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 eyes grew fierce and sullen, both at the insult to a Tolliver and at the thought of a certain moonshine still up a ravine not far away and the indirect danger to it in any finicky growth of law and order. Still he had a keen sense of justice, and he knew that Dave had not told all the story, and from him Dave, to his wonder, got scant comfort—for another reason as well: with a deal pending for the sale of his lands, the shrewd old man would not risk giving offence to Hale—not until that matter was settled, anyway. And so June was safer from interference just then than she knew. But Dave carried the story far and wide, and it spread as a story can only in the hills. So that the two people most talked about among the Tollivers and, through Loretta, among the Falins as well, were June and Hale, and at the Gap similar talk would come. Already Hale's name was on every tongue in the town, and there, because of his recent purchases of town-site land, he was already, aside from his personal influence, a man of mysterious power.
Meanwhile, the prescient shadow of the coming “boom” had stolen over the hills and the work of the Guard had grown rapidly.
Every Saturday there had been local lawlessness to deal with. The spirit of personal liberty that characterized the spot was traditional. Here for half a century the people of Wise County and of Lee, whose border was but a few miles down the river, came to get their wool carded, their grist ground and farming utensils mended. Here, too, elections were held viva voce under the beeches, at the foot of the wooded spur now known as Imboden Hill. Here were the muster-days of wartime. Here on Saturdays the people had come together during half a century for sport and horse-trading and to talk politics. Here they drank apple-jack and hard cider, chaffed and quarrelled and fought fist and skull. Here the bullies of the two counties would come together to decide who was the “best man.” Here was naturally engendered the hostility between the hill-dwellers of Wise and the valley people of Lee, and here was fought a famous battle between a famous bully of Wise and a famous bully of Lee. On election days the country people would bring in gingercakes made of cane-molasses, bread homemade of Burr flour and moonshine and apple-jack which the candidates would buy and distribute through the crowd. And always during the afternoon there were men who would try to prove themselves the best Democrats in the State of Virginia by resort to tooth, fist and eye-gouging thumb. Then to these elections sometimes would come the Kentuckians from over the border to stir up the hostility between state and state, which makes that border bristle with enmity to this day. For half a century, then, all wild oats from elsewhere usually sprouted at the Gap. And thus the Gap had been the shrine of personal freedom—the place where any one individual had the right to do his pleasure with bottle and cards and politics and any other the right to prove him wrong if he were strong enough. Very soon, as the Hon. Sam Budd predicted, they had the hostility of Lee concentrated on them as siding with the county of Wise, and they would gain, in addition now, the general hostility of the Kentuckians, because as a crowd of meddlesome “furriners” they would be siding with the Virginians in the general enmity already alive. Moreover, now that the feud threatened activity over in Kentucky, more trouble must come, too, from that source, as the talk that came through the Gap, after young Dave Tolliver's arrest, plainly indicated.
Town ordinances had been passed. The wild centaurs were no longer allowed to ride up and down the plank walks of Saturdays with their reins in their teeth and firing a pistol into the ground with either hand; they could punctuate the hotel sign no more; they could not ride at a fast gallop through the streets of the town, and, Lost Spirit of American Liberty!—they could not even yell. But the lawlessness of the town itself and its close environment was naturally the first objective point, and the first problem involved was moonshine and its faithful ally “the blind tiger.” The “tiger” is a little shanty with an ever-open mouth—a hole in the door like a post-office window. You place your money on the sill and, at the ring of the coin, a mysterious arm emerges from the hole, sweeps the money away and leaves a bottle of white whiskey. Thus you see nobody's face; the owner of the beast is safe, and so are you—which you might not be, if you saw and told. In every little hollow about the Gap a tiger had his lair, and these were all bearded at once by a petition to the county judge for high license saloons, which was granted. This measure drove the tigers out of business, and concentrated moonshine in the heart of the town, where its devotees were under easy guard. One “tiger” only indeed was left, run by a round-shouldered crouching creature whom Bob Berkley—now at Hale's solicitation a policeman and known as the Infant of the Guard—dubbed Caliban. His shanty stood midway in the Gap, high from the road, set against a dark clump of pines and roared at by the river beneath. Everybody knew he sold whiskey, but he was too shrewd to be caught, until, late one afternoon, two days after young Dave's arrest, Hale coming through the Gap into town glimpsed a skulking figure with a hand-barrel as it slipped from the dark pines into Caliban's cabin. He pulled in his horse, dismounted and deliberated. If he went on down the road now, they would see him and suspect. Moreover, the patrons of the tiger would not appear until after dark, and he wanted a prisoner or two. So Hale led his horse up into the bushes and came back to a covert by the roadside to watch and wait. As he sat there, a merry whistle sounded down the road, and Hale smiled. Soon the Infant of the Guard came along, his hands in his pockets, his cap on the back of his head, his pistol bumping his hip in manly fashion and making the ravines echo with his pursed lips. He stopped in front of Hale, looked toward the river, drew his revolver and aimed it at a floating piece of wood. The revolver cracked, the piece of wood skidded on the surface of the water and there was no splash.
“That was a pretty good shot,” said Hale in a low voice. The boy whirled and saw him.
“Well-what are you—?”
“Easy—easy!” cautioned Hale. “Listen! I've just seen a moonshiner go into Caliban's cabin.” The boy's eager eyes sparkled.
“Let's go after him.”
