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I She sat at the base of the big tree -- her little sunbonnet pushed back, her arms locked about her knees, her bare feet gathered under her crimson gown and her deep eyes fixed on the smoke in the valley below. Her breath was still coming fast between her parted lips. There were tiny drops along the roots of her shining hair, for the climb had been steep, and now the shadow of disappointment darkened her eyes. The mountains ran in limitless blue waves towards the mounting sun -- but at birth her eyes had opened on them as on the white mists trailing up the steeps below her. Beyond them was a gap in the next mountain chain and down in the little valley, just visible through it, were trailing blue mists as well, and she knew that they were smoke. Where was the great glare of yellow light that the "circuit rider" had told about -- and the leaping tongues of fire? Where was the shrieking monster that ran without horses like the wind and tossed back rolling black plumes all streaked with f
II He had seen the big pine when he first came to those hills -- one morning, at daybreak, when the valley was a sea of mist that threw soft clinging spray to the very mountain tops: for even above the mists, that morning, its mighty head arose -- sole visible proof that the earth still slept beneath. Straightway, he wondered how it had ever got there, so far above the few of its kind that haunted the green dark ravines far below. Some whirlwind, doubtless, had sent a tiny cone circling heavenward and dropped it there. It had sent others, too, no doubt, but how had this tree faced wind and storm alone and alone lived to defy both so proudly? Some day he would learn. Thereafter, he had seen it, at noon -- but little less majestic among the oaks that stood about it; had seen it catching the last light at sunset, clean-cut against the after-glow, and like a dark, silent, mysterious sentinel guarding the mountain pass under the moon. He had seen it giving place with sombre dignity to the p
III On one side he had left the earth yellow with the coming noon, but it was still morning as he went down on the other side. The laurel and rhododendron still reeked with dew in the deep, ever-shaded ravine. The ferns drenched his stirrups, as he brushed through them, and each dripping tree-top broke the sunlight and let it drop in tent-like beams through the shimmering undermist. A bird flashed here and there through the green gloom, but there was no sound in the air but the footfalls of his horse and the easy creaking of leather under him, the drip of dew overhead and the running of water below. Now and then he could see the same slender foot-prints in the rich loam and he saw them in the sand where the first tiny brook tinkled across the path from a gloomy ravine. There the little creature had taken a flying leap across it and, beyond, he could see the prints no more. He little guessed that while he halted to let his horse drink, the girl lay on a rock above him, looking down. She
IV Even the geese in the creek seemed to know that he was a stranger and to distrust him, for they cackled and, spreading their wings, fled cackling up the stream. As he neared the house, the little girl ran around the stone chimney, stopped short, shaded her eyes with one hand for a moment and ran excitedly into the house. A moment later, the bearded giant slouched out, stooping his head as he came through the door. "Hitch that 'ar post to yo' hoss and come right in," he thundered cheerily. "I'm waitin' fer ye." The little girl came to the door, pushed one brown slender hand through her tangled hair, caught one bare foot behind a deer-like ankle and stood motionless. Behind her was the boy -- his dagger still in hand. "Come right in!" said the old man, "we are purty pore folks, but you're welcome to what we have." The fisherman, too, had to stoop as he came in, for he, too, was tall. The interior was dark, in spite of the wood fire in the big stone fireplace. Strings of herbs and red-
V Awaiting dinner, the mountaineer and the "furriner" sat on the porch while Bub carved away at another pine dagger on the stoop. As Hale passed out the door, a querulous voice said "Howdye" from the bed in the corner and he knew it was the step-mother from whom the little girl expected some nether-world punishment for an offence of which he was ignorant. He had heard of the feud that had been going on between the red Falins and the black Tollivers for a quarter of a century, and this was Devil Judd, who had earned his nickname when he was the leader of his clan by his terrible strength, his marksmanship, his cunning and his courage. Some years since the old man had retired from the leadership, because he was tired of fighting or because he had quarrelled with his brother Dave and his foster-brother, Bad Rufe -- known as the terror of the Tollivers -- or from some unknown reason, and in consequence there had been peace for a long time -- the Falins fearing that Devil Judd would be led
