her eyes and gazed up at the discolored

rafters. She watched the light sparkle and flash on

barrel of rifle and lock of pistol. The heat of the place

became a swelter; the mingled odors of charred wood,

tobacco smoke and the fumes of liquor nauseated her.

Her mind went back to the view across the lawns of

the Country Club at home. She saw the ivied walls

of the college where she had been educated — for this.

Then she saw in memory the delicately dancing string

of polo ponies going over to the grounds for the afternoon

game; saw herself sitting with other daintily gowned

women on the white flagstoned terrace of the club-house.

Outside the door " Beardog," the mongrel^ whined

vainly for admittance and she grew homesick for even a

glimpse of her great Dane. ^

And as she thought of these things the soul in her '

grew small and weak and very sick, and the heart in her j

told her that it stood on the verge of breaking. i

CHAPTER \T:

IT is related in the historj^ of the Hatfield-McCoy

feud, which burst out between neighbors over a

stray pig, and claimed its toll of lives through a

half century, that one of the Hatfield girls wrote on a

white pillar at the front of her often bereaved house,

" There is no place like home." Tne sequel tells that

a cynical traveler passing that way, reflected on the

annals of that house and added in postscript, " Least-

ways not this side of hell."

The story of the Hatfield-McCoy feud is in many

ways that of other " wars " which have made of the

roof-tree of the eastern divide a land beleaguered and

unique.

To the crags and coves where he was bom the moun-

tain man adheres, and if by chance he is led to wander,

even if he leaves his country for his country's good, the

call of the highlands will inevitably draw him back to

face the shot from the laurel and the vengeance of the

enemy who has "bided his time."

Two hundred years ago a handful of Anglo-Saxons

were stranded there where nature's defiance proved

strong enough to halt their westward march.

It was not granted them, as it was their more favored

brethren to colonize the rich land of promise beyond

and upon them settled the bitter heritage of the dere-

lict. Their great-grandchildren remain to-day pio-

neers in bondage to the hills. They sing the songs once

sung along the wild Scottish border and jealously hold

to outgrown ideals. They fight to the death and turn

away no shelterless stranger and forgive no enemy.

From such blood came Lincoln and from it will come

other Lincolns.

To these men the ordered civilization of " Down be-

low " means a foreign power which autocratically

crushes. It means Courts whose processes become a

power in the hands of feudal enemies, used to smite and

persecute.

In the war between the Haveys and the McBriars

there was more than the forgotten episode of a stray

razor-back, which was not sun*endered to its lawful

owners. They had for decades hated and killed each

other with a fidelity of bitterness that made all their

truces and intermarriages fail of permanent peace.

Between the territories where they had originally

settled, stretched a barrier of hills broken by only one

passable gap. The McBriars had made their first hab-

itations east of that ridge and gap where the waters

run toward the sea. The Haveys had set up their

power to the west where the springs feed the rivers that

go down to the Bluegrass and to Tennessee. Had the

two clans been content to remain respectively on the

sunrise and sunset slopes of the backbone, they might

never have clashed,- but there were bright-eyed women

to the west and east. Feminine Havey eyes lured Mc-

Briar suitors and McBriar girls seemed to the Havey

men worth any dare that Fate might set for their ven-

turing. So it has been since young Montagus and

Capulets ignored dead lines — and long before. Smoke

went up from cabins on both sides that housed men and

women of both clans. Hatred scattered and set up

new points of infection all along Tribulation and be-

3'ond its headwaters.

The war of the States had rent them farther apart

when McBriars fought for and Haveys against the Un-

ion. Since then each clan had wielded strong political

power, and wielded it against each other, but far be-

low flag and party went down the tap root of poisonous

and personal hatred.

It was an unfortunate thing that Cal Douglas

should, on a February afternoon, have shot to death

his brother-in-law, Noah INIcKay, even if as Cal ear-

nestly assured the Jury "he was jest obleeged an' be-

holden ter do hit." All the circumstances of the affair

were inopportune for his kinsmen and the kinsmen of

the man who died with a bullet through liis vitals.

Cal bore a name for surly character and even in a

land where grudge-bearing is a religion, he was deemed

ultra fanatical in fanning the flame of hatred. Noah

McKay, himself, w^as little loved by either the Haveys,

into whose family he had married, or the McBriars from

w^hom he sprang. Neighbors told of frequent and vio-

lent bickerings between the man and his shrewish wife

who was the twin sister of Cal Douglas.

" Cal Douglas an' Noey McKay's woman air es much

alike es two peas in a pod," went neighborhood pro-

nouncement. " They air both soured on mankind an'

they glories in human misery."

Had the fight on that winter evening ended in the

death of both participants, McBriars and Haveys would

alike have called it a gentle riddance and dropped the

matter where it stood. But since a Havey had slain

a McBriar, and the Havey still lived it could not, in

honor, be so dropped. It left an uneven score.

So the McBriar s called that killing a murder while

the Haveys styled it self-defense, and a new peg was

driven upon which to hang clan bitterness.

Since the mountaineer has little to do in the winter

and spring save gossip, the affair grew in importance

with rehearsing and to each telling was added new fea-

tures. It was assumed east of the ridge that Noah had

incurred the displeasure of Bad Anse Havey by the

suspicion of tale-bearing to old Milt McBriar. It was

argued that that particular wife-beating might have

passed as uneventfully as several similar episodes here-

tofore, had not the heads of the Haveys made it a pre-

text for eliminating a McBriar who dwelt in their midst

and carried news across the ridge to his own people.

For several years the feud had slept, not the com-

plete sleep of death, but the fitful, simmering sleep of

precarious animosity. Slowly the bitterness had be-

come a fevered sore, so tense and strained that it needed

only a spark to fire it into actual war. But neither

clan felt so overwhelmingly strong as to court an issue

just yet and realizing the desperate quality of any out-

break, both Milt McBriar " over yon " and Anse Havey

over here had guarded the more belligerent kinsmen

with jealous eye. They had until now held them

checked and leashed, though growling.

For these reasons the trial had been awaited with a

sense of crisis in the town of Peril where it might mean

a pitched battle. So it had been awaited, too, up and

down the creeks and branches that crept from the

ragged hills, where men were leadmg morbid lives of

isolation and nursing grudges.

Yet nothing had happened, and though the streets

were empty of peaceful folk and doors were barred,

when the bell in the rickety cupola called men to attend

" High-Court," the case had proceeded with a surpris-

ing apathy.

During the three days that the suspense of the trial

continued, each recess of Court found the long-limbed

frame of Milt McBriar tilted back in a split-bottomed

chair on the flagstones at the front of the hotel. His

dark face and piercing eyes gazed always thoughtfully,

and very calmly off across the dusty town to the re-

poseful languor of the piled-up, purple skyline. Like-

wise each recess found seated at the other end of the

same house-front the shorter, heavier figure of a fair-

haired man with ruddy face and sandy mustache.

Never did he appear there without two companions, who

like his Lartius and Herminius remained at his right

and left. Never did the dark giant speak to the florid

man, yet never did either fail to keep a glance directed

toward the other.

The man of the sandy hair was Breck Havey, next

to Bad Anse, the most influential leader of the clan.

His influence here in Peril made or unmade the officers

of the law.

When these two men came together, as opposing wit-

nesses in a homicide case, the air was fraught with ele-

ments of storm. " Thar's war a-brewin'," commented

a native, glancing at the quietly seated figures one noon,

" an' them fellers air in ther b'ilin'."

CHAPTER VII

PHYSICAL exhaustion will finally tell, even over

such handicaps as a mountain feather-bed and the

fumes of a backwoods cabin.

If Juanita Holland did not at last actually fall

asleep she drifted into a sort of coma and uneasily

dreamed that she was watching a polo game at Bryn

Mawr. The man whom she had sent away was dash-

ing, with lifted mallet, after the willow ball and she

was bending forward with parted lips.

Behind the white goal posts was a ragged mountain

thick with tangles of laurel and rhododendron, for such

is the chaotic topography of dreams. Just at the mo-

ment when the man, whom she had sent away, raised

his mallet for the stroke which should score a goal, she

saw Bad Anse Havey step from the thicket and throw

to his shoulder a rifle which barked before she could

scream a warning. The other man fell from his pony

with a red smear on his silk shirt and as he fell he said

calmly, but bitterly, to her across the field, while their

eyes met, " This is your doing, Juanita."

She wondered if she had really screamed aloud as

her eyes opened and stared at the rafters, but little

Dawn's sleeping breath rose and fell undisturbed at

her side, and the snores about her went on unbroken.

She raised her hand and wiped the perspiration from

her eyes. She even ventured to look cautiously about.

After all she must have slept heavily for now besides

the four beds there was a pallet on the floor and at its

top the fire-light, which was lower now, but still strong,

showed a towsled head, and at its bottom two bare feet.

Jeb had come home from the dance.

Again she shut her eyes, but their lids were hot and

feverish. The whole procession of the day's wretched

occurrences paraded before her and she wondered if

these creatures were worth the effort she was making

in their behalf. Here they slept about her the sodden

sleep of beasts, herded together in dirty congestion.

How, into such a life, could she hope to introduce clean

ideals or ambitions?