“No, you go on back. If you don't, they'll be suspicious. Get another man”—Hale almost laughed at the disappointment in the lad's face at his first words, and the joy that came after it—“and climb high above the shanty and come back here to me. Then after dark we'll dash in and cinch Caliban and his customers.”
“Yes, sir,” said the lad. “Shall I whistle going back?” Hale nodded approval.
“Just the same.” And off Bob went, whistling like a calliope and not even turning his head to look at the cabin. In half an hour Hale thought he heard something crashing through the bushes high on the mountain side, and, a little while afterward, the boy crawled through the bushes to him alone. His cap was gone, there was a bloody scratch across his face and he was streaming with perspiration.
“You'll have to excuse me, sir,” he panted, “I didn't see anybody but one of my brothers, and if I had told him, he wouldn't have let ME come. And I hurried back for fear—for fear something would happen.”
“Well, suppose I don't let you go.”
“Excuse me, sir, but I don't see how you can very well help. You aren't my brother and you can't go alone.”
“I was,” said Hale.
“Yes, sir, but not now.”
Hale was worried, but there was nothing else to be done.
“All right. I'll let you go if you stop saying 'sir' to me. It makes me feel so old.”
“Certainly, sir,” said the lad quite unconsciously, and when Hale smothered a laugh, he looked around to see what had amused him. Darkness fell quickly, and in the gathering gloom they saw two more figures skulk into the cabin.
“We'll go now—for we want the fellow who's selling the moonshine.”
Again Hale was beset with doubts about the boy and his own responsibility to the boy's brothers. The lad's eyes were shining, but his face was more eager than excited and his hand was as steady as Hale's own.
“You slip around and station yourself behind that pine-tree just behind the cabin”—the boy looked crestfallen—“and if anybody tries to get out of the back door—you halt him.”
“Is there a back door?”
“I don't know,” Hale said rather shortly. “You obey orders. I'm not your brother, but I'm your captain.”
“I beg your pardon, sir. Shall I go now?”
“Yes, you'll hear me at the front door. They won't make any resistance.” The lad stepped away with nimble caution high above the cabin, and he even took his shoes off before he slid lightly down to his place behind the pine. There was no back door, only a window, and his disappointment was bitter. Still, when he heard Hale at the front door, he meant to make a break for that window, and he waited in the still gloom. He could hear the rough talk and laughter within and now and then the clink of a tin cup. By and by there was a faint noise in front of the cabin, and he steadied his nerves and his beating heart. Then he heard the door pushed violently in and Hale's cry:
“Surrender!”
Hale stood on the threshold with his pistol outstretched in his right hand. The door had struck something soft and he said sharply again:
“Come out from behind that door—hands up!”
At the same moment, the back window flew open with a bang and Bob's pistol covered the edge of the opened door. “Caliban” had rolled from his box like a stupid animal. Two of his patrons sat dazed and staring from Hale to the boy's face at the window. A mountaineer stood in one corner with twitching fingers and shifting eyes like a caged wild thing and forth issued from behind the door, quivering with anger—young Dave Tolliver. Hale stared at him amazed, and when Dave saw Hale, such a wave of fury surged over his face that Bob thought it best to attract his attention again; which he did by gently motioning at him with the barrel of his pistol.
“Hold on, there,” he said quietly, and young Dave stood still.
“Climb through that window, Bob, and collect the batteries,” said Hale.
“Sure, sir,” said the lad, and with his pistol still prominently in the foreground he threw his left leg over the sill and as he climbed in he quoted with a grunt: “Always go in force to make an arrest.” Grim and serious as it was, with June's cousin glowering at him, Hale could not help smiling.
“You didn't go home, after all,” said Hale to young Dave, who clenched his hands and his lips but answered nothing; “or, if you did, you got back pretty quick.” And still Dave was silent.
“Get 'em all, Bob?” In answer the boy went the rounds—feeling the pocket of each man's right hip and his left breast.
“Yes, sir.”
“Unload 'em!”
The lad “broke” each of the four pistols, picked up a piece of twine and strung them together through each trigger-guard.
“Close that window and stand here at the door.”
With the boy at the door, Hale rolled the hand-barrel to the threshold and the white liquor gurgled joyously on the steps.
“All right, come along,” he said to the captives, and at last young Dave spoke:
“Whut you takin' me fer?”
Hale pointed to the empty hand-barrel and Dave's answer was a look of scorn.
“I nuvver brought that hyeh.”
“You were drinking illegal liquor in a blind tiger, and if you didn't bring it you can prove that later. Anyhow, we'll want you as a witness,” and Hale looked at the other mountaineer, who had turned his eyes quickly to Dave. Caliban led the way with young Dave, and Hale walked side by side with them while Bob was escort for the other two. The road ran along a high bank, and as Bob was adjusting the jangling weapons on his left arm, the strange mountaineer darted behind him and leaped headlong into the tops of thick rhododendron. Before Hale knew what had happened the lad's pistol flashed.
“Stop, boy!” he cried, horrified. “Don't shoot!” and he had to catch the lad to keep him from leaping after the runaway. The shot had missed; they heard the runaway splash into the river and go stumbling across it and then there was silence. Young Dave laughed:
“Uncle Judd'll be over hyeh to-morrow to see about this.” Hale said nothing and they went on. At the door of the calaboose Dave balked and had to be pushed in by main force. They left him weeping and cursing with rage.
