Part 19 (1/2)

Her laugh rippled out like bird notes as she replied with large scorn of fourteen years: ”_That_ was when I was a child.”

After a moment she added appealingly: ”The last time I saw you, General Prince said that when I came to these hills, you'd be 'charitable' to me.”

”I aims to be,” he a.s.serted stoutly, ”but it wouldn't skeercely be charitable to be the cause of your breakin' an arm or”--he paused an instant before adding with sedateness--”or a limb.”

But Anne had her way. She always had her way, and some days later they looked down on an outspread world from the crest of Slag-face. Boone had not been long in discovering that this slender girl was driven by a dauntless spirit that made of physical courage a positive fetish, so he had pretended weariness himself from time to time and demanded a breathing spell.

The sky overhead was splendidly soft and blue, broken by tumbling cloud ma.s.ses, which, it seemed, one could almost reach out and touch.

From the foreground where they sat flushed and resting, with moss and rock and woodland about them, the prospect went off into distances where mountain shadows fell across valleys, and other ridges were ranked row on row. Still more remote was the vagueness of the horizon whose misty violet merged with the robin's-egg blue of the sky.

The girl stood, leaning against the tree, and her violet eyes were full of imaginative light.

Through lids half closed the boy looked at her. She was an exponent of that world of which he had dreamed. He thought of the hall where he had first seen her; of the silk and broadcloth, of the mahogany and silver; of the whole setting which was home to her, and to him a place into which he had come as a trespa.s.ser in homespun.

Into the tempering of the crude ore came a new element. Asa Gregory had been the fire, and so far Victor McCalloway had been the water. Now, came the third factor of life's process--the oil; for there and then on the hilltop he had fallen in love, and it was not until he was riding home in the starlight that he stopped to consider the chances of disaster.

It had been a wonderful day, accepted without questioning; but now he drew his horse suddenly to a stop and took his hat from his head. For a time he sat there in his saddle, as unmoving as though he and the beast he rode were inanimate parts of an equestrian group; the statue of a pioneer lad rough-mounted.

His face stiffened painfully, and he licked his lips. Finally he said to the dark woods where the whippoorwills were calling and the fireflies flickering:

”Great G.o.d! I mout jest as well fall in love with a star up thar in heaven.” Something like a groan escaped him, and after a while he gathered up his reins. Again he spoke, but in a dull voice:

”I'll quit afore I get in too far. Tomorrow night I'll go over thar and 'set up' with Happy Spradling.”

He remembered how they had laughed at him at college when, quite naturally, he had used that term, ”settin' up with a gal,” to express the idea of courts.h.i.+p. Now he laughed himself, but bitterly. That was what his own people called it, and, after all, it was better to remember that he was of his own people.

The next night Boone kept his word. He brushed his clothes and did what he could with the unruly crispness of his hair, and then he set out for the log house of Cyrus Spradling on the headwaters of Snag Ridge.

He was not going on this, his first formal visit to a girl, with such leaping pulses as might have been expected. He was following out an almost grim determination quite devoid of eagerness. Having lost his heart to royalty, he was now bent on forcing himself back into a society where he had a right to be.

He had not slept much that night after the excursion to Slag-face, and what sleep he had had, had been troubled by dreams in which Anne had stood smiling down on him from the mountain top, while he looked up from a deep gorge where the shadows lay black. He was driven by a mad sense of necessity to climb up and stand beside her--but always he slid back, or fell from narrow ledges, until he was bruised, bleeding--and unsuccessful. He woke up panting, and afterward dreamed the same thing over. And every time he fell he found Happy waiting in the gorge and saying, ”Why don't ye stay here with me? You don't have to climb after me--and I'm a right pretty gal.” Always too he answered, in the words that Anne had used, ”Why do I want to go up there? Up there you'd be looking down on everything but the clouds themselves”--and he would begin climbing once more, clutching with raw fingers upon frail and slippery supports.

All day he had argued with himself, and being young and unversed in such problems he told himself that the only way to halt this runaway thing within himself that led to no hope was to set his heart upon something which lay in reach. His inexperience told him that Happy liked him; that she was a nice girl trying to better her condition in life as he was himself trying, and he meant to commandeer his own heart and lay it at her feet. It was, of course, an absurd and impossible thing to undertake, but this he must learn for himself.

As Boone reached the house, old man Spradling sat on his porch in the twilight with his cob pipe between his teeth. Cyrus remained what his ”fore-parents” had been before him, a rough-hewn man of undeviating honesty and of an innate kindliness that showed out only in deeds and not at all in demonstrativeness.

Just now he wore an expression of countenance that was somewhat glum as he watched the lingering afterglow which edged the western crests of the ”Kaintuck' Ridges” with pale amber.

”Set ye a cheer, Booney,” he invited, with a brief nod. ”I reckon ye didn't skeercely fare over hyar ter set an' talk with me, but ther gal hain't quite through holpin' her mammy with the dish-was.h.i.+n' yit--an' I wants ter put some questions ter ye afore she comes out.”

The lad drew a hickory-withed chair forward and sat down, laying his hat on the floor at his feet.

”Ye've done been off ter college, son,” began old Cyrus reflectively, as he bit on his pipe stem and judicially nodded his head.

”I've always countenanced book-lore myself, even when folks hes faulted me fer hit. I've contended thet ther times change an' what was good enough fer ther parents hain't, of needcessity, good enough fer ther young ones. 'Peared like, ter me, a body kinderly hes a better chanst ter be G.o.dly ef he hain't benighted.”

”I reckon there ain't no two ways about that proposition,” agreed the boy eagerly. ”Hit just stands ter reason.”