From present disgust and discouragement the trend

of her reflections swept forward into premonitions and

sorry prophecies for the future. If to-night was bad

what might to-morrow be?

The messenger who had talked low out there in the

dark, when the tall stranger had still been to her only

a soothing voice, was a native. He looked as if he had

been trained to face even the uncertainties of such a

life as this. And yet his utterance, too, had been shrill

with excitement. " Thar's liable ter be hell ter-night 1 "

What might even now be happening over there, where

Milt McBriar designed to give the Haveys " somethin'

ter celebrate proper " ?

What monstrous things might she have to face at the

very inception of her mission? Could it be that the

sleeping volcano of violence would select her coming

as a cue for eruption, and that she, who had seen only

the better things of life until to-day, must begin her

work by looking on at such a revolting drama?

She had come here only to try to aid and assist, and

in welcome the very crags and everything within their

sandstone gates were showing her a snarl of bared fangs

and evil, burning eyes.

For a seeming of centuries she lay there aching in

heart and mind and body. She kept her eyes tight

shut and tried to count sheep jumping over a fence.

She tried to think of pleasant, inconsequential things

and of dances and house parties where she had had a

good time.

And finally she fell again into that half sleep which

dreams of wakefulness. It may have lasted minutes or

hours, but suddenly she roused again with a start from

a new nightmare and lay trembling under the oppres-

sion of a poignant foreboding. What was it that she

had subconsciously heard or imagined .^ She was pain-

fully wide awake in the slumbering cabin. At last she

was sure of a sound, low, but instinct with warning.

Beardog was growling just outside the door.

Then violently and without the preface of gradual

approach — precisely as though horsemen had sprung

from the earth — there clattered and beat past the

front of the cabin a staccato thunder of wildly gallop-

ing hoofs and a rattle of scattered rocks. She felt an

uncanny freezing of her marrow. Horses travel peril-

ous and broken roads in that fashion only when their

riders are in wild haste.

As abruptly as the drum-beat had come it died again

into silence and there was no diminuendo of hoof-beats

receding into the distance. The thing was weird and

ghostly. She had not noticed in the weariness of ar-

rival at the cabin that the road ran deep in sand to the

corner of the fence and that after fifty yards of rough

and broken rock it fell away again into another sound-

muffling stretch. She knew only that she was thor-

oughly frightened and that whatever the noise was, it

bore with it the proclaiming of hot and desperate haste.

Yet even in her terror she had moved only to turn her

head, and had opened her eyes cautiously and narrowly.

There was no sound in the cabin now ; not even the

stertorous breath of a snore. The fire flickered faintly

and occasionally sent up from its white bed of ashes a

dying spurt, before which the darkness fell back a little,

for the moment. She could see that Fletch McNash

had half risen in his bed. His head was partly turned

in an attitude of intent listening and his pose was as

rigid as that of a bird dog frozen on a point. It had

all been momentary and as Juanita gazed, she saw other

figures stir uneasily, though no one spoke. The boy

on the floor had not moved. The missionary lay still,

but the woman's figure stirred uneasily beneath the

heaped-up quilt.

So for a few moments the strange and tense tableau

held, and the girl, watching the house-holder's alert and

motionless pose, remembered him as he had hunched

drunkenly over his plate a few houi^s ago. The two

pictures were hard to reconcile.

Then at some warning which her less acute ears failed

to register, she saw Fletch McNash's right hand sweep

outward toward the wall and come up gripping the

rifle.

Still there was no word, though the eldest boy's head

had risen from the pallet.

Keyed now to concert pitch, the girl held her body

rigid and through half-closed lids, looked across the

dim room. While she was so staring, and pretending

to sleep there drifted from a long way off an insistent,

animal-like yell with a peculiar quaver in its final note.

She did not know that it was the famous McBriar rally-

ing cry, and that trouble inevitably followed fast in

the wake of its sounding. She knew only that it fitted

in with her childhood's terrified conception of the In-

dian's war-whoop. But she did know that in an instant

after it had been borne along the wind she had seen a

thing happen which she would have disbelieved had

she heard it from the lips of a narrator; a thing un-

realizable in its swift silence ; a thing belonging to the

stern legerdemain of self-defense.

She saw, in one breathing space, the half-risen figure

of Fletch McNash under the covers of his bed; and

that of young Jeb under the quilts of his pallet. She

saw in the next breathing space, with no realization of

how it had happened, both of them crouched low at the

center of the floor ; the father's eyes glued to the front

door, the son's to the back. And as they crouched there

in the fitful firelight, their long shadows wavered ofF

from them — rising and falling in inky patches. The

elder man bent low like a runner on his mark waiting

the starting signal. His right hand held the rifle at his

front, his left lightly touched the floor with fingers

spread to brace his posture, and his face was tensely

upturned. So while she counted ten father and son

crouched in precisely similar poses, one covering the

barred door at the front with a repeating rifle, the other

seeming to stare through the massive timbers of that

at the back with leveled pistol. No one spoke. No

one moved, but the regular swelling breath of sleep

had died for every pair of lips in the place was holding

its breath bated. Then came a fresh pounding of

hooves and scattering of gravel, and a chorus of angry

incoherent voices sounded above the noise of flight — or

was it pursuit? Whatever w^ords were being shouted

out there In the night were swallowed in the medley,

except a wake of oaths that seemed to float behind.

The noise, like the other which had preceded it, died

swiftly, but In the Instant that It lasted Fletch McNash

lifted his left hand and brought his rifle to the " ready "

and his son had instinctively thrust forward his cocked

revolver.

For a full minute, perhaps, the girl in the bed had

the picture of two figures bent low like bronze emblems

of motionless preparedness, yet not a syllable had been

spoken and when from quite a distance beyond there

came the snap of a single shot, follow^ed by the retort

of a volley, they still neither spoke nor moved. But

at last as if by one impulse they rose and turned to face

each other.

Then and then only was there utterance of any sort

inside the house. In a voice, so low that Juanita would

not have heard it had not every sense been acutely and

painfully alert, Fletch spoke to his son, '' I reckon

ther war's on ag'in."

The boy nodded sullenly and the father commanded

in an almost inaudible undertone,

" Lay down."

The boy went back to his pallet and the father to

his bed. For a long time there was dead silence and

then one by one they took up again their chorus of

snores. To-morrow might bring chaos, but to-night

offered sleep. Still the girl lay gazing helplessly up

at the rafters and wondering what things had tran-

spired out there between the grim uncommunicative si-

lences of the slopes.

A little while ago she had been dreading what might

come. Now in an access of terror she thought of what

must come. " Ther war's on " ; that was enough. Evi-

dently there had been " hell " over there at the dance.

She had reached the country just in time to see a new

and sanguinary chapter open. Her view of the life had

so far consisted only of thumb-nail sketches, but they

had been terrible little keyhole pictures, and she trem-

bled as she lay there contemplating what was before her

when the door should be fully opened.

She would in all probability see people she actually

knew, with whom she had spoken and whose hands she

had taken, the victims of this brutal blood-lust. She

would have to live day in and day out with murderers

and accustom herself to their atrocities. Every delicate

fiber in her nature throbbed with repulsion and panic.

The horror of the whole system danced a grisly rig-

adoon of death across her throbbing eyeballs.

Through her head ran hideously lines of verse:

". . . But never came the day;

And crooked shapes of terror crouched,

In the corners where we lay:

And each evil sprite that walks by night

Before us seemed to play."

And in the face of such things these human beasts

could sleep !

But one was not sleeping, and after a while among

the snoring slumberers Good Anse Talbott rose and

fell upon his knees before the hearth. There were still

a few glowing embers there and as he bent and at last

took the knotted hands away from his seamed face,

a feeble light fell upon his features and upon the bare

feet that twisted convulsively as he prayed.

It was a tortured face, and as the girl watched him

she realized for the first time the significance of the

words " to wrestle in prayer." It suddenly came to

her that she had never before seen a man really pray,

and for an hour the backwoods missionary knelt there

pleading with his God for his unrepentant people.

Often his voice was only a groaning murmur out of

which came no coherence, unless as it might be, that

God could understand. But now and then she caught

words and her own hands lying on the quilt folded them-

selves reverently.

". . . Oh, Lord I hev sought ter carry Thy gawspel

ter these folk, but I reckon I hain't hardly no worthy

vessel . . . my own hands hev been red with blood, but.

Lord, I've done sought ter wash 'em clean an' dedicate

them ter Thy sarvice . , . Lord Gawd, look down an'

command me. . . . Show me . . , ther way ter teach

'em an' ter lead 'em up outen these shadders. . . . Lord

Gawd, show me ther way ! "

Outside a single whippoorwill wailed plaintively:

" These poor hills ! These poor hills 1 "

CHAPTER VIII

IN the lowlands morning announces itself with the

rosy glow of dawn and upflung shafts of light,

but here in the hills of Appalachia even the sun

comes stealing with surreptitious caution and veiled face

as if fearful of ambuscade.

When Juanita opened her eyes, to find the tumbled

beds empty save for herself, she thought with a dismal

heart that a day of rain and sodden skies lay ahead

of her.