“Go to bed, Bob,” said Hale.
“Yes, sir,” said Bob; “just as soon as I get my lessons.”
Hale did not go to the boarding-house that night—he feared to face June. Instead he went to the hotel to scraps of a late supper and then to bed. He had hardly touched the pillow, it seemed, when somebody shook him by the shoulder. It was Macfarlan, and daylight was streaming through the window.
“A gang of those Falins are here,” Macfarlan said, “and they're after young Dave Tolliver—about a dozen of 'em. Young Buck is with them, and the sheriff. They say he shot a man over the mountains yesterday.”
Hale sprang for his clothes—here was a quandary.
“If we turn him over to them—they'll kill him.” Macfarlan nodded.
“Of course, and if we leave him in that weak old calaboose, they'll get more help and take him out to-night.”
“Then we'll take him to the county jail.”
“They'll take him away from us.”
“No, they won't. You go out and get as many shotguns as you can find and load them with buckshot.”
Macfarlan nodded approvingly and disappeared. Hale plunged his face in a basin of cold water, soaked his hair and, as he was mopping his face with a towel, there was a ponderous tread on the porch, the door opened without the formality of a knock, and Devil Judd Tolliver, with his hat on and belted with two huge pistols, stepped stooping within. His eyes, red with anger and loss of sleep, were glaring, and his heavy moustache and beard showed the twitching of his mouth.
“Whar's Dave?” he said shortly.
“In the calaboose.”
“Did you put him in?”
“Yes,” said Hale calmly.
“Well, by God,” the old man said with repressed fury, “you can't git him out too soon if you want to save trouble.”
“Look here, Judd,” said Hale seriously. “You are one of the last men in the world I want to have trouble with for many reasons; but I'm an officer over here and I'm no more afraid of you”—Hale paused to let that fact sink in and it did—“than you are of me. Dave's been selling liquor.”
“He hain't,” interrupted the old mountaineer. “He didn't bring that liquor over hyeh. I know who done it.”
“All right,” said Hale; “I'll take your word for it and I'll let him out, if you say so, but—-”
“Right now,” thundered old Judd.
“Do you know that young Buck Falin and a dozen of his gang are over here after him?” The old man looked stunned.
“Whut—now?”
“They're over there in the woods across the river NOW and they want me to give him up to them. They say they have the sheriff with them and they want him for shooting a man on Leatherwood Creek, day before yesterday.”
“It's all a lie,” burst out old Judd. “They want to kill him.”
“Of course—and I was going to take him up to the county jail right away for safe-keeping.”
“D'ye mean to say you'd throw that boy into jail and then fight them Falins to pertect him?” the old man asked slowly and incredulously. Hale pointed to a two-store building through his window.
“If you get in the back part of that store at a window, you can see whether I will or not. I can summon you to help, and if a fight comes up you can do your share from the window.”
The old man's eyes lighted up like a leaping flame.
“Will you let Dave out and give him a Winchester and help us fight 'em?” he said eagerly. “We three can whip 'em all.”
“No,” said Hale shortly. “I'd try to keep both sides from fighting, and I'd arrest Dave or you as quickly as I would a Falin.”
The average mountaineer has little conception of duty in the abstract, but old Judd belonged to the better class—and there are many of them—that does. He looked into Hale's eyes long and steadily.
“All right.”
Macfarlan came in hurriedly and stopped short—seeing the hatted, bearded giant.
“This is Mr. Tolliver—an uncle of Dave's—Judd Tolliver,” said Hale. “Go ahead.”
“I've got everything fixed—but I couldn't get but five of the fellows—two of the Berkley boys. They wouldn't let me tell Bob.”
“All right. Can I summon Mr. Tolliver here?”
“Yes,” said Macfarlan doubtfully, “but you know—-”
“He won't be seen,” interrupted Hale, understandingly. “He'll be at a window in the back of that store and he won't take part unless a fight begins, and if it does, we'll need him.”
An hour later Devil Judd Tolliver was in the store Hale pointed out and peering cautiously around the edge of an open window at the wooden gate of the ramshackle calaboose. Several Falins were there—led by young Buck, whom Hale recognized as the red-headed youth at the head of the tearing horsemen who had swept by him that late afternoon when he was coming back from his first trip to Lonesome Cove. The old man gritted his teeth as he looked and he put one of his huge pistols on a table within easy reach and kept the other clenched in his right fist. From down the street came five horsemen, led by John Hale. Every man carried a double-barrelled shotgun, and the old man smiled and his respect for Hale rose higher, high as it already was, for nobody—mountaineer or not—has love for a hostile shotgun. The Falins, armed only with pistols, drew near.
“Keep back!” he heard Hale say calmly, and they stopped—young Buck alone going on.
“We want that feller,” said young Buck.
“Well, you don't get him,” said Hale quietly. “He's our prisoner. Keep back!” he repeated, motioning with the barrel of his shotgun—and young Buck moved backward to his own men, The old man saw Hale and another man—the sergeant—go inside the heavy gate of the stockade. He saw a boy in a cap, with a pistol in one hand and a strapped set of books in the other, come running up to the men with the shotguns and he heard one of them say angrily:
“I told you not to come.”
“I know you did,” said the boy imperturbably.
“You go on to school,” said another of the men, but the boy with the cap shook his head and dropped his books to the ground. The big gate opened just then and out came Hale and the sergeant, and between them young Dave—his eyes blinking in the sunlight.
