in front and
behind and had strange long-hooded stirrups. Starting to mount, the man
stopped with one foot in the stirrup and raised his eyes towards her
so suddenly that she shrank back again with a quicker throbbing at her
heart and pressed closer to the earth. Still, seen or not seen, flight
was easy for her, so she could not forbear to look again. Apparently, he
had seen nothing--only that the next turn of the trail was too steep to
ride, and so he started walking again, and his walk, as he strode along
the path, was new to her, as was the erect way with which he held his
head and his shoulders.

In her wonder over him, she almost forgot herself, forgot to wonder
where he was going and why he was coming into those lonely hills until,
as his horse turned a bend of the trail, she saw hanging from the
other side of the saddle something that looked like a gun. He was a
"raider"--that man: so, cautiously and swiftly then, she pushed herself
back from the edge of the cliff, sprang to her feet, dashed past the big
tree and, winged with fear, sped down the mountain--leaving in a spot of
sunlight at the base of the pine the print of one bare foot in the black
earth.

II

He had seen the big pine when he first came to those hills--one morning,
at daybreak, when the valley was a sea of mist that threw soft clinging
spray to the very mountain tops: for even above the mists, that morning,
its mighty head arose--sole visible proof that the earth still slept
beneath. Straightway, he wondered how it had ever got there, so far
above the few of its kind that haunted the green dark ravines far below.
Some whirlwind, doubtless, had sent a tiny cone circling heavenward and
dropped it there. It had sent others, too, no doubt, but how had this
tree faced wind and storm alone and alone lived to defy both so proudly?
Some day he would learn. Thereafter, he had seen it, at noon--but little
less majestic among the oaks that stood about it; had seen it catching
the last light at sunset, clean-cut against the after-glow, and like a
dark, silent, mysterious sentinel guarding the mountain pass under the
moon. He had seen it giving place with sombre dignity to the passing
burst of spring--had seen it green among dying autumn leaves, green
in the gray of winter trees and still green in a shroud of snow--a
changeless promise that the earth must wake to life again. The Lonesome
Pine, the mountaineers called it, and the Lonesome Pine it al