The dim room reeked with wet mists and an inquisi-

tive young rooster stalked jauntily over the puncheon

floor, where his footfalls sounded in tiny clicks. It

was a few minutes after five o'clock and Juanita shiv-

ered a little with the clammy chill as she went over to

the door and looked out.

The mountains were vague apparitions, though the

sun should have risen an hour ago. The whole land-

scape was a dreary monotone, shrouded in wet stream-

ers of mist that cut off the view and left only a gray

void as if the world had dissolved over night.

Among piled up bowlders where the thicket came down

to the yard's edge stood a single tulip poplar. Its

gnarled roots broke from the earth in smooth-worn el-

bows, and between them gushed the clear tongue of a

mountain spring, breaking from underground and

spilling into a basin of rock.

Bending over it in the unconscious grace of perfect

naturalness, with her sleeves rolled back and her dark

hair tumbling, knelt the girl, Dawn.

Juanita crossed the yard and as she came near, the

younger girl raised a face still glistening with the cold

water into which it had been plunged and glowing with

shyness.

The older woman nodded with a smile as she, too, knelt

to thrust her face into the sparkle of the natural foun-

tain. " Good-morning," she said. " I think you and

I are going to be great friends. I know we are if you

will try to like me as much as I do you."

The wild. Dryad-like little creature stood with the

bare toes of one foot twisting in the wet earth and the

fingers of both hands nervously clutching at the calico

of her skirt. She was gazing with artless worship on

the fuller beauty of the " furrin " visitor who was, save

for the swelling of more womanly curves, as slender as

herself.

"What makes ye like me.?" she suddenly demanded

in a half-challenging voice, while her eyes held the di-

rect questioning of one who will establish no friendship

on a basis of denied frankness.

" You make me like you," laughed Juanita, as she

raised a dripping countenance.

The mountain girl held her eyes still in the unwav-

ering steadiness of her race, then she said in a voice

that carried an undernote of defiance.

" Ye hain't nuver seed me afore an' — " she broke

off, then added doggedly — " an' besides I don't know

nuthin'."

I mean to see you often, after this," announced the

woman from Down-below, " and the things you don't

know can all be learned."

A swift eagerness flashed into the younger face and

a sudden torrent of questioning seemed to hover on

her lips, but it did not find utterance. She only turned

and led the way silently back toward the house. When

they were almost at the door Dawn hesitated and Juan-

ita encouraged her with a smile. It was clear that the

mountain girl found whatever she meant to say diffi-

cult for she stood indecisive and her cheeks were hotly

suffused with color, so that at last Juanita prompted,

"What is it, dear?"

" Ye said — " began Dawn hastily and awkwardly,

" ye said suthin' 'bout me a-tryin' ter like ye, I — I

don't hafter try — I does hit." Then having made a

confession as difficult to her shy taciturnity as a cal-

low boy's first declaration of love, she fled abruptly

around the comer of the house.

Juanita stood looking after her with a puzzled brow.

This hard mountain reserve which is so strong that

friends rarely shake hands ; that fathers seldom em-

brace their children, and that the kiss is known only to

courtship, was new to her: and strange.

At breakfast she did not see Dawn.

Last night, until heaviness overtook him, Fletch

McNash had been voluble and full of loud jest. This

morning his face with its high cheekbones and bushy

beard, was unreadable and mute. No allusion was made

to the happenings of last night.

But the girl noticed that inside the door leaned the

house-holder's " rifle-gun " and under Young Jeb's left

arm-pit bulged the partly masked shape of a pistol

butt.

Young Jeb's face yesterday had been that of a boy,

this morning it was the sullen face of a man confront-

ing grim realities. Had Juanita been more familiar

with the contemporary affairs of the community she

might have known that many visages along Tribulation

that morning brooded with the same scowl from the

same cause. The McBriar yell had been raised last

night in the heart of the Havey country, and this morn-

ing brought the shame of a land invaded and dishon-

ored.

Dawn dxd not reappear until Juanita had mounted

and turned her mule's head forward. Then as she was

passing the dilapidated barn the slim calico-clad figure

slipped from its door and intercepted her in the road,

holding up a handful of queer-shaped roots.

" I 'lowed ye mout need these hyar," she whispered

still diffidently.

Juanita smiled as she bent in her saddle to take the

gift.

" Thank you, dear. What are they ? "

" Hit's ginsang," Dawn assured her. " Hit grows

back thar in ther woods an' hits got a powerful heap of

virtue. Hit frisks ther speret an' drives away torment.

Ef ye starts ter swoon argin, jest chaw hit."

Juanita repressed her amusement.

" You see, dear," she declared. " There's one very

wonderful thing you know, that I didn't know. And

don't forget when we meet again we are old friends."

Then, looking back over her shoulder as she rode

on, Juanita saw the figures of both Flctch and Jeb cross

the fence at the far side of the yard, and turn into the

mountain thicket. Each carried a rifle cradled in his

bent elbow.

• •••••••

When just before sunset yesterday afternoon a ver-

dict of acquittal for Cal Douglas had come from the

jury room, the town of Peril had once more held its

breath and doors had closed and the streets had cleared

of such as wished to remain non-combatants. But with

no comment or criticism, Milt McBriar mounted his

horse and rode out of town, shaping liis course over the

hills toward his own house. Following his example

with equal quiet, his kinsmen mounted, too, and disap-

peared.

As for Cal Douglas, he reserved any enthusiasm his

vindication may have brought to his heart until he was

back again in the depths of the hills. Pie and his kins-

men turned their horses by a shorter and steeper trail

to the house where the dance was going forward with

shuffling and fiddling and passing of the jug.

When Milt McBriar and his fellows started home an

informer or two from the Havey ranks kept them in

view, themselves unseen, until they passed through the

gap and started down the other side of the ridge into

their own domain.

That they were being so watched was either known to

the McBriars or assumed by them. But a picked squad

on fresh mounts was waiting over there in a place where

the road ran deep through forest and laurel, and this

squad was equipped with repeating rifles. Milt Mc-

Briar himself did not go back with them. He had

made all his arrangements in advance, and it was not

seemly that the chief himself should take a personal

part in an execution which he had decreed.

" Let me hear the news, boys," he had said with a

wave of his hand, and then he had ridden on, still re-

flective and calm of mien toward his own house from

which the smoke rose in the distance.

The house where the dance was being held stood be-

between the knees of two hills and before the pocket in

which it had been built ran the road, following the

twistings of Tribulation. It was a larger house than

most, hereabouts, and had in the same enclosure an-

other building which had beforetimes been a wayside

store. It was in this store that the floor had been

cleared for dancing. It was there that the fiddles sang

and the broganed feet shuffled to the ancient hoe-down

and jig of the hills, wliich have never known a round

dance.

In the three rooms of the house proper and about its

tight-trodden yard stood such as had wearied of danc-

ing, and here the jug was passed.

Near midnight a half-dozen men, who had not been

invited, rode carefully over an almost obliterated trail

which wound blindly through the hills at the back of

the place and hitched their horses in a rock-surrounded

hollow a half mile from the house. Other horses and

mules were hitched all along the county road, but these

belonged to the legitimate guests.

As the half-dozen men whose arrival had been so

cautiously accomplished began slipping down, each

holding his own course in the cover of the laurel, there

was nothing to indicate that any warning had gone

ahead of them. The shadows fell deep and impenetrable

in patches of cobalt. The ridges stood up boldly

against a sky in which innummerable stars and the band

of the Milky Way were pallid ghosts of light undone by

the moon's magnificence.

From the houses with their yellow windows and their

open doors came no note of apprehension — no inti-

mation of suspicion. A medley of voices, a din of scrap-

ing feet and the whine and boom of fiddles gave out a

careless chorus to the night.

Slowly with an adept craft that hardly broke a twig

underfoot, three of the new arrivals hitched their way

forward to a point of vantage down near the road.

They went crouched low, holding to the shadows with

rifles thrust out ahead, and faces almost smiling in

their grim foretaste of sure success. In a few mo-

ments they would have before them the doors and win-

dows as lighted targets. Then whoever saw Cal Doug-

las in his front would crook forefinger on trigger and

the error of the Jury would be rectified. The others

would send a volley at random for good measure.

It was almost too easy. It seemed a shame to snatch

a full and red revenge with such scant effort. To be

sure a moment later there would be a wrathful flood of

men rushing out of the pandemonium to rake and search

the hillsides, but there would first come the panic-ridden

instant of utter surprise — and that would be enough.

Then as the foremost figure, crouching in easy range

of a window, braced himself on one knee and peered for-

ward under his upturned hat brim, there came the re-

ports of several rifles — but they were not the rifles

of the McBriar squad, and they came not from the hills

in front, but from the laurel at the back. Thej broke

from directly between the carefully picked squad and

its horses, '

The man who had braced his knee and cocked his

rifle gave a brief gurgling sound as an oath was stifled

off in a hemorrhage of the throat, and pitched forward

on his face. After that the figure lay without stirring,

its own blood blackening the rifle whose trigger guard

pressed against its forehead.

The doors vomited men. There was a trailing and

ragged outburst of firearms and many dark figures

plunged here and there across the silvered spaces where

the shadows did not fall.