VI The old man went with him up the creek and, passing the milk house, turned up a brush-bordered little branch in which the engineer saw signs of coal. Up the creek the mountaineer led him some thirty yards above the water level and stopped. An entry had been driven through the rich earth and ten feet within was a shining bed of coal. There was no parting except two inches of mother-of-coal -- midway, which would make it but easier to mine. Who had taught that old man to open coal in such a way -- to make such a facing? It looked as though the old fellow were in some scheme with another to get him interested. As he drew closer, he saw radiations of some twelve inches, all over the face of the coal, star-shaped, and he almost gasped. It was not only cannel coal -- it was "bird's-eye" cannel. Heavens, what a find! Instantly he was the cautious man of business, alert, cold, uncommunicative. "That looks like a pretty good -- " he drawled the last two words -- "vein of coal. I'd like to ta
VII Past the Big Pine, swerving with a smile his horse aside that he might not obliterate the foot-print in the black earth, and down the mountain, his brain busy with his big purpose, went John Hale, by instinct, inheritance, blood and tradition -- pioneer. One of his forefathers had been with Washington on the Father's first historic expedition into the wilds of Virginia. His great- grandfather had accompanied Boone when that hunter first penetrated the "Dark and Bloody Ground," had gone back to Virginia and come again with a surveyor's chain and compass to help wrest it from the red men, among whom there had been an immemorial conflict for possession and a never-recognized claim of ownership. That compass and that chain his grandfather had fallen heir to and with that compass and chain his father had earned his livelihood amid the wrecks of the Civil War. Hale went to the old Transylvania University at Lexington, the first seat of learning planted beyond the Alleghanies. He was fond
VIII On a spur of Black Mountain, beyond the Kentucky line, a lean horse was tied to a sassafras bush, and in a clump of rhododendron ten yards away, a lean black-haired boy sat with a Winchester between his stomach and thighs -- waiting for the dusk to drop. His chin was in both hands, the brim of his slouch hat was curved crescent-wise over his forehead, and his eyes were on the sweeping bend of the river below him. That was the "Bad Bend" down there, peopled with ancestral enemies and the head-quarters of their leader for the last ten years. Though they had been at peace for some time now, it had been Saturday in the county town ten miles down the river as well, and nobody ever knew what a Saturday might bring forth between his people and them. So he would not risk riding through that bend by the light of day. All the long way up spur after spur and along ridge after ridge, all along the still, tree-crested top of the Big Black, he had been thinking of the man -- the "furriner" whom
IX It was court day at the county seat across the Kentucky line. Hale had risen early, as everyone must if he would get his breakfast in the mountains, even in the hotels in the county seats, and he sat with his feet on the railing of the hotel porch which fronted the main street of the town. He had had his heart-breaking failures since the autumn before, but he was in good cheer now, for his feverish enthusiasm had at last clutched a man who would take up not only his options on the great Gap beyond Black Mountain but on the cannel-coal lands of Devil Judd Tolliver as well. He was riding across from the Bluegrass to meet this man at the railroad in Virginia, nearly two hundred miles away; he had stopped to examine some titles at the county seat and he meant to go on that day by way of Lonesome Cove. Opposite was the brick Court House -- every window lacking at least one pane, the steps yellow with dirt and tobacco juice, the doorway and the bricks about the upper windows bullet-dented
X Hale opened his eyes next morning on the little old woman in black, moving ghost-like through the dim interior to the kitchen. A wood-thrush was singing when he stepped out on the porch and its cool notes had the liquid freshness of the morning. Breakfast over, he concluded to leave the yellow mule with the Red Fox to be taken back to the county town, and to walk down the mountain, but before he got away the landlord's son turned up with his own horse, still lame, but well enough to limp along without doing himself harm. So, leading the black horse, Hale started down. The sun was rising over still seas of white mist and wave after wave of blue Virginia hills. In the shadows below, it smote the mists into tatters; leaf and bush glittered as though after a heavy rain, and down Hale went under a trembling dew-drenched world and along a tumbling series of water-falls that flashed through tall ferns, blossoming laurel and shining leaves of rhododendron. Once he heard something move below