“Damn ye,” he heard Dave say to Hale. “I'll get even with you fer this some day”—and then the prisoner's eyes caught the horses and shotguns and turned to the group of Falins and he shrank back utterly dazed. There was a movement among the Falins and Devil Judd caught up his other pistol and with a grim smile got ready. Young Buck had turned to his crowd:
“Men,” he said, “you know I never back down”—Devil Judd knew that, too, and he was amazed by the words that followed-“an' if you say so, we'll have him or die; but we ain't in our own state now. They've got the law and the shotguns on us, an' I reckon we'd better go slow.”
The rest seemed quite willing to go slow, and, as they put their pistols up, Devil Judd laughed in his beard. Hale put young Dave on a horse and the little shotgun cavalcade quietly moved away toward the county-seat.
The crestfallen Falins dispersed the other way after they had taken a parting shot at the Hon. Samuel Budd, who, too, had a pistol in his hand. Young Buck looked long at him—and then he laughed:
“You, too, Sam Budd,” he said. “We folks'll rickollect this on election day.” The Hon. Sam deigned no answer.
And up in the store Devil Judd lighted his pipe and sat down to think out the strange code of ethics that governed that police-guard. Hale had told him to wait there, and it was almost noon before the boy with the cap came to tell him that the Falins had all left town. The old man looked at him kindly.
“Air you the little feller whut fit fer June?”
“Not yet,” said Bob; “but it's coming.”
“Well, you'll whoop him.”
“I'll do my best.”
“Whar is she?”
“She's waiting for you over at the boarding-house.”
“Does she know about this trouble?”
“Not a thing; she thinks you've come to take her home.” The old man made no answer, and Bob led him back toward Hale's office. June was waiting at the gate, and the boy, lifting his cap, passed on. June's eyes were dark with anxiety.
“You come to take me home, dad?”
“I been thinkin' 'bout it,” he said, with a doubtful shake of his head.
June took him upstairs to her room and pointed out the old water-wheel through the window and her new clothes (she had put on her old homespun again when she heard he was in town), and the old man shook his head.
“I'm afeerd 'bout all these fixin's—you won't never be satisfied agin in Lonesome Cove.”
“Why, dad,” she said reprovingly. “Jack says I can go over whenever I please, as soon as the weather gits warmer and the roads gits good.”
“I don't know,” said the old man, still shaking his head.
All through dinner she was worried. Devil Judd hardly ate anything, so embarrassed was he by the presence of so many “furriners” and by the white cloth and table-ware, and so fearful was he that he would be guilty of some breach of manners. Resolutely he refused butter, and at the third urging by Mrs. Crane he said firmly, but with a shrewd twinkle in his eye:
“No, thank ye. I never eats butter in town. I've kept store myself,” and he was no little pleased with the laugh that went around the table. The fact was he was generally pleased with June's environment and, after dinner, he stopped teasing June.
“No, honey, I ain't goin' to take you away. I want ye to stay right where ye air. Be a good girl now and do whatever Jack Hale tells ye and tell that boy with all that hair to come over and see me.” June grew almost tearful with gratitude, for never had he called her “honey” before that she could remember, and never had he talked so much to her, nor with so much kindness.
“Air ye comin' over soon?”
“Mighty soon, dad.”
“Well, take keer o' yourself.”
“I will, dad,” she said, and tenderly she watched his great figure slouch out of sight.
An hour after dark, as old Judd sat on the porch of the cabin in Lonesome Cove, young Dave Tolliver rode up to the gate on a strange horse. He was in a surly mood.
“He lemme go at the head of the valley and give me this hoss to git here,” the boy grudgingly explained. “I'm goin' over to git mine termorrer.”
“Seems like you'd better keep away from that Gap,” said the old man dryly, and Dave reddened angrily.
“Yes, and fust thing you know he'll be over hyeh atter YOU.” The old man turned on him sternly.
“Jack Hale knows that liquer was mine. He knows I've got a still over hyeh as well as you do—an' he's never axed a question nor peeped an eye. I reckon he would come if he thought he oughter—but I'm on this side of the state-line. If I was on his side, mebbe I'd stop.”
Young Dave stared, for things were surely coming to a pretty pass in Lonesome Cove.
“An' I reckon,” the old man went on, “hit 'ud be better grace in you to stop sayin' things agin' him; fer if it hadn't been fer him, you'd be laid out by them Falins by this time.”
It was true, and Dave, silenced, was forced into another channel.
“I wonder,” he said presently, “how them Falins always know when I go over thar.”
“I've been studyin' about that myself,” said Devil Judd. Inside, the old step-mother had heard Dave's query.
“I seed the Red Fox this afternoon,” she quavered at the door.
“Whut was he doin' over hyeh?” asked Dave.
“Nothin',” she said, “jus' a-sneakin' aroun' the way he's al'ays a-doin'. Seemed like he was mighty pertickuler to find out when you was comin' back.”
Both men started slightly.
“We're all Tollivers now all right,” said the Hon. Samuel Buddthat night while he sat with Hale on the porch overlooking themill-pond—and then he groaned a little.
“Them Falins have got kinsfolks to burn on the Virginia side and they'd fight me tooth and toenail for this a hundred years hence!”
He puffed his pipe, but Hale said nothing.