CHAPTER IX

THE scheme that had germinated back of the con-

templative and seemingly resigned eyes of Milt

McBriar had borne its fruit of surprise and death

— but so far as the tally showed the surprise and death

had recoiled entirely upon the would-be avengers.

Of the six men who had crept down three had lain

within one hundred yards of the house when the shots

came from their rear. The other three were off to the

side ready to bring up the horses as close as might prove

safe when the moment came for flight. But now they,

too, found themselves cut off. Had the man who fired

on the man who was about to fire, waited an instant

longer there would have been more deaths than one.

His colleagues would then have been, like himself, cov-

ering their respective victims, victims who confidently

thought themselves executioners. But as it w^as they

had not quite yet worked themselves into positions un-

trammeled by intervening rock and timber. The man

who fired first, knew that for he had not heard the per-

fectly imitated quaver of " scritch-owls " which was to

signify a common readiness. But as he eyed his

crouching victim across his rifle sights he had also been

able to look beyond him, and had seen the figure of Cal

Douglas pause at the lighted window. He knew that

to wait a moment would be to wait too long. So the

others had to fire blindly through black undergrowth

at speeding shadows — and they missed. The fleeing

murder squad melted back into the black timber and

some of them, signaling with the call of frog and owl,

came together in temporary safety. They dared not

go to their own horses, since they might be discovered

in the effort. The road that led into McBriar country

would be watched. If they were to carry away unpunc-

tured skins they must flee the other way — into the

Havey territory and astride stolen Havey horses. It

was every man for himself, and they had not paused to

count noses. They hurriedly swung themselves into

saddles at the remote end of the line of hitched mounts

and galloped pell-mell down the road toward the cabin

of Fletch McNash.

When the theft of the horses was discovered, Anse

Havey sent pursuing parties to ride the roads in both

directions.

It had seemed to Havey wiser to withhold his warning

from all save those whom he needed to use. To all the

rest the affair had come without warning, and the hue

and cry which followed the rifle shots was genuine in

its excitement.

But in a very few minutes the pandemonium fell away

to quiet, and sullenness supplanted the shouting. The

mountains behind, where several men were stealthily

seeking escape and many others were stalking them, lay

silent in the moonlight. Here and there an owl quav-

ered and a frog boomed, and some were not owls and

frogs, but men, calling as lost quail call at twilight when

the covey has been scattered under fire.

A hundred yards beyond the window a small and in-

quisitive knot of men gathered around a figure that had

hunched forward, sprawling on a cocked rifle. Some

one turned the figure up and straightened its limbs so

that they should not stiffen in such grotesquerie of at-

titude. The face with the yellow lantern light shining

down on it was the face of a boy of twenty. Its thin lips

were set in a grim smile of satisfaction, for Death had

overtaken him without a suspicion of its coming.

Perhaps had a photograph of his retina been taken

it would have disclosed the portrait of Cal Douglas

pausing at the open window.

" Hit's Little Nash McKay," exclaimed a surprised

voice, using the diminutive which in the mountains takes

the place of Junior and stays with a man well on in life.

The victim who had been designated to avenge the death

of Noah McKay had been Noah McKay's younger

brother.

Meanwhile the pursuing horsemen were gaining

slowly on those that fled. The murder squad had failed

and must bear back to Milt McBriar, if they ever got

back, a narrative of frustrated effort. They were

bitterly angry and proportionately desperate. So as

they clattered along the empty road, meeting no enemy

whom they could shoot down in appeasement of their

wrath and chagrin, they satisfied themselves with rais-

ing their war cry for the benefit of the sleeping cabins.

A little distance beyond Fletch McNash's place lay

a cross-trail by which they might find a circuitous way

back over the ridge, but it was too steep and broken to

ride. They could miake better time on foot over the

" roughs," so there they abandoned their mounts, and

plunged into the timber. When the pursuers came up

with the discarded horses they realized that further

effort " in the night-time " would be bootless. Yet

since the heaving flanks and panting nostrils of the

horses testified that they had been only a few minutes

late, they took a last chance and plunged into the

thicket.

There a single defiant shot, sent from a long way

up the slope, was their only challenge, and their vol-

ley of reply, fired at the flash, was merely a retort of

hatred. But even in the isolation of the hills certain

news travels on wings, and the morning would find

every cabin dweller wearing a face of grim and sullen

realization. The phrase which Fletch McNash had

whispered to his boy would travel to the headwaters

of every fork, and the faces of the women would once

more wear the drawn misery of anxiety for their men.

• ••?••••

It was into this newly charged atmosphere that

Juanita Holland and her missionary guide rode in the

morning mists. The face of the preacher still bore

something of last night's torture and despair, for

his eyes were looking ahead and foresaw the undoing,

in a few fierce moments of passion, of what he had so

uncouthly, but sincerely, labored through years to ac-

complish.

He had planned to take the girl to the gap in the

ridge, because it was remote from a railroad and no

section stood in greater need of schooling. If she

meant to set up a serviceable school in this territory,

— unless it were to be limited to one faction of the

feud — its doors must stand open at the border, alike

to the children of east and west. But now the ridge

would be an armed frontier.

Good Anse Talbott was in many ways as Inade-

quate an ally as he had at first seemed to Juanita. He

was both narrow and illiterate, but he was earnest.

He knew the life and people — and —

" As a Pictish shepherd dog among his Pictish sheep,

So went he in and out of them where they stood breathing

deep,

Half frightened and half loving,

He could make them laugh or weep,

Whose lives and deaths were his to him, whose vigil and whose

sleep."

In his ignorant zeal, he had thought out many things

which she could not realize until she had crossed the

first great barrier of prejudice and learned many les-

sons of sympathy. So she had trusted herself to his

guidance, and as they plodded on and he rode in si-

lence, she was puzzled and a little hurt by his uncom-

municativeness.

The way at first followed the creek bank, but soon

they were climbing steeply upward and the mists went

with them; lifting and giving way to the clarity of

day. The sun, had appeared above the dim summits

now, not yet in the golden triumph of full victory, but

like a polished disc of platinum, that slowly passed

through pallor to rosiness and through rosiness to

flame. A dozen miracles of exquisite and ephemeral

beauty hung between sunlight and mist like dreams at

the pale heart of an opal. A scrap of bird's-egg blue

flashed in the gray sky and a tilting cornfield, far up

the mountain, gave back a response of spirit emerald.

Upon the foliage of pine and oak and poplar were

breathed transitory and gossamer hues that were like

the fugitive souls of colors. At last the veil was rent

and the vapors went floating away in tattered wisps and

streamers of defeat. Through rifts in the nearer hills

rose other hills where the green turned blue with dis-

tance to the last line of smoky purple that merged and

wedded with the sky.

It was all very beautiful, but she had not come here

only to listen to the song of June. So at last the girl

rode resolutely up to her escort's saddle-skirts and

asked, " Brother Talbott, hadn't you better tell me

what it all means ? "

The missionary lifted a face that was almost hag-

gard.

" Hit means," he said with no idea of irreverence,

" thet Satan's got both under-holts — an' God help

this country."

She listened with a sickening heart while he told her

many things she needed to know until he changed the

subject and assured her that the Widow Everson, with

whom she was to stop, had a sizable house where she

would be comfortable.

" Are all the houses in this country like the one

where we stopped last night? " she inquired.

" No, ma'am," he promptly informed her with a

solemnity which belied any spirit of the humorous.

" Back a piece in ther hills amongst ther branch-water

folks thar's lots of houses whar, es ther sayin' goes, ye

hain't hardly got room ter cuss a dawg 'thout gittin'

yore teeth full of ha'r. But es fur es thet's con-

sarned," he apologetically added, '' a man hain't

rightly got no call ter cuss a dawg nohow."

As the day advanced they passed a cabin that stood

barred of door and smokeless of chimney ; deserted since

yesterday. " Thet house," he told her, " b'longs ter

Bud McBriar. He married a Havey an' I reckon

they've done moved acrost ther ridge this mornin'."

Juanita looked at the abandoned place and shud-

dered at the thought of the conditions that had urged

such flight.

Yet as they rode through cloistered hollows where

the greens were deep and the air moist, and the sun

sent only vagrant flakes of gold filtering through the

branches it all seemed incredible. The melody of peace

and joy poured from the swelling throats of cardinal

and thrush down there and tiny shoals of minnows

darted about the splashing feet of their mules in creek-

bed pools.

The hills grew with their progress until those behind

them were only the little brothers of those ahead, for

they were steadily plodding toward the ridge of the

divide. At last, the girl saw, still a long way ofl^, a

fertile little valley where the corn seemed taller and

richer than in the scattered " coves " and where across a

table-land she could make out a silver thread of water —

flowing east. There, like a tiny match-box, on a high

level near the point where the wall of mountain broke

into a broad gateway she could make out a house. It

was not of logs, but of brick, and stood in an enclosure

that looked more like the Blue Grass than the moun-

tains. From its chimney went up a thread of smoke

blue and straight until it lost itself overhead. Then

the missionary drew his mule to a standstill and raised

one talon-like hand, pointing across the vista. The girl

followed the direction over miles of forest tops and

broken hills ; over two narrow and converging valleys ;

over shadows that were thrown by western peaks and

that crept well up the eastern slopes beyond. She

nodded her head and caught her breath in a quick, al-

most gasping intake of sheer admiration.

