The girl lifted the brows that were dark enough to require no penciling.

"That was the speech of a dreamer and a poet, Jack, and I thought you the most practical of men. What calls you into a land of poverty? I didn't know you ever ran on cold trails." She spoke with a delicately shaded irony, as though for the materialism of his own viewpoint, yet he knew that her interest in him would survive no failure of worldly attainment.

He did not repeat to her the story told him so long ago by Snowdon, the engineer, nor confide to her that ever since then his mind had harked back insistently to that topic and its possibilities. Now he only smiled with diplomatic suavity.

"Pearls," he said, "don't feed oysters into robustness. They make 'em most uncomfortable. The poverty-stricken illiterates in these hills, where I'm going, might starve for centuries over buried treasure--which some one else might find."

The girl nodded.

"In the stories," she answered, though she did not seem disturbed at the thought, "the stranger in the c.u.mberlands always arouses the ire of some whiskered moonshiner and falls in a creek bed pierced by a shot from the laurel."

Spurrier grinned.

"Or he falls in love with a barefoot Diana and teaches her to adore him in return."

Miss Harrison made a satirical little grimace. "At least teach her to eat with a fork, too, Jack," she begged him. "It will contribute to your fastidious comfort when you come back here to sell your pearls at Tiffany's or in Maiden Lane, or wherever it is that one wholesales his treasure-trove."

If John Spurrier had presented the picture of a man to the manner born as he sat with Martin Harrison's daughter at Martin Harrison's table, he fitted into the ensemble, too, a week later, as he crossed the hard-tramped dirt of the street from the railway station at Waterfall and entered the shabby tavern over the way--for the opportunity hound must be adaptable.

Here he would leave the end of the rails and travel by mule into a wilder country, for on the geological survey maps that he carried with him he had made tracings of underground currents which it had not been easy to procure.

These red-inkings were exact miniatures of a huge wall chart in the headquarters of American Oil and Gas, and to others than a trusted few they were not readily accessible. How Spurrier had achieved his purpose is a separate story and one over which he smiled inwardly, though it may have involved features that were not nicely ethical.

The tavern had been built in the days when Waterfall had attracted men answering the challenge of oil discovery. Now it had fallen wretchedly into decay, and over it brooded the depression of hopes and dreams long dead. Gladly Spurrier had left that town behind him.

Now, on a crisp afternoon, when the hill slopes were all garbed in the rugged splendor of the autumn's high color, he was tramping with a shotgun on his elbow and a borrowed dog at his heels. He had crossed Hemlock Mountain and struck into the hinterland at its back.

Until now he had thought of Hemlock Mountain as a single peak, but he had discovered it to be, instead, an unbroken range beginning at h.e.l.l's Door and ending at Praise the Lord, which zigzagged for a hundred miles and arched its bristling backbone two thousand feet into the sky. Along this entire length it offered only a few pa.s.ses over which a traveler could cross except on foot or horseback.

He had found entertainment overnight at a clay-c.h.i.n.ked log-cabin, where he had shared the single room with six human beings and two dogs. This census takes no account of a razor-back pig which was segregated in a box under the dining table, where its feeding with sc.r.a.ps simplified the problem of stock raising.

His present objective was the house of d.y.k.e Cappeze, the retired lawyer, whose name had drifted into talk at every town in which he had stopped along the railroad.

Cappeze was a "queer fellow," a recluse who had quit the villages and drawn far back into the hills themselves. He was one who could neither win nor stop fighting; who wanted to change the unalterable, and, having failed, sulked like Achilles in his tent. But whoever spoke of Cappeze credited him with being a positive and unique personality, and Spurrier meant to know him.

So he pretended to hunt quail--in a country where a covey rose and scattered beyond gorges over which neither dog nor man could follow.

One excuse served as well as another so long as he seemed sufficiently careless of the things which were really the core and center of his interest. And now Cappeze's place ought to be near by.

Off to one side of the ragged way stretched a brown patch of stubble, and suddenly the dog stopped at its edge, lifted his muzzle with distended nostrils delicately aquiver, and then went streaking away into the rattling weed stalks, eagerly quartering the bare field.

Spurrier followed, growling skeptically to himself: "He's made a stand on a rabbit. That dog's a liar and the truth is not in him!"

But the setter had come to a halt and held motionless, his statuesque pose with one foreleg uplifted as rigid as a piece of bronze save for the black muzzle sensitively alert and tremulous.