XI Spring was coming: and, meanwhile, that late autumn and short winter, things went merrily on at the gap in some ways, and in some ways -- not. Within eight miles of the place, for instance, the man fell ill -- the man who was to take up Hale's options -- and he had to be taken home. Still Hale was undaunted: here he was and here he would stay -- and he would try again. Two other young men, Bluegrass Kentuckians, Logan and Macfarlan, had settled at the gap -- both lawyers and both of pioneer, Indian-fighting blood. The report of the State geologist had been spread broadcast. A famous magazine writer had come through on horseback and had gone home and given a fervid account of the riches and the beauty of the region. Helmeted Englishmen began to prowl prospectively around the gap sixty miles to the southwest. New surveying parties were directing lines for the rocky gateway between the iron ore and the coal. Engineers and coal experts passed in and out. There were rumours of a furnace
XII June did not have to be awakened that morning. At the first clarion call of the old rooster behind the cabin, her eyes opened wide and a happy thrill tingled her from head to foot -- why, she didn't at first quite realize -- and then she stretched her slender round arms to full length above her head and with a little squeal of joy bounded out of the bed, dressed as she was when she went into it, and with no changes to make except to push back her tangled hair. Her father was out feeding the stock and she could hear her step-mother in the kitchen. Bub still slept soundly, and she shook him by the shoulder. "Git up, Bub." "Go 'way," said Bub fretfully. Again she started to shake him but stopped -- Bub wasn't going to the Gap, so she let him sleep. For a little while she looked down at him -- at his round rosy face and his frowsy hair from under which protruded one dirty fist. She was going to leave him, and a fresh tenderness for him made her breast heave, but she did not kiss him, f
XIII Hale rode that night under a brilliant moon to the worm of a railroad that had been creeping for many years toward the Gap. The head of it was just protruding from the Natural Tunnel twenty miles away. There he sent his horse back, slept in a shanty till morning, and then the train crawled through a towering bench of rock. The mouth of it on the other side opened into a mighty amphitheatre with solid rock walls shooting vertically hundreds of feet upward. Vertically, he thought -- with the back of his head between his shoulders as he looked up -- they were more than vertical -- they were actually concave. The Almighty had not only stored riches immeasurable in the hills behind him -- He had driven this passage Himself to help puny man to reach them, and yet the wretched road was going toward them like a snail. On the fifth night, thereafter he was back there at the tunnel again from New York -- with a grim mouth and a happy eye. He had brought success with him this time and there
XIV But June did not go home. Hale anticipated that resolution of hers and forestalled it by being on hand for breakfast and taking June over to the porch of his little office. There he tried to explain to her that they were trying to build a town and must have law and order; that they must have no personal feeling for or against anybody and must treat everybody exactly alike -- no other course was fair -- and though June could not quite understand, she trusted him and she said she would keep on at school until her father came for her. "Do you think he will come, June?" The little girl hesitated. "I'm afeerd he will," she said, and Hale smiled. "Well, I'll try to persuade him to let you stay, if he does come." June was quite right. She had seen the matter the night before just as it was. For just at that hour young Dave, sobered, but still on the verge of tears from anger and humiliation, was telling the story of the day in her father's cabin. The old man's brows drew together and his
XV Hand in hand, Hale and June followed the footsteps of spring from the time June met him at the school-house gate for their first walk into the woods. Hale pointed to some boys playing marbles. "That's the first sign," he said, and with quick understanding June smiled. The birdlike piping of hylas came from a marshy strip of woodland that ran through the centre of the town and a toad was croaking at the foot of Imboden Hill. "And they come next." They crossed the swinging foot-bridge, which was a miracle to June, and took the foot-path along the clear stream of South Fork, under the laurel which June called "ivy," and the rhododendron which was "laurel" in her speech, and Hale pointed out catkins greening on alders in one swampy place and willows just blushing into life along the banks of a little creek. A few yards aside from the path he found, under a patch of snow and dead leaves, the pink-and-white blossoms and the waxy green leaves of the trailing arbutus, that fragrant harbinge
