"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 pa.s.s 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 Budd that night while he sat with Hale on the porch overlooking the mill-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 h.e.l.l of a merry time NOW.

The mountaineer hates as long as he remembers and--he never forgets."

XV

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 l.u.s.ty 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 pa.s.sion 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.'"