f the house moved
about noiselessly and with drawn faces. There were no lights lit, and
nobody stood long even in the light of the fire where he could be seen
through a window; and doors were opened and passed through quickly. The
Falins had opened the feud that day, for the boy's foster-uncle, Bad
Rufe Tolliver, contrary to the terms of the last truce, had come home
from the West, and one of his kinsmen had been wounded. The boy told
what he had heard while he lay over the road along which some of his
enemies had passed and his father nodded. The Falins had learned in some
way that the lad was going to the Gap that day and had sent men after
him. Who was the spy?

"You TOLD me you was a-goin' to the Gap," said old Dave. "Whar was ye?"

"I didn't git that far," said the boy.

The old man and Loretta, young Dave's sister, laughed, and quiet smiles
passed between the others.

"Well, you'd better be keerful 'bout gittin' even as far as you did
git--wharever that was--from now on."

"I ain't afeered," the boy said sullenly, and he turned into the
kitchen. Still sullen, he ate his supper in silence and his mother asked
him no questions. He was worried that Bad Rufe had come back to the
mountains, for Rufe was always teasing June and there was something
in his bold, black eyes that made the lad furious, even when the
foster-uncle was looking at Loretta or the little girl in Lonesome
Cove. And yet that was nothing to his new trouble, for his mind hung
persistently to the stranger and to the way June had behaved in the
cabin in Lonesome Cove. Before he went to bed, he slipped out to the
old well behind the house and sat on the water-trough in gloomy unrest,
looking now and then at the stars that hung over the Cove and over the
Gap beyond, where the stranger was bound. It would have pleased him
a good deal could he have known that the stranger was pushing his big
black horse on his way, under those stars, toward the outer world.

IX

It was court day at the county seat across the Kentucky line. Hale
had risen early, as everyone must if he would get his breakfast in the
mountains, even in the hotels in the county seats, and he sat with his
feet on the railing of the hotel porch which fronted the main street
of the town. He had had his heart-breaking failures since the autumn
before, but he was in good cheer now, for his feverish enthusiasm had at
last clutched a man who would take up not only his options on the gr