rown less frequent, shorter,
more hurried the past year--well, he should have his chance. Always,
however, her mind kept going back to the people at the station and to
her people in the mountains. They were the same, she kept repeating
to herself--the very same and she was one of them. And always she kept
thinking of her first trip to Lonesome Cove after her awakening and of
what her next would be. That first time Hale had made her go back as
she had left, in home-spun, sun-bonnet and brogans. There was the same
reason why she should go back that way now as then--would Hale insist
that she should now? She almost laughed aloud at the thought. She knew
that she would refuse and she knew that his reason would not appeal to
her now--she no longer cared what her neighbours and kinspeople might
think and say. The porter paused at her seat.

"How much longer is it?" she asked.

"Half an hour, Miss."

June went to wash her face and hands, and when she came back to her seat
a great glare shone through the windows on the other side of the car. It
was the furnace, a "run" was on and she could see the streams of white
molten metal racing down the narrow channels of sand to their narrow
beds on either side. The whistle shrieked ahead for the Gap and she
nerved herself with a prophetic sense of vague trouble at hand.

* * * * * * *

At the station Hale had paced the platform. He looked at his watch to
see whether he might have time to run up to the furnace, half a mile
away, and board the train there. He thought he had and he was about to
start when the shriek of the coming engine rose beyond the low hills in
Wild Cat Valley, echoed along Powell's Mountain and broke against the
wrinkled breast of the Cumberland. On it came, and in plain sight it
stopped suddenly to take water, and Hale cursed it silently and
recalled viciously that when he was in a hurry to arrive anywhere,
the water-tower was always on the wrong side of the station. He got so
restless that he started for it on a run and he had gone hardly fifty
yards before the train came on again and he had to run back to beat it
to the station--where he sprang to the steps of the Pullman before it
stopped--pushing the porter aside to find himself checked by the crowded
passengers at the door. June was not among them and straightway he ran
for the rear of the car.

June had risen. The other occupants of the car had crowded forward and
she was the