Then as the man walked in there came that startling little thunder of whirring wings with which quail break cover.

The ground seemed to burst with a tiny drumming eruption of up-surging feathery shapes, and Spurrier's gun spoke rapidly from both barrels.

Save for the two he had downed, the covey crossed a little rise beyond a thicket of blackberry brier where he marked them by the tips of a few gnarled trees, and the man nodded his head in satisfaction as the dog he had libeled neatly retrieved his dead birds and cast off again toward the hummock's ridge.

Spurrier, following more slowly, lost sight of his setter and, before he had caught up, he heard a whimpering of fright and pain. Puzzled, he hastened forward until from a slight elevation, which commanded a burial ground, choked with a tangle of brambles and twisted fox grapes, he found himself looking on a picture for which he was entirely unprepared.

His dog was crouching and crawling in supplication, while above him, with eyes that snapped lightning jets of fury, stood a slender girl with a hickory switch tightly clenched in a small but merciless hand.

As the gunner came into sight she stood her ground, a little startled but obdurately determined, and her expression appeared to transfer her anger from the animal she had whipped to the master, until he almost wondered whether she might not likewise use the hickory upon him.

He tried not to let the vivid and unexpected beauty of the apparition cloud his just indignation, and his voice was stern with offended dignity as he demanded:

"Would you mind telling me why you're mistreating my dog? He's the gentlest beast I ever knew."

The girl was straight and slim and as colorful as the landscape which the autumn had painted with crimson and violet, but in her eyes flamed a war fire.

"What's that a-bulgin' out yore coat pocket, thar?" she demanded breathlessly. "You an' yore dog air both murderers! Ye've been shootin' into my gang of pet pa'tridges."

"Pet--partridges?" He repeated the words in a mystified manner, as under the compulsion of her gaze he drew out the incriminating bodies of the lifeless victims.

The girl s.n.a.t.c.hed the dead birds from him and laid their soft b.r.e.a.s.t.s against her cheek, crooning sorrowfully over them.

"They trusted me ter hold 'em safe," she declared in a grief-stricken tone. "I'd kept all the gunners from harmin' 'em--an' now they've done been betrayed--an' murdered."

"I'm sorry," declared Spurrier humbly. "I didn't know they were pets.

They behaved very much like wild birds."

The dog rose from his cowering position and came over to shelter himself behind Spurrier, who just then heard the underbrush stir at his back and wheeled to find himself facing an elderly man with a ruggedly chiseled face and a mane of gray hair. It was a face that one could not see without feeling a spirit force behind it, and when the man spoke his sonorous voice, too, carried a quality of impressiveness.

"He didn't have no way of knowin', Glory," he said placatingly to the girl. "Bob Whites are mostly wild, you know." Then turning back to the man again he courteously explained: "She fed this gang through last winter when the snows were heavy. They'd come up to the door yard an'

peck 'round with the chickens. She's gifted with the knack of gentlin'

wild things." He paused, then added with a grim touch of irony. "It's a lesson that it would have profited me to learn--but I never could master it. You're a furriner hereabouts, ain't you?"

"My name is John Spurrier," said the stranger. "I was looking for d.y.k.e Cappeze."

"I'm d.y.k.e Cappeze," said the elderly man, "an' this is my daughter, Glory. Come inside. Yore welcome needs some mendin', I reckon."

CHAPTER VII

As John Spurrier followed his host between rhododendron thickets that rose above their heads, he found himself wondering what had become of the girl, but when they drew near to an old house whose stamp of orderly neatness proclaimed its contrast to the scattering hovels of widely separated neighbors, he caught a flash of blue gingham by the open door and realized that the Valkyrie had taken a short cut.

The dog, too, had arrived there ahead of its master and was fawning now on the girl, who leaned impulsively over to take the gentle-pointed muzzle between her palms.

"I'm sorry I whopped ye," she declared in a silver-voiced contrition that made the man think of thrush notes. "Hit wasn't _yore_ fault no-how. Hit was thet--thet stuck-up furriner. I _hates_ him!"

The setter waved its plumed tail in forgiveness and contentment, and the girl, discovering with an upward glance that she had been overheard, rose and stood for a moment defiantly facing the object of her denunciation, then, as embarra.s.sment flooded her cheeks with color, fled into the house.