whole bones inside his skin.
He better not tell me, nuther."

"He don't keer enough 'bout ye, Jacob, ter tell ye. He don't think
nothin' of ye."

Love is popularly supposed to dull the mental faculties. It developed
in Jacob Brice sudden strategic abilities.

"Thar is them ez does," he said diplomatically.

Cynthia spoke promptly with more vivacity than usual, but in her
customary drawl and apparently utterly irrelevantly:--

"I never in all my days see no sech red-headed gal ez that thar Becky
Stiles. She's the red-headedest gal ever I see." And Cynthia once more
was silent.

Jacob resumed, also irrelevantly:--

"When I goes a-huntin' up yander ter Pine Lick, they is mighty perlite
ter me. They ain't never done nothin' agin me, ez I knows on." Then,
after a pause of deep cogitation, he added, "Nor hev they said nothin'
agin me, nuther."

Cynthia took up her side of the dialogue, if dialogue it could be
called, with wonted irrelevancy: "That thar Becky Stiles, she's got
the freckledest face--ez freckled ez any turkey-aig" (with an
indescribable drawl on the last word).

"They ain't done nothin' agin me," reiterated Jacob astutely, "nor
said nothin' nuther--none of 'em."

Cynthia looked hard across the amphitheatre at the distant Great Smoky
Mountains shimmering in the hazy September sunlight--so ineffably
beautiful, so delicately blue, that they might have seemed the ideal
scenery of some impossibly lovely ideal world. Perhaps she was
wondering what the unconscious Becky Stiles, far away in those dark
woods about Pine Lick, had secured in this life besides her freckled
face. Was this the sylvan deity of the young hunter's adoration?

Cynthia took off her sunbonnet to use it for a fan. Perhaps it was
well for her that she did so at this moment; it had so entirely
concealed her head that her hair might have been the color of Becky
Stiles's, and no one the wiser. The dark brown tendrils curled
delicately on her creamy forehead; the excitement of the day had
flushed her pale cheeks with an unwonted glow; her eyes were alight
with their newly kindled fires; the clinging curtain of her bonnet had
concealed the sloping curves of her shoulders--altogether she was
attractive enough, despite the flare of her yellow dress, and
especially attractive to the untutored eyes of Jacob Brice. He
relented suddenly, and lost all the advantages of his tact and
diplomacy.

"I likes ye better nor I does Becky Stiles," he sai