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 courtship. 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-washin' 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."

"An yit, hyar latterly," suggested the mountaineer dubiously, "I've done commenced ter mis...o...b.. ef I've been right, atter all. Thet's what I wanted ter question ye about. My woman an' me, we sent Happy off ter thet new school in Leslie--an' since she's come home I mis...o...b..s ef her name fits her es well es. .h.i.t did afore she went over thar. She used ter sing like a bird all day--an' now she don't."

"I don't see how knowin' something can make a body unhappy," protested Boone.

Cyrus Spradling studied him with a keen, but not unkindly, fixedness of gaze.

"Ye don't, don't ye? Wa'al, let me norrate ye a leetle parable. Suppose you an' me hes done been pore folks livin' in a small dwellin'-house.

We've done been plum content, because we hain't never knowed nothing better. But suppose one of us goes a'visitin' ter rich kin-folks--an'

t'other one stays home." He paused there to rekindle his pipe, and the voice of his resumed "parable" was troubled.

"Ther one thet's been away hes done took up notions of wealth that he kain't nuver hope ter satisfy. The mean cabin seems a heap meaner when he comes back ter hit--but ther other pore d.a.m.n fool--he's still happy an' contented because he don't know no better."

"I reckon," laughed the young visitor, "if the feller that had gone away was anything but the disablest body in the world, he'd set about improving the house he had to dwell in."

"I hope ter G.o.d ye're right, Booney. Hit's been a mighty sober thing fer me ter ponder over, though--whether I was helpin' my gal or hurtin'

her."

Boone was smitten with a sense of guilt. He felt that he ought to make confession that he had come here tonight because he had already recognized a new flame in his heart, and a flame which the voice of sanity and wisdom told him he must quench: that he was here because discontent had driven him. But his voice was firm as he made some commonplace reply, and Cyrus nodded his satisfaction. "Mebby if thar's a few boys like thet, growin' up hyarabouts, ther few gals thet gits larnin' won't be foredoomed ter lead lonesome lives, atter all."

The moonlight was beginning to convert the dulness of twilight into a nocturne of soft and tempered beauty.

Boone felt suddenly appalled, as if the father had given him parental recognition and approval, and laid upon him an obligation. He wanted to rise and frame some excuse for immediate flight, but it was of course too late for that.

The evening star came up over the dark contours of the ridge. It shone soft and l.u.s.trous in the sky, where other stars would soon add their myriad points of light, but however many others might fill the heavens there would still be only one evening star--and Boone, as he waited for one girl, fell to thinking of the other with whom he had climbed Slag-face yesterday; the girl who had set fire to his young imagination.

Then Happy came out of the door and soon after the father went in.

"Thar hain't no place fer an ign'rant old feller like me, out hyar amongst ther young an' wise," he chuckled as he left them. "I reckon ye aims ter talk algebry an' sich-like."

The mountains were great upward sweeps of velvet darkness. Down in the slopes, where the moonlight fell, was a bath of silver and shadows, not dead and inky but blue and living, but Happy Spradling, keyed to the emotional influences of that June evening, found herself labouring with a distrait and unresponsive visitor, who made an early excuse for departure.

CHAPTER XVII

Beyond the goal of getting through college in three years, Boone had planned his future but vaguely. He might seek election to the Legislature, when he came of qualifying age, and strive upwards from that beginning toward Congress and the larger rewards of a political life. For such a career the law was a necessary preparation, so while he was still in college he began its reading.

Whenever he went home from the university he saw Happy, and in the tacit fashion of simple souls their neighbourhood fell to speaking of "Boone and Happy," as though the linking of their names was natural and logical, and in local gossip it was almost as though they were betrothed.

Happy had other suitors, more than a few of them indeed, drawn to the Spradling house by her beauty. Along those neighbourhood creeks, from the trickles where they "headed up" to the mouths where they emptied, there were few girls who could hope to compete with her loveliness of sloe-eyes, dusky hair and slender grace of body. But the old wives shook their heads, saying, "Happy Spradling wouldn't hurt a fly--but jest ther same she's breakin' hearts right an' left because she's mortgaged ter Boone Wellver--an' she's jest a'waitin' fer him."

Old Cyrus already looked on him as a son--and Boone spoke as little of Anne Masters as he would have spoken of the things sealed in Masonic secrecy.

Happy's school was one which arranged its terms and vacations in accordance with local exigencies. Crop planting and gathering had the right of way over text-books, and so it happened that when Anne was at Marlin Town, Happy was usually at school--and their ways did not cross.

Yet each summer, too, as a man may go from the provinces to court and yet not delude himself with the hallucination that he is a courtier, Boone went over to Marlin Town. For every summer Anne Masters came for a few weeks to visit the father, who held his position there, remote from the things that, to his thinking, made up the values of life.