" Does ye see ther brick house over thar, nigh ther

gap.'' — Thet's Bad Anse's place, an' over thar acrost

ther ridge, three mile away by crow-flight an' a half

day's ride by ther roads is whar Milt McBriar dwells.

Ye kain't see hit from hyar."

Juanita followed his words and his brown index

finger and in her heart beat something like the emotions

which must have stirred the crusaders when their eyes

first looked on the walls of the Jerusalem they had come

to take from the Saracen.

It was almost sundown when they reached the house

of the Widow Everson, and at sight of the woman stand-

ing at the fence to meet them her heart took strength.

This house was not of logs, but of undressed boards,

with gayly painted window and door frames of red,

and though two days ago she would have called it mean,

she had revised her views enough to regard it, now, as

almost magnificent.

The widow dwelt here with her two sons, and the

trio, by virtue of great diplomacy, had succeeded in

maintaining a neutrality throughout the strife that

went on about them.

The comforts of the place were such as must give

contentment where teaming is arduous and the mail

carrier comes twice a week, but cleanliness dwelt there,

and homely cheer of a sort.

Before they had yet entered the house the girl saw

a horseman approaching, with an escort of several

men who carried rifles balanced across their pommels.

They came from the east, and though the girl did not

know who they were, she recognized that the central

figure, himself unarmed, was a person of consequence.

He was tall and under his faded coat his rather lean

figure fell into an attitude of well-muscled strength

despite his fulness of years. His face though calm,

even thoughtful, was more in cut of feature than in

expression the face of a man of tense emotions and

warlike readiness in quarrel. Indeed, features molded

for antagonism and expression of reflective composure

seemed paradoxically at variance.

Instinctively her mind flashed back to a bit of re-

membered description with w^hich five hundred years

before a French writer had quaintly depicted another

tribal chief whom the laws could not curb, the portrait

of the Irish King MacMurrough. ..." He was tall

of stature, well-composed, strong and active ; his coun-

tenance fell and ferocious to the eye — a man of deed."

Then she heard the man's voice, bland and ingratiat-

ing. " 'Evenin', ma'am. No, I hain't a-goin' ter light,

I jest heered thet Brother Talbott war a-comin' over

hyar an' I wanted speech with him."

The missionary nodded. " All right. Milt," he said ;

and the girl knew, as she had already suspected, that she

had before her the second of her chief enemies.

" I reckon ye all knows what happened last night,"

she heard him saying slowly. " Hit war a pity, an'

I hears thet ther Haveys are a-chargin' hit up ergin

me. Thet's nat'ral enough, I reckon. They 'lows thet

I'd walk plumb acrost hell on a rotten plank ter do 'em

injury. Ef they stopped ter reason hit out a spell

they'd recollect thet I went over thar ter Peril an' let

a Jedge thet didn't own his own soul an' a Jury they hed

done packed, clar one of their kin folks fer killin' a

cousin of mine , . . an' thet I never raised a hand. I

reckon they didn't hardly hev no call ter figger thet I

was sheered of them. I done what I done because I

wanted peace. I was fer lettin' ther law take hit's

co'se, even when I knowed the Co'te war crooked es a

drunkard's elbow."

He paused and no one spoke, so at last he went on

again.

" But Little Nash McKay war young an' hot-

hearted. He couldn't hardly see hit in ther light of

wisdom and he didn't come ter me fer counsel. So he

jest went hell-splittin' over thar with some other boys

thet he'd done over-persuaded — an' he didn't come

back. . . . I'm sorry. ... I was right fond of Little

Nash, but I hain't complalnin' none. He started trou-

ble an' he got hit." Again the dark giant paused ; then

he came to his point. His voice was regretful, almost

sad, but tinged with resignation.

" So Little Nash is a-layin' dead down thar, an' no

McBriar durstn't venture down ter fotch his body

home." He waved a hand toward the west, and the

faces of his escort lowered. They seemed the faces

of men who " durst " go anywhere, but their chief went

on. " I knowed. Brother Talbott, thet ye sarves Al-

mighty God, an' thet thar hain't no word ye carries

but what all men w^ill listen ter ye, so I've done come

ter ye, in behalf of Little Nash's maw an' his women

folks. I 'lowed I'd ask ye ef ye'd ride down thar and

f otcli home ther body ? " The missionary nodded and

though he was travel-stained and very tired, he re-

sponded, " I'll start right now." Then Milt McBriar

continued, " An' ef ye sees fit, ye kin tell Anse Havey,

thet I hain't a suin' fer peace, but thet I hain't a

blamin' him nuther, an' thet ef he wants ther truce ter

go on I'm a-willin' ter hev hit thetaway. I hain't

holdin' no grudge on account of last night."

CHAPTER X

JUANITA'S eyes grew a little misty as she thought

of that desolated cabin where a mother and sis-

ters were grieving for the boy who had been " hot-

hearted." Even the sight of his older kinsman who

sat his horse with such composure while his eyes wan-

dered off to the purple haze of the far mountains, stirred

in her an emotion of sympathy. Of course she knew

nothing of the ten acres of " bottom land " which were

to be little Nash's when Cal Douglas should have ceased

to breathe, nor how it was covetousness and cold thrift

rather than a hot heart that had sent him out with his

rifle in the night. She did not know that Milt McBriar

had torn up several unsigned deeds when the murder

squad had failed to earn their contingent fees. She

only heard the McBriar say, " I'm much obleeged,"

and saw him turn his cavalcade east. 'The tired mis-

sionary started his mule west again, and she herself

followed the Widow Everson into the house which was

for the time to be her home. She went into the tiny,

but scrupulously clean room where an ancient bed was

gayly spread with a gaudy home-made quilt and where

a cracked pitcher and bowl and a broken mirror

adorned a home-made washstand, and then as the

widow left her, she rummaged in her saddle-bags

and drew out a small leather case. She sat for a long

while silent, in her shuck-bottomed rocking chair, gaz-

ing wearily out at the west where sunset fires were be-

ginning to kindle, and where an old-rose haze was

drowsing over the valley and glowing more brightly in

the twisting ribbon of a far-away stream. But her eyes

came often back from the panorama out there to dwell

a little wistfully on a photograph in the leather frame,

and it was the picture of the man whom she had sent

away. She was an appealing little figure of loveliness,

too frail and flower-like it seemed for hard places, and

the present wistfulness of clouded eyes and drooping

lips only made her the more appealing, like a bruised

blossom whose petals are dust-blown, which needs

to be lifted again to the sun and dew. Had the man

of the photograph been there just then, when her cour-

age and determination were at ebb tide, and had he

stretched out his arms, perhaps she would have shaken

her head wearily on abstract resolves and come into

their embrace. But he was not there.

In the quaint conversation of the Widow Everson

and her sons, Juanita found so much of the amusing

that she had to school herself against too great an

appreciation of their utterly unintentional humor.

Though she was a " fotched-on woman " to be taken

on probation it was only a matter of hours before the

family capitulated, as people in general had a fashion

of doing, under the spell of her graciousness and un-

self-conscious charm. Jerry Everson, whom men ac-

counted surly, for the first time in years brushed his

shapeless hat, and remembered not to " hang it on the

floor " and Sim Everson hied him into the misty^ woods

at dawn and brought home squirrels for her first break-

fast in his house.

When from the front porch, where the morning-glory

vines had been carefully cut away in accordance with

the country's distaste for " weeds a trailin' all over the

God's blessed face of a dwellin'-house," she saw the

mists of the next morning dissipate, she already felt

at home. She soon came to recognize that instead of

going back east after a cursory inspection to draw

plans for school-houses, she must stay here, and, as a

condition precedent, win her way naturally into the

confidence of those whom she sought to influence. As

the widow looked out under her sunbonnet, and the

two boys nursed their knees on the edge of the porch,

staring at her until she grew painfully conscious of her

silk stockinged ankles and short gingham skirt, she

knew that even if she could remove all the ivied and

towered walls of her own university and set them down

as " fur from here as a man kin fling a cow by hit's

tail " she still would be no nearer success than she was

at tliis moment. First she must be trusted by a race

distrustful of strangers.

In the forenoon of her first day she left the house

and, crossing the tiny garden where the weeds were

already growing tall and rank enough to hint of future

ragged victory, she made her way by a narrow trail

that led to the crest of the ridge. The Everson boys

watched her go up the steep path and nodded their

heads with grins of approval. " Thet gal hain't string-

halted none," observed Jerry, and Sim replied hotly,

" Stringhalted, hell ! Thet gal's plumb supple."

Juanita was steering her course for a patriarchal

poplar that sent a straight shaft heavenward at the

rim of the crest, opening its verdure like a great flag

unfurled on a mighty parapet. She knew that up

there she could look two ways across the divide and

that her battle ground would be spread before her.

