CHAPTER I

Where the narrow, rocky road from Big Laurel Cove taps the main highway down the valley, a limpid trout stream refuses to give up its right of way and forces a ford. Here, one afternoon in June, Bud Childers coming down from his shack on Green Mountain stopped to water his horse in the middle of the brook. Lank and lean, he sat easily astride the mare, gazing about indifferently in spite of his twenty-two years. In his inscrutable eyes there lurked something of that unchanging limpid blue which coats these North Carolina mountains. It was not easy to read in them anything except perhaps cruelty; an expression to which the long line of his thin jaw closing on bloodless lips, the high protruding cheek-bones clearly traced by his tautly drawn bronzed skin, doubtless contributed. The hot sun beating down upon his head caused him to raise his black dust-stained hat. A white crescent-shaped scar was then revealed slightly above his left ear clearly visible in his blue-black hair--souvenir of the day that the Enfield boys, stimulated by liquor, attempted, in an argument, to knife him. The Enfields have their souvenir in a marble slab in Mount Bethel churchyard. The memory of this episode was never so completely out of Bud’s mind but that the unexpected crackle of a twig sent his hand flashing back to the gun always within reach. It did at this moment as his quick ear caught the sound of movement in the cover of hemlocks and rhododendrons skirting the road at the bend beyond him. His face remained immobile. His eyes were leveled like a rifle barrel. His bony hand was alert. And all for a slight, flaxen-haired girl carrying under her arm a small sack of flour!

She stepped out upon the road, and for a moment the sun claimed her for its own, drenching her through and through with its luminous rays like a spot-light from a distant gallery on the figure of a woodland nymph. It touched with gold the girl’s white-clad figure, her silken hair, her wonderfully fair skin, and lighted her eager, young face--a primitive face, but with the beauty of a wild rose half opened. She might have been eighteen or a little less. Much of the child was still left, but the mouth had already begun to harden and the eyes to question. At this moment, however, both eyes and mouth were gently smiling, moved into unconscious harmony with the picture before her--the slope pied with mountain daisies half asleep under the soft radiance of the setting sun; the sanded road burnished to a golden sheen, and finally the stream in front where the scattered shafts of light spent themselves in flashing from stone to stone. It was a setting worthy of the princes of the fairy books she had lately been reading--reading as children read.

Bud, still motionless, saw her--but not wholly as a prince might have seen her. His eyes noted scarcely more than her pretty figure suggested by the curve of her neck, the litheness of her movements and the trim ankles. Her appeal to him was the primitive appeal of a woman to man. And yet she was not just any woman, even though she was not the first upon whom he had looked greedily. He was conscious of that at once. She was prettier than most for one thing. And something more besides, although he did not attempt to analyze his emotions. He was more interested in speaking to her. In response to a tugging at his bridle, the horse moved lingeringly out of the stream into the road. Then the girl, startled, wide-eyed, looked up. For a second she seemed about to turn and run. Then, as though thinking better of that, she faced the man. The latter grinned; partly to assure her of his good nature and partly because the sight of any one suddenly surprised was amusing.

“Afeard?” he asked.

She raised her head still higher. She recognized the man now. From all she had heard about him she was entitled to be afraid. But the woods were near and she could run in them like a deer.

“No,” she answered quietly.

“I ’lowed mebbe you’d heard tales about me.”

She remained uncompromisingly silent.

“My name’s Bud Childers,” he announced.

She made no reply, but shifted the sack forward on her arm as though about to go on.

“What’s yourn?” he demanded.

“Roxie Kester.”

He sidled his horse nearer.

“Let me have that air sack. I’m goin’ your way, I reckon.”

“It ain’t heavy,” she replied, shrinking out of reach.

“Might as well,” he insisted with his wrinkled, calloused hands outstretched; “me on a horse and you on your feet.”

“It ain’t heavy.”

“Might as well--me a man and you a woman.”

“I kin carry it all right.”

He dropped his hands to his side again, still smiling, but with the grin of a collie dog ready to change in a flash to a snarl.

“It ain’t--isn’t fur to where I live,” she added in a sincere dislike at hurting him--or any man.

“You been goin’ to this air school, aincher?” he asked, quick to detect her avoidance of the “ain’t.”

“I been goin’,” she nodded.

“Like it?”

“More ’n anything I ever done,” she answered.

“How long yer been goin’?”

“Six years. Ma was sick last year, but she’s better now an’ I’m goin’ back next fall.”

“Six year o’ schoolin’ sounds like enough ter me. I ain’t been but two, an’ that’s all I need. Got me a house over in Big Laurel Cove, got me a cow, and I’m makin’ money too.”

The sack in her arms was becoming heavy. She was listening because she saw no alternative, but her face remained blank. Bud noted it with a frown.

“Got me a house,” he repeated with slightly more emphasis, “and a cow that give a gallon and a half at a milkin’, a good sure-footed hoss and--besides, I’m makin’ money.”

“Looks like you oughta be married with all what you say you got,” she answered mockingly.

