"You mustn't open that door," he said, looking up, surprised by the
sweetness of the voice which he heard now for the first time.

"How can anybody see me from the pass?" she asked innocently. "That is
what you are afraid of, isn't it?"

He shot a perplexed and slightly suspicious glance at her, then the
frowning importance faded from his beardless face; he bit a piece out of
the soggy corncake he was holding and glanced up at her again, amiably
conscious of her attractions; besides, her voice and manner had been a
revelation. Evidently her father had had her educated at some valley
school remote from these raw solitudes.

So he smiled at her, quite willing to be argued with and entertained;
and at his suggestion she shyly seated herself on the sill outside in
the sunlight.

"Have you lived here long?" he asked encouragingly.

"Not very," she said, eyes downcast, her clasped hands lying loosely
over one knee. The soft, creamy-tinted fingers occupied his attention
for a moment; the hand resembled the hand of "quality"; so did the ankle
and delicate arch of her naked foot, half imprisoned in the coarse shoe
under her skirt's edge.

He had often heard that some of these mountaineers had pretty children;
here, evidently, was a most fascinating example.

"Is your mother living?" he asked pleasantly.

"No, sir."

He thought to himself that she must resemble her dead mother, because
the man whom the cavalry had caught in the creek was a coarse-boned,
red-headed ruffian, quite impossible to reconcile as the father of this
dark-haired, dark-eyed, young forest creature, with her purely-molded
limbs and figure and sensitive fashion of speaking. He turned to her
curiously:

"So you have not always lived here on the mountain."

"No, not always."

"I suppose you spent a whole year away from home at boarding-school," he
suggested with patronizing politeness.

"Yes, six years at Edgewood," she said in a low voice.

"What?" he exclaimed, repeating the name of the most fashionable
Southern institute for young ladies. "Why, I had a sister
there--Margaret Kent. Were _you_ there? And did you ever--er--see my
sister?"

"I knew her," said the Special Messenger absently.

He was very silent for a while, thinking to himself.

"It must have been her mother; that measly old man we caught in the
creek is 'poor white' all through." And, munching thoughtfully again on
his soggy corncake, he pondered over the strange fate of t