he face of each. Marston would not come in that night
and the Blight went dinnerless to bed and cried herself to sleep. She
told the little sister that she had seen the Wild Dog again peering
through the bushes, and that she was frightened. That was her
explanation--but I guessed a better one.

VI. THE GREAT DAY

It was a day to make glad the heart of slave or freeman. The earth was
cool from a night-long rain, and a gentle breeze fanned coolness
from the north all day long. The clouds were snow-white, tumbling,
ever-moving, and between them the sky showed blue and deep. Grass, leaf,
weed and flower were in the richness that comes to the green things of
the earth just before that full tide of summer whose foam is drifting
thistle down. The air was clear and the mountains seemed to have brushed
the haze from their faces and drawn nearer that they, too, might better
see the doings of that day.

From the four winds of heaven, that morning, came the brave and the
free. Up from Lee, down from Little Stone Gap, and from over in Scott,
came the valley-farmers--horseback, in buggies, hacks, two-horse wagons,
with wives, mothers, sisters, sweethearts, in white dresses, flowered
hats, and many ribbons, and with dinner-baskets stuffed with good things
to eat--old ham, young chicken, angel-cake and blackberry wine--to be
spread in the sunless shade of great poplar and oak. From Bum Hollow and
Wildcat Valley and from up the slopes that lead to Cracker's Neck came
smaller tillers of the soil--as yet but faintly marked by the gewgaw
trappings of the outer world; while from beyond High Knob, whose crown
is in cloud-land, and through the Gap, came the mountaineer in the
primitive simplicity of home spun and cowhide, wide-brimmed hat and
poke-bonnet, quaint speech, and slouching gait. Through the Gap he came
in two streams--the Virginians from Crab Orchard and Wise and Dickinson,
the Kentuckians from Letcher and feudal Harlan, beyond the Big
Black--and not a man carried a weapon in sight, for the stern spirit of
that Police Guard at the Gap was respected wide and far. Into the town,
which sits on a plateau some twenty feet above the level of the two
rivers that all but encircle it, they poured, hitching their horses in
the strip of woods that runs through the heart of the place, and broad
ens into a primeval park that, fan-like, opens on the oval level field
where all things happen on the Fourth of July. About the street they
lo