“Yes, sir,” he added cheerily, “we're in for a hell of a merry time NOW. The mountaineer hates as long as he remembers and—he never forgets.”
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 harbinger of the old Mother's awakening, and June breathed in from it the very breath of spring. Near by were turkey peas, which she had hunted and eaten many times.
“You can't put that arbutus in a garden,” said Hale, “it's as wild as a hawk.”
Presently he had the little girl listen to a pewee twittering in a thorn-bush and the lusty call of a robin from an apple-tree. A bluebird flew over-head with a merry chirp—its wistful note of autumn long since forgotten. These were the first birds and flowers, he said, and June, knowing them only by sight, must know the name of each and the reason for that name. So that Hale found himself walking the woods with an interrogation point, and that he might not be confounded he had, later, to dip up much forgotten lore. For every walk became a lesson in botany for June, such a passion did she betray at once for flowers, and he rarely had to tell her the same thing twice, since her memory was like a vise—for everything, as he learned in time.
Her eyes were quicker than his, too, and now she pointed to a snowy blossom with a deeply lobed leaf.
“Whut's that?”
“Bloodroot,” said Hale, and he scratched the stem and forth issued scarlet drops. “The Indians used to put it on their faces and tomahawks”—she knew that word and nodded—“and I used to make red ink of it when I was a little boy.”
“No!” said June. With the next look she found a tiny bunch of fuzzy hepaticas.
“Liver-leaf.”
“Whut's liver?”
Hale, looking at her glowing face and eyes and her perfect little body, imagined that she would never know unless told that she had one, and so he waved one hand vaguely at his chest:
“It's an organ—and that herb is supposed to be good for it.”
“Organ? Whut's that?”
“Oh, something inside of you.”
June made the same gesture that Hale had.
“Me?”
“Yes,” and then helplessly, “but not there exactly.”
June's eyes had caught something else now and she ran for it:
“Oh! Oh!” It was a bunch of delicate anemones of intermediate shades between white and red-yellow, pink and purple-blue.
“Those are anemones.”
“A-nem-o-nes,” repeated June.
“Wind-flowers—because the wind is supposed to open them.” And, almost unconsciously, Hale lapsed into a quotation:
“'And where a tear has dropped, a wind-flower blows.'”
“Whut's that?” said June quickly.
“That's poetry.”
“Whut's po-e-try?” Hale threw up both hands.
“I don't know, but I'll read you some—some day.”
By that time she was gurgling with delight over a bunch of spring beauties that came up, root, stalk and all, when she reached for them.
“Well, ain't they purty?” While they lay in her hand and she looked, the rose-veined petals began to close, the leaves to droop and the stem got limp.
“Ah-h!” crooned June. “I won't pull up no more o' THEM.”
'“These little dream-flowers found in the spring.' More poetry, June.”
A little later he heard her repeating that line to herself. It was an easy step to poetry from flowers, and evidently June was groping for it.
A few days later the service-berry swung out white stars on the low hill-sides, but Hale could tell her nothing that she did not know about the “sarvice-berry.” Soon, the dogwood swept in snowy gusts along the mountains, and from a bank of it one morning a red-bird flamed and sang: “What cheer! What cheer! What cheer!” And like its scarlet coat the red-bud had burst into bloom. June knew the red-bud, but she had never heard it called the Judas tree.
“You see, the red-bud was supposed to be poisonous. It shakes in the wind and says to the bees, 'Come on, little fellows—here's your nice fresh honey, and when they come, it betrays and poisons them.”
“Well, what do you think o' that!” said June indignantly, and Hale had to hedge a bit.
“Well, I don't know whether it REALLY does, but that's what they SAY.” A little farther on the white stars of the trillium gleamed at them from the border of the woods and near by June stooped over some lovely sky-blue blossoms with yellow eyes.
“Forget-me-nots,” said Hale. June stooped to gather them with a radiant face.
“Oh,” she said, “is that what you call 'em?”
“They aren't the real ones—they're false forget-me-nots.”
“Then I don't want 'em,” said June. But they were beautiful and fragrant and she added gently:
“'Tain't their fault. I'm agoin' to call 'em jus' forget-me-nots, an' I'm givin' 'em to you,” she said—“so that you won't.”
“Thank you,” said Hale gravely. “I won't.”
They found larkspur, too—
“'Blue as the heaven it gazes at,'” quoted Hale.
“Whut's 'gazes'?”
“Looks.” June looked up at the sky and down at the flower.
“Tain't,” she said, “hit's bluer.”
When they discovered something Hale did not know he would say that it was one of those—
“'Wan flowers without a name.'”
“My!” said June at last, “seems like them wan flowers is a mighty big fambly.”
“They are,” laughed Hale, “for a bachelor like me.”
“Huh!” said June.
Later, they ran upon yellow adder's tongues in a hollow, each blossom guarded by a pair of ear-like leaves, Dutchman's breeches and wild bleeding hearts—a name that appealed greatly to the fancy of the romantic little lady, and thus together they followed the footsteps of that spring. And while she studied the flowers Hale was studying the loveliest flower of them all—little June. About ferns, plants and trees as well, he told her all he knew, and there seemed nothing in the skies, the green world of the leaves or the under world at her feet to which she was not magically responsive. Indeed, Hale had never seen a man, woman or child so eager to learn, and one day, when she had apparently reached the limit of inquiry, she grew very thoughtful and he watched her in silence a long while.