But when she reached the place her breath came

fast with delight for she found there a natural observa-

tory where save for the single poplar, and a few crest

plumes rising from the slopes, she had the timber tops

all beneath her. There was only open sky above with

the world spread out in mosaic below. It was such a

place as made one resentful of the lack of wings, and

eager to leap upward into the unbroken blue to soar

with the hawks and eagles. So at least it seemed to

Juanita, but Juanita was imaginative. She had clung

to her faith in fairies past the ordinary years of such

belief and she still found a fairy-like companionship

in the spirit of flowers and trees.

She looked to the east and line after line of hills

went over and melted into the sky. She looked to the

west and there, too, they rose phalanx on phalanx to

dissolve in a smoky haze that effaced the horizon. It

looked as if in a majesty of relentlessness they reached

from sunrise to sunset, and so, as far as the locked-in-

life of their people went, they might.

With precipice and torrent they shut out the world,

sweeping away roads and all the changes that roads

bring.

They offered sanctuary to the refugee, and safety to

their sons in crime and secure eyries to their eagles.

In them all, so far as she knew, was one person, and

that person her weak self, who stood for altering them.

As she gazed down to the west, she saw the thread of

smoke that went up like a contemptuous challenge from

the house of Bad Anse Havey and the square brick

walls of his fortress-like abode. Then she looked east

and down there, where a creek bed caught the sky like a

splinter of blue glass, lay another building with open

space about it and cornfields stretching farther away.

It was a squat building of logs, and she knew from its

size and its block-house stanchness that its thread of

smoke went up from the hearth of the McBriar.

Resolutely, she threw back her slender shoulders and

quoted some favorite verses.

"It was morning on hill and stream and tree,

And morning in the young knight's heart;

Only the castle moodily

Rebuffed the gifts of the sunshine free

And gloomed by itself apart;

The season brimmed all other things up

Full as the rain fills the pitcher plant's cup.'*

She nodded her head and looked down again. " And

the castle," she declared to herself, "sha'n't go on

rebuffing. Neither castle. That's what I'm here for."

She knew that it was only two hundred miles east

from where she stood to the blue line' of the Atlantic

coast and that between lay the culture of Virginia,

Mother of States. Less than two hundred miles west

stretched the rich smoothness of the Blue Grass where

the brethren of these same people had won through and

founded the " sittlements of Old Kaintuck." But

nearer at hand on cither side, and infinitely more po-

tential stood the brick house where a long-dead Havey

had owned negro slaves, and the log house where a

McBriar of other years had cried for abolition, and

between them the war was not yet ended.

She stood there a long while and finally she saw

where for a little space the road ran near the brick

house, unshielded by the woods, a straggling little

cortege. At its front rode a stoop-shouldered man in

whom even at that far distance she thought she recog-

nized the missionary. Behind him came a few horse-

men riding in two squads and between the squads

crawled a " jolt-wagon " drawn by mules. She knew

that the Haveys were bringing back to the frontier

the enemy's dead, and she shuddered at the cold reality.

It may have been three hours later that Good Anse

Talbott rode up to the Widow Everson's. When the

girl, who had returned long ago from the crest, came

out to meet him at the door she found him talking there

with Milt McBriar who also had ridden up, but from

the other direction.

" Anse Havey 'lows," the preacher was saying,

" thet he hes done fotched home ther body of Little

Nash McKay, an thet ther boy was shot ter death

a-layin' in ther la'rel a hundred paces from the winder

whar Cal Douglas was a-standin'."

" I've done already acknowledged thet," declared

Milt, in a voice into which crept a trace of truculent

sullenness.

The missionary nodded. " I hain't quite through

yit. Milt," he went on evenly, and the girl who stood

leaning against the door frame caught for an in-

stant a sparkle of zealous earnestness in his weary

eyes.

" Anse is willin' ter take yore hand on this truce.

He's willin' ter stand pledge thet ther Haveys keeps

faith. But I'm a preacher of the gawspel of God, Milt,

and I don't 'low ter be no go-between without both of

you men does keep faith."

Milt McBriar stiffened resentfully and his brows con-

tracted blackly under liis hat brim.

" Does ye doubt thet I'll do what I says ? " he in-

quired in a voice too soft for sincerity. The mission-

ary did not drop his steady and compelling eyes from

the gaze direct. It was as if he were reading through

the pupils of his protagonist, and searching the dark

heart.

" I aims ter see thet ye both starts out fair, Milt,"

he declared still quietly. " An' ter thet end I aims ter

admonish ye both on ther terms of this hyar meetin'

atween ye."

For an instant Milt McBriar's semblance of calm

reflectiveness slipped from him, and his voice rose rasp-

ingly. "Did Anse Havey larn ye thet speech.'^"

Good Anse Talbott shook his head patiently. " No.

I told Anse ther same thing I'm a-tellin' you. Neither

Anse ner ther four men that fotches ther body will

hev any sort of weepon about 'em when they comes

acrost thet stile. Ye've got ter give me yore hand,

thet none of yore men hain't a-goin' ter be armed.

I'm a servant of ther Most High God." For an in-

stant fire blazed in the preacher's eyes and his voice

mounted with fervor. " Fer years I've done sought ter

teach His grace an' His hatred of murder ter ther

people of these hyar hills. . . . When you two men

shakes hands on this hyar truce I aims ter be standin'

by with a rifle-gun in my hands an' ef I sees anything

crooked, I'm goin' ter use hit."

The dark giant stood for a time silent, then he gravely

nodded his head. " Them terms suits me," he said

briefly.

The two men walked down to the fence and separated

there, going in opposite directions.

A few minutes later Juanita, still standing fas-

cinatedly in the doorway was looking out across the

shoulder of the missionary. He presided at the

threshold with grave eyes, and, even after these peace-

ful years with something of familiar caress in the way

his brown hand lay on his rifle lock. Then the girl

saw a strange and primitive ratification of treaty.

On either side of the little porch was gathered a group

of solemn men, mostly bearded, mostly coatless and all

unarmed. In front of those, at the .right, stood Anse

Havey, his eyes still the dominant feature of the pic-

ture.

Over across from him was the taller and older chief-

tain of the other clan. They held the picture gravely,

with a courtesy that cloaked their hatred. Out in the

road was the "jolt-wagon" and in its deep bed the

girl could see the canvas that covered its burden. As

Bad Anse took his place at the front of his escort, his

gaze met that of Juanita. He did not speak, but for

an instant she saw his face harden and his eyes narrow

and his lips set themselves. It was the glance of one

who has been lashed across the face and who cannot

strike back, but who will not soon forget.

This time the girl's eyes did not drop and certainly

they held no hint of relenting or plea for forgive-

ness.

The head of the Haveys turned from her and began

speaking. " I get your message. Milt," he said

casually, " an' I reckon you got my answer. I've

brought back Little Nash."

" I'm obleeged tcr ye." The McBriar paused, then

volunteered: " Ef ther boy had took counsel of me

this thing wouldn't never hev happened."

For some moments Bad Anse Havey looked deep into

his enemy's eyes, then he nodded.

" Milt," he carelessly announced, while the ghost of

an ironical smile played in his eyes though it left his

lips grave, " I've got several bosses an' mules down

thar in my barn that we found hitched out in ther tim-

ber when Nash an' his friends took to the la'rel."

Again he paused and studied the faces of the McBriar

men before he went on, " One of 'em is your own roan

mare, Milt. One of 'em b'longs ter Sam thar and one

of 'em is Bob's thar." He pointed out each man as he

spoke. " Ye can get 'em any time ye send down thar

for 'em."

The girl caught her breath, and despite her dislike

acknowledged the cool insolence with which Anse had

parried Milt's disclaimer of any foreknowledge of a

plot. The McBriar replied only with a scowl ; so Anse

contemplatively continued, as though to himself,

" It's right smart of a pity for a feller thet goes

out shootin' in the night-time to take a kinsman's

horse — without askin' his counsel. It might lead to

some misunderstandin'."

A baleful glare flashed deep in the eyes of the taller

man, and from the henchmen at his back came an un-

easy shuffle of brogans.

But the voice of Good Anse Talbott interrupted and

relieved the tension. " Stiddy thar, men," he quietly

admonished, " you-all didn't hardly meet hyar ter talk

'bout hosses nohow. I'll lead them nags back myself,

Milt."

Anse Havey stepped forward and extended his hand.

" I gives ye my hand, Milt McBriar," he said,

" thet there truce goes on."

"An' I gives ye mine," rejoined the other.

After a perfunctory shake the two turned together

and went down the steps. The girl saw both squads

lifting the covered burden from the wagon and carry-

ing it around the turn of the road where a second

wagon waited. She believed that the feud was ended,

but it is doubtful if either of the principals whose hands

had joined, parted with great trust in the integrity

of the other's intentions. It is certain that one of

them at least was already making plans for the future,

not at all in accordance with that compact of peace.

CHAPTER XI

AS days grew into weeks Bad Anse Havey heard

nothing of the estabhshing of a school at the

head of Tribulation, though all the gossip of the

countryside which might interest a dictator filtered

through the valleys and gorges to his house.

He smiled a little over the copy of Plutarch's

" Lives," which was the companion of his leisure mo-

ments, and held his counsel. While he thought of

Juanita herself with a resentment which sprang from

hurt pride, he felt for her, as a menace to his power,

only contempt. But Juanita's resolve had in no wise

weakened. She had seen that her original ideas had

all been chaotic and bom of ignorance, and she was, like

a good and patient general, pulling all the pins out of

her little war map and drafting a completely new

plan of campaign.