XVI The in-sweep of the outside world was broadening its current now. The improvement company had been formed to encourage the growth of the town. A safe was put in the back part of a furniture store behind a wooden partition and a bank was started. Up through the Gap and toward Kentucky, more entries were driven into the coal, and on the Virginia side were signs of stripping for iron ore. A furnace was coming in just as soon as the railroad could bring it in, and the railroad was pushing ahead with genuine vigor. Speculators were trooping in and the town had been divided off into lots -- a few of which had already changed hands. One agent had brought in a big steel safe and a tent and was buying coal lands right and left. More young men drifted in from all points of the compass. A tent-hotel was put at the foot of Imboden Hill, and of nights there were under it much poker and song. The lilt of a definite optimism was in every man's step and the light of hope was in every man's eye. An
XVII Twice her lips opened soundlessly and, dazed, she could only point dumbly. The old step-mother laughed: "Jack Hale done that. He pestered yo' pap to let him do it fer ye, an' anything Jack Hale wants from yo' pap, he gits. I thought hit was plum' foolishness, but he's got things to eat planted thar, too, an' I declar hit's right purty." That wonderful garden! June started for it on a run. There was a broad grass-walk down through the middle of it and there were narrow grass-walks running sidewise, just as they did in the gardens which Hale told her he had seen in the outer world. The flowers were planted in raised beds, and all the ones that she had learned to know and love at the Gap were there, and many more besides. The hollyhocks, bachelor's buttons and marigolds she had known all her life. The lilacs, touch-me-nots, tulips and narcissus she had learned to know in gardens at the Gap. Two rose- bushes were in bloom, and there were strange grasses and plants and flowers that Jac
XVIII Pausing at the Pine to let his big black horse blow a while, Hale mounted and rode slowly down the green-and-gold gloom of the ravine. In his pocket was a quaint little letter from June to "John Hail"; thanking him for the beautiful garden, saying she was lonely, and wanting him to come soon. From the low flank of the mountain he stopped, looking down on the cabin in Lonesome Cove. It was a dreaming summer day. Trees, air, blue sky and white cloud were all in a dream, and even the smoke lazing from the chimney seemed drifting away like the spirit of something human that cared little whither it might be borne. Something crimson emerged from the door and stopped in indecision on the steps of the porch. It moved again, stopped at the corner of the house, and then, moving on with a purpose, stopped once more and began to flicker slowly to and fro like a flame. June was working in her garden. Hale thought he would halloo to her, and then he decided to surprise her, and he went on down
XIX And still farther into that far silence about which she used to dream at the base of the big Pine, went little June. At dusk, weary and travel-stained, she sat in the parlours of a hotel -- a great gray columned structure of stone. She was confused and bewildered and her head ached. The journey had been long and tiresome. The swift motion of the train had made her dizzy and faint. The dust and smoke had almost stifled her, and even now the dismal parlours, rich and wonderful as they were to her unaccustomed eyes, oppressed her deeply. If she could have one more breath of mountain air! The day had been too full of wonders. Impressions had crowded on her sensitive brain so thick and fast that the recollection of them was as through a haze. She had never been on a train before and when, as it crashed ahead, she clutched Hale's arm in fear and asked how they stopped it, Hale hearing the whistle blow for a station, said: "I'll show you," and he waved one hand out the window. And he repe