“Mebbe I will some o’ these days,” he answered, seeking her eyes. But he found them at that moment turned towards a bird in the hemlocks.

Bud shifted his position in the saddle slightly and adjusted one side of his lavender suspenders.

“Ain’t no girl in that thar Cove purty like you,” he declared.

“My pa ’lowed I was pretty,” she answered without embarrassment.

“Yo’ pa dead?”

“Three year come this September.”

“Who makes yo’ livin’ fer yer if yo’ pa’s dead?”

“My mother hires out for washing and I work out. Guess I’ll take the path fer a piece.”

The path mounted several feet to an embankment left by the road-builders in grading the course of the road. The roadbed itself, hidden from the sunlight by the dense foliage of the great chestnut-oaks cloaking the mountain-side, was rarely free of mud so that those on foot deserted it here for the path. She started at once and he followed below, losing sight of her at times as she was hidden by the laurel, but falling in with her again where the path rejoined the road. All this while he continued his conversation as he was able.

“A gal like you can’t do no good workin’ out,” he suggested.

“Ma thinks I do tol’able well.”

“Workin’ out ain’t like havin’ a home fer yo’ own.”

“I like workin’ down to Mr. Howe’s. He’s good to me and so’s Miss Wilmer.”

“It ain’t like havin’ a home fer yo’ own.”

“They have books to read down there.”

“Where do the Howes live, anyhow?”

“The bark-covered house with the porch runnin’ round it--this side of Valley Elk,” she informed him.

“I pass thet way sometimes. Mebbe I’ll be seein’ you off an’ on.”

“Mebbe,” she answered with a little pucker of her mouth.

“Where’s yo’ house?”

“Up there.”

She pointed to a primitive, clapboarded structure they were approaching on the mountain-side.

He turned his eyes back to her.

“Oughta make a trip over in the Cove and see mine,” he ventured.

“Seein’ yours wouldn’t do me no good,” she returned, a bit more tartly now that she was in sight of home. “Good-evenin’.”

With that she began to mount the path. It followed a circuitous course through the giant rhododendrons growing on the hillside beneath the house. In June when they were in flower she looked down on an undulating sea of pink.

She entered the house and closed the door sharply behind her.

Bud Childers remained in the road until he heard that decisive slam and then turned and resumed his interrupted journey. It was not often that he went out of his way for valley folk; the round-faced folk with laughter in their eyes. It was more often they who changed their course for him. When he met them, it was he who kept the middle of the road. The life that made him lean had also given him muscles with the resiliency of highly tempered steel. The valley boys with whom he attended the Mission school for two terms had discovered this.

At eleven, having learned to write his name Bud had gone back to the Cove; back to the house his grandfather had built as soon after the Civil War as the Confederate deserter hunters ceased to hunt him through the mountains. And here, joining his father, Bud had his own patch of corn, a newly cleared strip of mountain-side punctuated with half-burnt stumps and decaying chestnut-oaks, showing still the cut, a ring chopped around their bases, that had wounded them mortally and left them there to die. At fifteen he was logging, following the logs down into the valley to the sawmill and then making his way back to the Cove. A living was all he claimed of life, and this he could make without wandering far afield.

His father’s death left him alone with his grandmother--his mother had given her life to bring him into the world--and this arrangement proved satisfactory enough. The old lady was not good for much except to cook, but she did that until two days before her death. When not at the stove she rocked back and forth mechanically in the doorway, a birch brush stained with snuff protruding from her withered lips. When she walked, her legs followed her uncertainly, barely moving the folds of the dirty gray calico which clothed her. Then one day she flickered out, leaving Bud alone.

At first he did not mind being alone, for his farm and his cooking kept him busy enough during the day. But the evenings were long. Even the old grandmother crouching by the fireplace had made them shorter than they were now. She scolded and fussed a good deal, but she was always some one.

Bud, once or twice, had considered marrying. To get him a wife was the normal and natural thing to do. No house, without one, could be said to be complete. He was quite unemotional over the idea, and in the few tentative proposals he had made among the daughters of his mountain neighbors he was met by an equally unemotional refusal. Unemotionally they had already made other plans, and though Bud was well enough they saw no reason for shifting their affections. Besides, to do this would in all probability involve considerable shooting on the part of certain young men who would be more or less directly concerned in any such alteration of arrangements.

Bud accepted these decisions philosophically. There was no harm in asking even if in the end he did not receive. If the evenings seemed a little lonelier than before after these half-hearted ventures, it was not because any of these young ladies had left their mark, but merely because he had now been longer alone.

Bud moved slowly back over the road he had just followed with Roxie Kester and at the ford where he had met her, stopped where he had stopped before. The setting had not changed except that the slowly sinking sun was now casting a mellow glow over tree and stream and road instead of the more brilliant sheen of the direct rays.

There at the bend stood the same thick cluster of rhododendrons through which she had pushed. For a moment he waited as though he expected them to open again and reveal once more that slight figure. He found his blood running faster because of this. Then, half ashamed of his mood, he started on with a muttered curse at his foolishness.