There was no weakening of resolve. Each day she

went up to the tall poplar that commanded the valleys,

east and west, and each morning with the glint of bat-

tle in her violet eyes she repeated to herself in anathema

on both houses " Carthago delenda est,''*

She meant to spend as much time as was necessary

in simply learning to know these people and making

them feel her sympathy. With Good Anse Talbott,

she rode up dwindling water courses to the hovels of

the " branch-water folks " and accompanied him where-

soever the cry of sickness or distress sent up its call,

and since his introduction was an open sesame, she

found welcomes where she went.

Dust-covered in the station at Peril, were trunks

which she had not been able to bring across the creek-

beds and quicksands, and she smiled as she thought of a

still more insane piece of foolishness of which she had

been guilty in her dense initial ignorance. Besides the

trunks there stood there in the little baggage-room a

crated piano ! Whenever she saw a patient teamster

struggling and maneuvering for ten minutes over one

twisting series of broken ledges or " man-powering "

out of the way fallen wreckage of last night's storm she

thought of that piano and laughed.

But even the small wardrobe of her saddle-bags was

beyond her needs now. To be too obviously a " fur-

riner " meant to appear, in native eyes, " stuck-up "

and to lose influence. So she adopted plain calicos and

sunbonnets like those worn by the women about her,

though even native severity of line and material could

not take from her figure its trim distinction of grace

and beauty. Just as she amended her dress so she

also amended her speech to simplified and homely

words.

It was all a very sincere effort to adapt herself, a

passionate determination. . , .

" In patience to abide.

To veil the threat of terror

And check the show of pride;

By open speech and simple,

An hundred times made plain.

To seek another's profit.

And work another's gain."

And soon the slight figure, that walked with an al-

most lyric grace, yet with a boyish strength and lithe-

ness, became familiar along the roads and trails.

Instead of asking, " Who mout thet be ? " moun-

taineers nodded and said, " Thet's her; " and some

women added, " God bless thet child."

She had been into many gloomy cabins that repelled

the brightness of the summer sun, and she had been

more like sunlight than anything that had ever come

through their narrow doors before. The children loved

her and she loved them. And she marveled at their

numbers. It was June and it seemed to her that in

almost every family a new baby was struggling through

its first months of unsanitary gloom and squalor. She

looked at their mothers, prematurely old by the pain of

their frequent coming, then at their gaunt, sullen fathers

and she prayerfully resolved that these newcomers

should know the wholesomeness of life; should be lib-

erated from their heritage of drudgery and hate.

One wild afternoon Good Anse stopped by the gate

and called to her. Clouds were piling and tumbling

along the ridges in angry ramparts of raw and leaden

heaviness. Now and then a cannonading of thunder

rumbled with its echoes through the mountains. Al-

ready great drops were falling and the missionary's

slicker shone like black armor.

" Thar's a-goin' ter be a bornin' at ther Calloway

house, I reckon," he said simply. " Thar hain't no

doctor nigher than Peril an' ther woman's mighty puny.

I reckon ye durstn't hardly ride over thar, would ye? "

Then he added, " Hit's ten mile by crow-flight an' hit's

a-comin' on ter storm."

The preacher, who from the spur of necessity was

something of a doctor, too, scowled on her, as he al-

ways scowled when something was tearing his breast

which he wished to hide, but the scowl softened when

ten minutes later she was riding beside him. The rain

had already become a lashing downpour, and the twi-

light was rent by garish sheets of lightning. At last

Good Anse said slowly : " I don't hardly feel fitten

ter try ter do nuthin'. Ye see — " He broke off and

when he looked round at her again the face under his

dripping hat brim was whiter even than the lightning

should have limned it, as his voice rose in contention

with the thunder. " Calloway's wife hain't much ter

look at now. She's plumb broke, but wunst she war

ther purtiest gal on Meetin' House Fork. In them

days they called me Hell-cat Talbott — an' hit war

God's will thet she wouldn't marry me."

The girl never forgot that night of thunder and

squalor and suspense. The night long she watched be-

side the wretched, pain-racked woman and fought for

two lives by the light of a fire into which the rain sput-

tered down the low, wide chimney. At the hearth sat

two men. One clutched his face and combed nervously

at his unkempt beard with talon-like fingers. He

rocked from side to side and groaned, brokenly, deep

in his throat. The other sat unmoving and stared,

wide-eyed, at the smoke-blackened stones of the fire-

place. Often, too, he knelt and the fire shone on

spasmodic lips moving in prayer. So they waited; the

husband and the discarded lover.

The rain drove and rattled like shot against the slab

roof, and some of it dripped through. The storm went

shrieking and volle^'-ing through the hills where the

timber bent to its savage buffeting. Over it all rolled

the artillery of the thunder and now and again came

the death crash of some forest patriarch that had given

way after centuries.

Juanita kept vigil and thanked God for her little

knowledge of medicine and the use of chloroform.

When day came at last and a tiny bundle of hu-

manity lay beside its wasted, but faintly smiling mother,

she carried away, in reward for the night-long watch

an incoherent " God bless ye," from bearded lips.

She sometimes rode over to the cabin of Fletch Mc-

Nash and brought little Dawn back with her to spend

a day or two. Then foreign girl and mountain girl

wandered together in the woods, and Dawn's diffidence

gave way and her adoration grew. Twice Juanita

found another visitor at the McNash cabin — Bad

Anse Havey. He recognized her only with a haughty

nod like that of an Indian chief and she gave him in

return a slight inclination of her head, accompanied by

a glance of starry contempt from her violet eyes. Yet

in the attitude of the mountaineers toward the man,

she saw such hero-worship as might have been accorded

to some democratic young monarch walking freely

among his subjects.

As he talked they hung on his words. Jeb listened

as to a prophet and even Dawn sat with her chin in

her hands and her gaze fixed upon his deep gray eyes.

Sometime Juanita felt the gray pupils focused on

her and under their scrutiny, back of which gleamed

mingled anger and a sort of amused scorn that galled

her, she grew strangely uneasy.

Once Fletch said, " Ma'am, how's yore school a-comin'

on? Air ye gittin' things started ter suit ye? "

Juanita flushed. " Not yet," she answered. " I'm

trying to get acquainted first. When I do start I

hope to make up for lost time."

" I reckon that school will be a right-good thing

over thar, don't ye 'low so, Anse?" inquired Fletch,

whose good-natured density had not sensed the tacit

hostility between his two guests.

Anse laughed quietly. " I reckon," he non-commit-

tally replied, " so long as the lady j ust keeps on sayin'

' not yet ' thar won't be no harm done."

The lady flushed and a hot retort rose to her lips,

but she only turned to Fletch and smiled.

" I'm biding my time, Fletch," she assured him.

" My dream will come true."

As the days went by she charged up to Anse Havey's

heavy scroll of ofl'ense something more concrete.

Juanita Holland was building a structure of dreams ;

and as she sat alone in the woods or looked out of the

single window of her room she liked to imagine its ful-

filment out there between the bases of the hills. For

her dream's fulfilment she must have land. Her site

must be large enough not only for the first log school-

house or two, but for the larger institution, into which

it was to grow. There must be dormitories for boys

and girls and playgrounds where muscles and brains

grown slow from heavy-harness could be quickened.

She fancied herself listening to the laughter of chil-

dren who had not before learned to laugh.

That should be the first thing taught, but even

above that rose another dream. On some green hill-

side should stand her tiny, but model hospital, with a

" fotched-on " trained nurse in attendance and white

cots ranged in clean rows to which the sick might come.

From comfortless beds in musty cabins women might be

brought to have God's sun and air and cleanliness at-

tend upon the birth of their children. As she made

inquiries of land-holders whom a price might tempt to

sell, she was met everywhere with a reserve which puz-

zled her until a bare-footed and slouching farmer gave

her a hint.

This man rubbed his brown toe in the dust and spoke

in a lowered voice.

" I don't mind a-tellin' ye thet I'd be plumb willin'

ter sell out an' move — " his eyes shone greedily as he

added, " fer a fair figger, but I moutn't live ter move

ef I sold out."

" What do you mean ? " she asked, much puzzled.

" Wall, I wouldn't hardly like ter hev this travel

back ter Bad Anse, but I've done been admonished not

ter make no trades with strangers."

" Oh ! " she exclaimed, in a low voice as her face

flushed wrathfully. " Whom does your land belong

to? " she demanded after a moment's indignant silence.

" Are you a bondman to Bad Anse Havey.'^ Isn't your

property your own ? "

He looked away and rummaged in his pockets for

a few crumbs of leaf tobacco, then he commented with

the dreary philosophy of hopelessness, " Hit's a God's

blessed truth thet a feller hyarabouts is plumb lucky es

long as his lifers his own."