XX The boom started after its shadow through the hills now, and Hale watched it sweep toward him with grim satisfaction at the fulfilment of his own prophecy and with disgust that, by the irony of fate, it should come from the very quarters where years before he had played the maddening part of lunatic at large. The avalanche was sweeping southward; Pennsylvania was creeping down the Alleghanies, emissaries of New York capital were pouring into the hills, the tide-water of Virginia and the Bluegrass region of Kentucky were sending in their best blood and youth, and friends of the helmeted Englishmen were hurrying over the seas. Eastern companies were taking up principalities, and at Cumberland Gap, those helmeted Englishmen had acquired a kingdom. They were building a town there, too, with huge steel plants, broad avenues and business blocks that would have graced Broadway; and they were pouring out a million for every thousand that it would have cost Hale to acquire the land on which
XXI Hale was beyond Black Mountain when her letter reached him. His work over there had to be finished and so he kept in his saddle the greater part of two days and nights and on the third day rode his big black horse forty miles in little more than half a day that he might meet her at the train. The last two years had wrought their change in him. Deterioration is easy in the hills -- superficial deterioration in habits, manners, personal appearance and the practices of all the little niceties of life. The morning bath is impossible because of the crowded domestic conditions of a mountain cabin and, if possible, might if practised, excite wonder and comment, if not vague suspicion. Sleeping garments are practically barred for the same reason. Shaving becomes a rare luxury. A lost tooth-brush may not be replaced for a month. In time one may bring himself to eat with a knife for the reason that it is hard for a hungry man to feed himself with a fork that has but two tines. The finger tip
XXII June sat in the little dummy, the focus of curious eyes, while Hale was busy seeing that her baggage was got aboard. The checks that she gave him jingled in his hands like a bunch of keys, and he could hardly help grinning when he saw the huge trunks and the smart bags that were tumbled from the baggage car -- all marked with her initials. There had been days when he had laid considerable emphasis on pieces like those, and when he thought of them overwhelming with opulent suggestions that debt-stricken little town, and, later, piled incongruously on the porch of the cabin on Lonesome Cove, he could have laughed aloud but for a nameless something that was gnawing savagely at his heart. He felt almost shy when he went back into the car, and though June greeted him with a smile, her immaculate daintiness made him unconsciously sit quite far away from her. The little fairy-cross was still at her throat, but a tiny diamond gleamed from each end of it and from the centre, as from a tiny
XXIII June, tired though she was, tossed restlessly that night. The one look she had seen in Hale's face when she met him in the car, told her the truth as far as he was concerned. He was unchanged, she could give him no chance to withdraw from their long understanding, for it was plain to her quick instinct that he wanted none. And so she had asked him no question about his failure to meet her, for she knew now that his reason, no matter what, was good. He had startled her in the car, for her mind was heavy with memories of the poor little cabins she had passed on the train, of the mountain men and women in the wedding-party, and Hale himself was to the eye so much like one of them -- had so startled her that, though she knew that his instinct, too, was at work, she could not gather herself together to combat her own feelings, for every little happening in the dummy but drew her back to her previous train of painful thought. And in that helplessness she had told Hale good-night. She r
XXIV Very slowly June walked up the little creek to the old log where she had lain so many happy hours. There was no change in leaf, shrub or tree, and not a stone in the brook had been disturbed. The sun dropped the same arrows down through the leaves -- blunting their shining points into tremulous circles on the ground, the water sang the same happy tune under her dangling feet and a wood- thrush piped the old lay overhead. Wood-thrush! June smiled as she suddenly rechristened the bird for herself now. That bird henceforth would be the Magic Flute to musical June -- and she leaned back with ears, eyes and soul awake and her brain busy. All the way over the mountain, on that second home-going, she had thought of the first, and even memories of the memories aroused by that first home-going came back to her -- the place where Hale had put his horse into a dead run and had given her that never-to-be- forgotten thrill, and where she had slid from behind to the ground and stormed with tear