“What's the matter, June?” he asked finally.
“I'm just wonderin' why I'm always axin' why,” said little June.
She was learning in school, too, and she was happier there now, for there had been no more open teasing of the new pupil. Bob's championship saved her from that, and, thereafter, school changed straightway for June. Before that day she had kept apart from her school-fellows at recess-times as well as in the school-room. Two or three of the girls had made friendly advances to her, but she had shyly repelled them—why she hardly knew—and it was her lonely custom at recess-times to build a play-house at the foot of a great beech with moss, broken bits of bottles and stones. Once she found it torn to pieces and from the look on the face of the tall mountain boy, Cal Heaton, who had grinned at her when she went up for her first lesson, and who was now Bob's arch-enemy, she knew that he was the guilty one. Again a day or two later it was destroyed, and when she came down from the woods almost in tears, Bob happened to meet her in the road and made her tell the trouble she was in. Straightway he charged the trespasser with the deed and was lied to for his pains. So after school that day he slipped up on the hill with the little girl and helped her rebuild again.
“Now I'll lay for him,” said Bob, “and catch him at it.”
“All right,” said June, and she looked both her worry and her gratitude so that Bob understood both; and he answered both with a nonchalant wave of one hand.
“Never you mind—and don't you tell Mr. Hale,” and June in dumb acquiescence crossed heart and body. But the mountain boy was wary, and for two or three days the play-house was undisturbed and so Bob himself laid a trap. He mounted his horse immediately after school, rode past the mountain lad, who was on his way home, crossed the river, made a wide detour at a gallop and, hitching his horse in the woods, came to the play-house from the other side of the hill. And half an hour later, when the pale little teacher came out of the school-house, he heard grunts and blows and scuffling up in the woods, and when he ran toward the sounds, the bodies of two of his pupils rolled into sight clenched fiercely, with torn clothes and bleeding faces—Bob on top with the mountain boy's thumb in his mouth and his own fingers gripped about his antagonist's throat. Neither paid any attention to the school-master, who pulled at Bob's coat unavailingly and with horror at his ferocity. Bob turned his head, shook it as well as the thumb in his mouth would let him, and went on gripping the throat under him and pushing the head that belonged to it into the ground. The mountain boy's tongue showed and his eyes bulged.
“'Nough!” he yelled. Bob rose then and told his story and the school-master from New England gave them a short lecture on gentleness and Christian charity and fixed on each the awful penalty of “staying in” after school for an hour every day for a week. Bob grinned:
“All right, professor—it was worth it,” he said, but the mountain lad shuffled silently away.
An hour later Hale saw the boy with a swollen lip, one eye black and the other as merry as ever—but after that there was no more trouble for June. Bob had made his promise good and gradually she came into the games with her fellows there-after, while Bob stood or sat aside, encouraging but taking no part—for was he not a member of the Police Force? Indeed he was already known far and wide as the Infant of the Guard, and always he carried a whistle and usually, outside the school-house, a pistol bumped his hip, while a Winchester stood in one corner of his room and a billy dangled by his mantel-piece.
The games were new to June, and often Hale would stroll up to the school-house to watch them—Prisoner's Base, Skipping the Rope, Antny Over, Cracking the Whip and Lifting the Gate; and it pleased him to see how lithe and active his little protege was and more than a match in strength even for the boys who were near her size. June had to take the penalty of her greenness, too, when she was “introduced to the King and Queen” and bumped the ground between the make-believe sovereigns, or got a cup of water in her face when she was trying to see stars through a pipe. And the boys pinned her dress to the bench through a crack and once she walked into school with a placard on her back which read:
“June-Bug.” But she was so good-natured that she fast became a favourite. Indeed it was noticeable to Hale as well as Bob that Cal Heaton, the mountain boy, seemed always to get next to June in the Tugs of War, and one morning June found an apple on her desk. She swept the room with a glance and met Cal's guilty flush, and though she ate the apple, she gave him no thanks—in word, look or manner. It was curious to Hale, moreover, to observe how June's instinct deftly led her to avoid the mistakes in dress that characterized the gropings of other girls who, like her, were in a stage of transition. They wore gaudy combs and green skirts with red waists, their clothes bunched at the hips, and to their shoes and hands they paid no attention at all. None of these things for June—and Hale did not know that the little girl had leaped her fellows with one bound, had taken Miss Anne Saunders as her model and was climbing upon the pedestal where that lady justly stood. The two had not become friends as Hale hoped. June was always silent and reserved when the older girl was around, but there was never a move of the latter's hand or foot or lip or eye that the new pupil failed to see. Miss Anne rallied Hale no little about her, but he laughed good-naturedly, and asked why SHE could not make friends with June.
“She's jealous,” said Miss Saunders, and Hale ridiculed the idea, for not one sign since she came to the Gap had she shown him. It was the jealousy of a child she had once betrayed and that she had outgrown, he thought; but he never knew how June stood behind the curtains of her window, with a hungry suffering in her face and eyes, to watch Hale and Miss Anne ride by and he never guessed that concealment was but a sign of the dawn of womanhood that was breaking within her. And she gave no hint of that breaking dawn until one day early in May, when she heard a woodthrush for the first time with Hale: for it was the bird she loved best, and always its silver fluting would stop her in her tracks and send her into dreamland. Hale had just broken a crimson flower from its stem and held it out to her.