So, she told herself. Bad Anse had begun his war

with boycott! She could not even buy a foothold on

which to begin her fight. Back there in the Philadel-

phia banks lay enough money, she bitterly reflected, to

buy the County at an inflated price ; to bribe its Courts ;

to hire assassins and snuff" out human lives, yet, since

the edict of one man carried the force of terror, she

could not buy a few acres to teach little children and

care for the sick. At least it was a confession that,

for all his fine pretense of scorn, the man recognized

and feared the potentiality of her efforts.

CHAPTER XII

AS the bright greens of June were scorched Into

dustier hues of July and the little spears of corn

grew taller, she began to feel conscious of a cer-

tain drawing back, even of those who had been her warm

admirers and to notice scowls on strange faces as they

eyed her.

Somewhere a poison squad was at work. Of that she

felt sure, and her eyes flashed militant anger as she

thought of its authorship. Each day brought her

new warnings, offered under the semblance of kindness

and friendship.

" Folks hereabouts liked her powerful well, but hit

warn't hardly likely thet Bad Anse, ner Milt McBriar

would suffer her ter go forward with her projecks.

They'd done been holdin' off 'cause she war a woman,

an' she'd better quit of her own behest." So they were

willing to let her surrender with the honors of war!

Her lips tightened.

In answer to detailed questioning her informant

would invariably shake his head vaguely and suspect

that " hit warn't rightly none of his business nohow,

he just 'lowed liit war a kindly act ter give her timely

warnin'."

Old Bob McGreeger had a water mill a half mile

from the Widow Everson's house, and had there been

competition in his neighborhood, his trade would have

died, for the tongue in old Bob's head was a member

given to truculent bitterness, and his temper was the

channel through which the dyspepsia that racked him,

found torrential outlet. It was intimated that the

spring which crept down through the laurel thickets

above his house, often brought on its surface floating

grains of yellow com. As to the significance of these

kernels, mountain etiquette remained silent. Yet the

floating particles were prima facie evidence of the

proximity of a moonshine still and distilling under such

circumstances engenders a steadfast distaste for in-

novations hinting at a change of order.

Be that as it may, Old Bob was, in word of mouth,

the most violent man in the hills. In his code of honor

the one unforgivable sin was forgiveness, and peace

was the one contemptible weakness. His body was

knife-slashed, bullet-pitted and marked of fist and hu-

man tooth and out of no battle had he ever emerged

victorious.

" Nobody kain't nuver I'am ol' Bob nuthin'," Jerry

Everson told Juanita one day. " Some fellers fights

'cause they kin fight, an' some fellers gets persuaded

by-and-by that they kain't fight an' quits tryin', but

OP Bob kain't fight an' kain't quit. He's in ther hell

of a sorry fix, 01' Bob is."

And so despite his troublesome proclivities, the moun-

tain folk regarded him rather humorously and made al-

lowances for his idiosyncrasies.

One Sunday afternoon the girl was standing at the

stile of the Widow's house with Jerry at her elbow when

Old Bob came "jest broguein' down the road." He

was a strange sight in his bare feet, his ragged trousers

and the faded Prince Albert coat, which had drifted

into his ownership a quarter of a century ago and been

donned every Sabbath since. He completed his

anomalous costume with a battered straw hat and a

much spotted red necktie at his collarless throat. He

rapped the road as he came with a long hickory staff,

and his face, masked in ragged iron-gray whiskers,

worked like a rabbit's with his mutterings.

But he paused at the gate and stood there scowling

villainously at the girl.

" Is thet her? " he exploded at the end of

his scrutiny.

" Thet," said Jerry, who was now the girl's dumb

admirer, " is Miss Holland : Miss Juanita Holland."

" Hit's ther hell of a name fer any gal," observed

the old man, still boring into her face with hostile eyes.

" How much longer do she 'low ter tarry in these

parts ? "

The girl flushed scarlet, and then telling herself

that this was one of the deficients whom the hill peo-

ple call " fitty," she turned away and looked down the

road.

" Folks round hyar," said Jerry slowly and in an

ominously quiet voice, " hopes thet she stays a long

spell."

" Like hell they does ! " ripped out the gray-bearded

moonshiner fiercely. " Ther only folks thet wishes thet

air them thet eats with the McBriars an' drinks with

ther Haveys an' tells lies ter both on 'em. Shore-

'nough folks hain't honin' ter hev no fotched-on women

spreadin' new-fangled notions of corruption through

ther country. What's more they hain't a-goin' ter

suffer hit much longer. Bad Anse is gittin' damn

tired of puttin' up with sich, jest because hits a

woman."

Juanita Holland wheeled, stung into speech at last.

" I reckon," she said quietly, falling unconsciously

into the idiom, while her cheeks blazed, " there isn't

much danger."

" No, by God," flared the man, " hit hain't danger,

hit's a plumb sartainty."

Then Jerry Everson crossed the stile.

" Uncle Bob," he said slowly, " I reckon ye've done

talked plenty. Begone now whilst ye've got a chanst."

Bob McGreeger broke into a volley of fiery oaths,

but the young mountaineer silenced him with a vice-

like grip on his shoulder.

" Folks," he said, " hev been makin' hit a practise

ter take a heap off'en ye, because ye've got gray ha'r

an' a weak mind. In p'int of fact one more lickin'

wouldn't harm ye none, an' ef ye hain't plumb heedful

ye're a goin' ter git hit right now."

The girl, genuinely anxious for the old man, started

across the stile to intercede, but with a sudden change

of mood her heckler turned and started ambling up the

road, rumbling as he went. Jerry, whose anger had

died as suddenly as it had flared, sung after him taunt-

ingly. " Uncle Bob, ye hadn't oughter go round

seekin' fights. Some day ye're liable ter meet up with

a right-puny feller thet ye kin lick, an' then yore

rep'tation'll be plumb eternally gone ter hell."

But the girl that night thought long and gloomily

over the outbreak of the drunken miller.

During those weeks of June and the first half of

July the mountains seemed to breathe freer, because of

the truce pledged by the two leaders, and the men of

both clans walked in seeming security, through the

enemy's territory. None the less, secret and silent in-

vestigations were going forward, and when the answer

to them came the seeming of peace would burst like a

pricked bubble. The grievance that had been rankling

in McBriar breasts since the night of the dance had

lost none of its soreness. Who killed Nash McKay?

Bad Anse Havey knew that the plighted assurances of

his enemy would not long outlast the answering of that

question and he was not resting idle.

Juanita Holland had bought a small piece of ground

from the Widow Everson, near her own house, and upon

it a cabin was being reared.

One afternoon, while old Milt McBriar was sitting

on the porch of his house, a horseman rode up and

" lighted." The horseman was not a pleasant person

of visage or expression, but he knew his mission and

was sure of his welcome.

" Evenin', Luke," welcomed the McBriar chief.

As the visitor sank into a chair with a nod he la-

conically announced:

" I've done found out who kilt Nash McKay."

Old Milt never showed surprise. It was his pride

that his features had banished all register of emotion.

Now he merely leaned over and knocked the ash from

his pipe against the railing. " Wall," he commanded

curtly, " let's hev yore tale."

" Them Haveys picked out a man thet hain't been

mixed up in no feud fightin' heretofore," pursued the

other with unruffled calmness. ** He's a feller thet no-

body wouldn't hardly suspect; him bein' peaceable an'

mostly sober. But he shoots his squirrels through the

head every time he throws up his rifle-gun. Thet war

ther kind of man they wanted."

Milt McBriar shifted his position a little. He

seemed bored.

" Who war this feller? "

The bearer of tidings was reserving his climax and

refused to be hurried. *

" I reckon ye'll be right-smart astonished when I

names his name, but thar hain't no chanst of bein' mis-

took. I've done run ther thing down."

'' I hain't nuver astonished," retorted McBriar.

"Who war he?"

Very cautiously the second man looked around and

then bent over and whispered a name. If Milt McBriar

did not show surprise at its mention it was because he

made a conscious effort. At last he laughed unpleas-

antly and commented, *' Thet war like Anse Havey.

He's kind of fond of doin' tilings thet ye wouldn't

hardly 'low he would do." After a short pause the

chief added, " Wall, I reckon I don't need ter tell yer

what ter do now? "

" I reckon I knows," confessed Luke with a some-

what surly expression. " Why don't ye foller Anse's

lead an' use a new man oncet in a while? "

" Oh, I reckon ye'll do, Luke, an' atter ye does hit,

ye'd better leave ther mountings fer a spell."

The surliness deepened. " Hell ! " muttered the

henchman. But Milt McBriar was paying no atten-

tion. His face was darkening. " I wish I could af-

ford ter git ther real man," he exclaimed abruptly,

" I wish I durst hev Anse Havey kilt."

" Wall — " this time it was the underling who spoke

casually — " I reckon I mout as well die fer a sheep as a

lamb. Shell I kill Anse Havey fer ye? "

The chieftain looked at him during a long pause,

then slowly shook his head.

" No, Luke," he said quietly, " I hain't quite ready

ter die myself yit. I reckon if I hed ye ter kill Ead

Anse thet's 'bout what'd happen. Jest git ther lamb

this trip an' let ther old ram live a spell."

So one unspeakably sultry morning a few days after

that informal session. Good Anse Talbott appeared at

the door of the Widow Everson's house. As Juanita

Holland appeared in the door to greet him he came to

the point without persiflage.