XXV Thus Fate did not wait until Election Day for the thing Hale most dreaded -- a clash that would involve the guard in the Tolliver- Falin troubles over the hills. There had been simply a preliminary political gathering at the Gap the day before, but it had been a crucial day for the guard from a cloudy sunrise to a tragic sunset. Early that morning, Mockaby, the town-sergeant, had stepped into the street freshly shaven, with polished boots, and in his best clothes for the eyes of his sweetheart, who was to come up that day to the Gap from Lee. Before sunset he died with those boots on, while the sweetheart, unknowing, was bound on her happy way homeward, and Rufe Tolliver, who had shot Mockaby, was clattering through the Gap in flight for Lonesome Cove. As far as anybody knew, there had been but one Tolliver and one Falin in town that day, though many had noticed the tall Western- looking stranger who, early in the afternoon, had ridden across the bridge over the North Fork, but he
XXVI Back to the passing of Boone and the landing of Columbus no man, in that region, had ever been hanged. And as old Judd said, no Tolliver had ever been sentenced and no jury of mountain men, he well knew, could be found who would convict a Tolliver, for there were no twelve men in the mountains who would dare. And so the Tollivers decided to await the outcome of the trial and rest easy. But they did not count on the mettle and intelligence of the grim young "furriners" who were a flying wedge of civilization at the Gap. Straightway, they gave up the practice of law and banking and trading and store-keeping and cut port-holes in the brick walls of the Court House and guarded town and jail night and day. They brought their own fearless judge, their own fearless jury and their own fearless guard. Such an abstract regard for law and order the mountaineer finds a hard thing to understand. It looked as though the motive of the Guard was vindictive and personal, and old Judd was almost st
XXVII The miracle had happened. The Tollivers, following the Red Fox's advice to make no attempt at rescue just then, had waited, expecting the old immunity from the law and getting instead the swift sentence that Rufe Tolliver should be hanged by the neck until he was dead. Astounding and convincing though the news was, no mountaineer believed he would ever hang, and Rufe himself faced the sentence defiant. He laughed when he was led back to his cell: "I'll never hang," he said scornfully. They were the first words that came from his lips, and the first words that came from old Judd's when the news reached him in Lonesome Cove, and that night old Judd gathered his clan for the rescue -- to learn next morning that during the night Rufe had been spirited away to the capital for safekeeping until the fatal day. And so there was quiet for a while -- old Judd making ready for the day when Rufe should be brought back, and trying to find out who it was that had slain his brother Dave. The Fa
XXVIII And so while Bad Rufe Tolliver was waiting for death, the trial of the Red Fox went on, and when he was not swinging in a hammock, reading his Bible, telling his visions to his guards and singing hymns, he was in the Court House giving shrewd answers to questions, or none at all, with the benevolent half of his mask turned to the jury and the wolfish snarl of the other half showing only now and then to some hostile witness for whom his hate was stronger than his fear for his own life. And in jail Bad Rufe worried his enemy with the malicious humour of Satan. Now he would say: "Oh, there ain't nothin' betwixt old Red and me, nothin' at all -- 'cept this iron wall," and he would drum a vicious tattoo on the thin wall with the heel of his boot. Or when he heard the creak of the Red Fox's hammock as he droned his Bible aloud, he would say to his guard outside: "Course I don't read the Bible an' preach the word, nor talk with sperits, but thar's worse men than me in the world -- old
XXIX Day broke on the old Court House with its black port-holes, on the graystone jail, and on a tall topless wooden box to one side, from which projected a cross-beam of green oak. From the centre of this beam dangled a rope that swung gently to and fro when the wind moved. And with the day a flock of little birds lighted on the bars of the condemned man's cell window, chirping through them, and when the jailer brought breakfast he found Bad Rufe cowering in the corner of his cell and wet with the sweat of fear. "Them damn birds ag'in," he growled sullenly. "Don't lose yo' nerve, Rufe," said the jailer, and the old laugh of defiance came, but from lips that were dry. "Not much," he answered grimly, but the jailer noticed that while he ate, his eyes kept turning again and again to the bars; and the turnkey went away shaking his head. Rufe had told the jailer, his one friend through whom he had kept in constant communication with the Tollivers, how on the night after the shooting of Moc