“Here's another of the 'wan ones,' June. Do you know what that is?”
“Hit's”—she paused for correction with her lips drawn severely in for precision—“IT'S a mountain poppy. Pap says it kills goslings”—her eyes danced, for she was in a merry mood that day, and she put both hands behind her—“if you air any kin to a goose, you better drap it.”
“That's a good one,” laughed Hale, “but it's so lovely I'll take the risk. I won't drop it.”
“Drop it,” caught June with a quick upward look, and then to fix the word in her memory she repeated—“drop it, drop it, DROP it!”
“Got it now, June?”
“Uh-huh.”
It was then that a woodthrush voiced the crowning joy of spring, and with slowly filling eyes she asked its name.
“That bird,” she said slowly and with a breaking voice, “sung just that-a-way the mornin' my sister died.”
She turned to him with a wondering smile.
“Somehow it don't make me so miserable, like it useter.” Her smile passed while she looked, she caught both hands to her heaving breast and a wild intensity burned suddenly in her eyes.
“Why, June!”
“'Tain't nothin',” she choked out, and she turned hurriedly ahead of him down the path. Startled, Hale had dropped the crimson flower to his feet. He saw it and he let it lie.
Meanwhile, rumours were brought in that the Falins were coming over from Kentucky to wipe out the Guard, and so straight were they sometimes that the Guard was kept perpetually on watch. Once while the members were at target practice, the shout arose:
“The Kentuckians are coming! The Kentuckians are coming!” And, at double quick, the Guard rushed back to find it a false alarm and to see men laughing at them in the street. The truth was that, while the Falins had a general hostility against the Guard, their particular enmity was concentrated on John Hale, as he discovered when June was to take her first trip home one Friday afternoon. Hale meant to carry her over, but the morning they were to leave, old Judd Tolliver came to the Gap himself. He did not want June to come home at that time, and he didn't think it was safe over there for Hale just then. Some of the Falins had been seen hanging around Lonesome Cove for the purpose, Judd believed, of getting a shot at the man who had kept young Dave from falling into their hands, and Hale saw that by that act he had, as Budd said, arrayed himself with the Tollivers in the feud. In other words, he was a Tolliver himself now, and as such the Falins meant to treat him. Hale rebelled against the restriction, for he had started some work in Lonesome Cove and was preparing a surprise over there for June, but old Judd said:
“Just wait a while,” and he said it so seriously that Hale for a while took his advice.
So June stayed on at the Gap—with little disappointment, apparently, that she could not visit home. And as spring passed and the summer came on, the little girl budded and opened like a rose. To the pretty school-teacher she was a source of endless interest and wonder, for while the little girl was reticent and aloof, Miss Saunders felt herself watched and studied in and out of school, and Hale often had to smile at June's unconscious imitation of her teacher in speech, manners and dress. And all the time her hero-worship of Hale went on, fed by the talk of the boardinghouse, her fellow pupils and of the town at large—and it fairly thrilled her to know that to the Falins he was now a Tolliver himself.
Sometimes Hale would get her a saddle, and then June would usurp Miss Anne's place on a horseback-ride up through the gap to see the first blooms of the purple rhododendron on Bee Rock, or up to Morris's farm on Powell's mountain, from which, with a glass, they could see the Lonesome Pine. And all the time she worked at her studies tirelessly—and when she was done with her lessons, she read the fairy books that Hale got for her—read them until “Paul and Virginia” fell into her hands, and then there were no more fairy stories for little June. Often, late at night, Hale, from the porch of his cottage, could see the light of her lamp sending its beam across the dark water of the mill-pond, and finally he got worried by the paleness of her face and sent her to the doctor. She went unwillingly, and when she came back she reported placidly that “organatically she was all right, the doctor said,” but Hale was glad that vacation would soon come. At the beginning of the last week of school he brought a little present for her from New York—a slender necklace of gold with a little reddish stone-pendant that was the shape of a cross. Hale pulled the trinket from his pocket as they were walking down the river-bank at sunset and the little girl quivered like an aspen-leaf in a sudden puff of wind.
“Hit's a fairy-stone,” she cried excitedly.
“Why, where on earth did you—”
“Why, sister Sally told me about 'em. She said folks found 'em somewhere over here in Virginny, an' all her life she was a-wishin' fer one an' she never could git it”—her eyes filled—“seems like ever'thing she wanted is a-comin' to me.”
“Do you know the story of it, too?” asked Hale.
June shook her head. “Sister Sally said it was a luck-piece. Nothin' could happen to ye when ye was carryin' it, but it was awful bad luck if you lost it.” Hale put it around her neck and fastened the clasp and June kept hold of the little cross with one hand.
“Well, you mustn't lose it,” he said.
“No—no—no,” she repeated breathlessly, and Hale told her the pretty story of the stone as they strolled back to supper. The little crosses were to be found only in a certain valley in Virginia, so perfect in shape that they seemed to have been chiselled by hand, and they were a great mystery to the men who knew all about rocks—the geologists.
“The ge-ol-o-gists,” repeated June.
These men said there was no crystallization—nothing like them, amended Hale—elsewhere in the world, and that just as crosses were of different shapes—Roman, Maltese and St. Andrew's—so, too, these crosses were found in all these different shapes. And the myth—the story—was that this little valley was once inhabited by fairies—June's eyes lighted, for it was a fairy story after all—and that when a strange messenger brought them the news of Christ's crucifixion, they wept, and their tears, as they fell to the ground, were turned into tiny crosses of stone. Even the Indians had some queer feeling about them, and for a long, long time people who found them had used them as charms to bring good luck and ward off harm.
