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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 gla.s.s, 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 Male'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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s 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."