XXX The longest of her life was that day to June. The anxiety in times of war for the women who wait at home is vague because they are mercifully ignorant of the dangers their loved ones run, but a specific issue that involves death to those loved ones has a special and poignant terror of its own. June knew her father's plan, the precise time the fight would take place, and the especial danger that was Hale's, for she knew that young Dave Tolliver had marked him with the first shot fired. Dry-eyed and white and dumb, she watched them make ready for the start that morning while it was yet dark; dully she heard the horses snorting from the cold, the low curt orders of her father, and the exciting mutterings of Bub and young Dave; dully she watched the saddles thrown on, the pistols buckled, the Winchesters caught up, and dully she watched them file out the gate and ride away, single file, into the cold, damp mist like ghostly figures in a dream. Once only did she open her lips and that w
XXXI Before dawn Hale and the doctor and the old miller had reached the Pine, and there Hale stopped. Any farther, the old man told him, he would go only at the risk of his life from Dave or Bub, or even from any Falin who happened to be hanging around in the bushes, for Hale was hated equally by both factions now. "I'll wait up here until noon, Uncle Billy," said Hale. "Ask her, for God's sake, to come up here and see me." "All right. I'll axe her, but -- " the old miller shook his head. Breakfastless, except for the munching of a piece of chocolate, Hale waited all the morning with his black horse in the bushes some thirty yards from the Lonesome Pine. Every now and then he would go to the tree and look down the path, and once he slipped far down the trail and aside to a spur whence he could see the cabin in the cove. Once his hungry eyes caught sight of a woman's figure walking through the little garden, and for an hour after it disappeared into the house he watched for it to come o
XXXII All winter the cabin in Lonesome Cove slept through rain and sleet and snow, and no foot passed its threshold. Winter broke, floods came and warm sunshine. A pale green light stole through the trees, shy, ethereal and so like a mist that it seemed at any moment on the point of floating upward. Colour came with the wild flowers and song with the wood-thrush. Squirrels played on the tree-trunks like mischievous children, the brooks sang like happy human voices through the tremulous underworld and woodpeckers hammered out the joy of spring, but the awakening only made the desolate cabin lonelier still. After three warm days in March, Uncle Billy, the miller, rode up the creek with a hoe over his shoulder -- he had promised this to Hale -- for his labour of love in June's garden. Weeping April passed, May came with rosy face uplifted, and with the birth of June the laurel emptied its pink- flecked cups and the rhododendron blazed the way for the summer's coming with white stars. Back
XXXIII Clouds were gathering as Hale rode up the river after telling old Hon and Uncle Billy good-by. He had meant not to go to the cabin in Lonesome Cove, but when he reached the forks of the road, he stopped his horse and sat in indecision with his hands folded on the pommel of his saddle and his eyes on the smokeless chimney. The memories tugging at his heart drew him irresistibly on, for it was the last time. At a slow walk he went noiselessly through the deep sand around the clump of rhododendron. The creek was clear as crystal once more, but no geese cackled and no dog barked. The door of the spring-house gaped wide, the barn-door sagged on its hinges, the yard-fence swayed drunkenly, and the cabin was still as a gravestone. But the garden was alive, and he swung from his horse at the gate, and with his hands clasped behind his back walked slowly through it. June's garden! The garden he had planned and planted for June -- that they had tended together and apart and that, thanks t
XXXIV The big Pine was gone. He had seen it first, one morning at daybreak, when the valley on the other side was a sea of mist that threw soft, clinging spray to the very mountain tops -- for even above the mists, that morning, its mighty head arose, sole visible proof that the earth still slept beneath. He had seen it at noon -- but little less majestic, among the oaks that stood about it; had seen it catching the last light at sunset, clean-cut against the after-glow, and like a dark, silent, mysterious sentinel guarding the mountain pass under the moon. He had seen it giving place with sombre dignity to the passing burst of spring, had seen it green among dying autumn leaves, green in the gray of winter trees and still green in a shroud of snow -- a changeless promise that the earth must wake to life again. It had been the beacon that led him into Lonesome Cove -- the beacon that led June into the outer world. From it her flying feet had carried her into his life -- past it, the sa
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