“And that's for you,” he said, “because you've been such a good little girl and have studied so hard. School's most over now and I reckon you'll be right glad to get home again.”
June made no answer, but at the gate she looked suddenly up at him.
“Have you got one, too?” she asked, and she seemed much disturbed when Hale shook his head.
“Well, I'LL git—GET—you one—some day.”
“All right,” laughed Hale.
There was again something strange in her manner as she turned suddenly from him, and what it meant he was soon to learn. It was the last week of school and Hale had just come down from the woods behind the school-house at “little recess-time” in the afternoon. The children were playing games outside the gate, and Bob and Miss Anne and the little Professor were leaning on the fence watching them. The little man raised his hand to halt Hale on the plank sidewalk.
“I've been wanting to see you,” he said in his dreamy, abstracted way. “You prophesied, you know, that I should be proud of your little protege some day, and I am indeed. She is the most remarkable pupil I've yet seen here, and I have about come to the conclusion that there is no quicker native intelligence in our country than you shall find in the children of these mountaineers and—”
Miss Anne was gazing at the children with an expression that turned Hale's eyes that way, and the Professor checked his harangue. Something had happened. They had been playing “Ring Around the Rosy” and June had been caught. She stood scarlet and tense and the cry was:
“Who's your beau—who's your beau?”
And still she stood with tight lips—flushing.
“You got to tell—you got to tell!”
The mountain boy, Cal Heaton, was grinning with fatuous consciousness, and even Bob put his hands in his pockets and took on an uneasy smile.
“Who's your beau?” came the chorus again.
The lips opened almost in a whisper, but all could hear:
“Jack!”
“Jack who?” But June looked around and saw the four at the gate. Almost staggering, she broke from the crowd and, with one forearm across her scarlet face, rushed past them into the school-house. Miss Anne looked at Hale's amazed face and she did not smile. Bob turned respectfully away, ignoring it all, and the little Professor, whose life-purpose was psychology, murmured in his ignorance:
“Very remarkable—very remarkable!”
Through that afternoon June kept her hot face close to her books. Bob never so much as glanced her way—little gentleman that he was—but the one time she lifted her eyes, she met the mountain lad's bent in a stupor-like gaze upon her. In spite of her apparent studiousness, however, she missed her lesson and, automatically, the little Professor told her to stay in after school and recite to Miss Saunders. And so June and Miss Anne sat in the school-room alone—the teacher reading a book, and the pupil—her tears unshed—with her sullen face bent over her lesson. In a few moments the door opened and the little Professor thrust in his head. The girl had looked so hurt and tired when he spoke to her that some strange sympathy moved him, mystified though he was, to say gently now and with a smile that was rare with him:
“You might excuse June, I think, Miss Saunders, and let her recite some time to-morrow,” and gently he closed the door. Miss Anne rose:
“Very well, June,” she said quietly.
June rose, too, gathering up her books, and as she passed the teacher's platform she stopped and looked her full in the face. She said not a word, and the tragedy between the woman and the girl was played in silence, for the woman knew from the searching gaze of the girl and the black defiance in her eyes, as she stalked out of the room, that her own flush had betrayed her secret as plainly as the girl's words had told hers.
Through his office window, a few minutes later, Hale saw June pass swiftly into the house. In a few minutes she came swiftly out again and went back swiftly toward the school-house. He was so worried by the tense look in her face that he could work no more, and in a few minutes he threw his papers down and followed her. When he turned the corner, Bob was coming down the street with his cap on the back of his head and swinging his books by a strap, and the boy looked a little conscious when he saw Hale coming.
“Have you seen June?” Hale asked.
“No, sir,” said Bob, immensely relieved.
“Did she come up this way?”
“I don't know, but—” Bob turned and pointed to the green dome of a big beech.
“I think you'll find her at the foot of that tree,” he said. “That's where her play-house is and that's where she goes when she's—that's where she usually goes.”
“Oh, yes,” said Hale—“her play-house. Thank you.”
“Not at all, sir.”
Hale went on, turned from the path and climbed noiselessly. When he caught sight of the beech he stopped still. June stood against it like a wood-nymph just emerged from its sun-dappled trunk—stood stretched to her full height, her hands behind her, her hair tossed, her throat tense under the dangling little cross, her face uplifted. At her feet, the play-house was scattered to pieces. She seemed listening to the love-calls of a woodthrush that came faintly through the still woods, and then he saw that she heard nothing, saw nothing—that she was in a dream as deep as sleep. Hale's heart throbbed as he looked.
“June!” he called softly. She did not hear him, and when he called again, she turned her face—unstartled—and moving her posture not at all. Hale pointed to the scattered play-house.
“I done it!” she said fiercely—“I done it myself.” Her eyes burned steadily into his, even while she lifted her hands to her hair as though she were only vaguely conscious that it was all undone.
“YOU heerd me?” she cried, and before he could answer—“SHE heerd me,” and again, not waiting for a word from him, she cried still more fiercely:
“I don't keer! I don't keer WHO knows.”
Her hands were trembling, she was biting her quivering lip to keep back the starting tears, and Hale rushed toward her and took her in his arms.