rouble
getting an option for a year on the old man's land. Just as dusk was
setting he got his horse.

"You'd better stay all night."

"No, I'll have to get along."

The little girl did not appear to tell him goodby, and when he went to
his horse at the gate, he called:

"Tell June to come down here. I've got something for her."

"Go on, baby," the old man said, and the little girl came shyly down to
the gate. Hale took a brown-paper parcel from his saddle-bags, unwrapped
it and betrayed the usual blue-eyed, flaxen-haired, rosy-cheeked doll.
Only June did not know the like of it was in all the world. And as she
caught it to her breast there were tears once more in her uplifted eyes.

"How about going over to the Gap with me, little girl--some day?"

He never guessed it, but there were a child and a woman before him now
and both answered:

"I'll go with ye anywhar."

* * * * * * *

Hale stopped a while to rest his horse at the base of the big pine. He
was practically alone in the world. The little girl back there was
born for something else than slow death in that God-forsaken cove, and
whatever it was--why not help her to it if he could? With this thought
in his brain, he rode down from the luminous upper world of the moon and
stars toward the nether world of drifting mists and black ravines. She
belonged to just such a night--that little girl--she was a part of its
mists, its lights and shadows, its fresh wild beauty and its mystery.
Only once did his mind shift from her to his great purpose, and that was
when the roar of the water through the rocky chasm of the Gap made him
think of the roar of iron wheels, that, rushing through, some day, would
drown it into silence. At the mouth of the Gap he saw the white valley
lying at peace in the moonlight and straightway from it sprang again, as
always, his castle in the air; but before he fell asleep in his cottage
on the edge of the millpond that night he heard quite plainly again:

"I'll go with ye--anywhar."

XI

Spring was coming: and, meanwhile, that late autumn and short winter,
things went merrily on at the gap in some ways, and in some ways--not.

Within eight miles of the place, for instance, the man fell ill--the man
who was to take up Hale's options--and he had to be taken home. Still
Hale was undaunted: here he was and here he would stay--and he would try
again. Two other young men, Bluegrass Kentuckians, Logan