out of the shadow appeared a man who set a plump hand
on either jamb and stared into the room with a round, white, anxiously
inquiring face. It was Jim Cal, eldest of the sons of Jephthah
Turrentine, married, and living in a cabin a short distance up the slope.
"Who give the information?" he asked as soon as he had peered all about
the room and found no outsider present.

"Well, we hearn that _you_ did, podner," jeered Blatch.

"Come in and set," invited the head of the household, with the
mountaineer's unforgetting hospitality. "Draw up--draw up. Reach and take
off."

"Well--I--I might," faltered the fleshy one, sidling toward the table and
getting himself into a seat. Without further word his father passed the
great dish of fried potatoes, then the platter of bacon. Judith brought
hot coffee and corn pone for him. She did not sit down with the men,
having quite enough to do to get the meal served.

Unheedingly she heard the matter discussed at the table; only when Creed
Bonbright's name came up was she moved to listen and put in her word.
Something in her manner of describing the assistance Bonbright offered
seemed to go against Blatch's grain.

"Got to look out for these here folks that's so free with their offers o'
he'p," he grunted. "Man'll slap ye on the back and tell ye what a fine
feller ye air whilst he's feelin' for your pocket-book--that's town
ways."

The girl was like one hearkening for a finer voice amid all this
distracting noise; she could hear neither. She made feverish haste to
clear away and wash her dishes, that she might creep to her own room
under the eaves. Through her open casement came up to her the sounds of
the April night: a heightened chorus of little frogs in a rain-fed
branch; nearer in the dooryard a half-dozen tree-toads trilling
plaintively as many different minors; with these, scents of growing,
sharpened and sweetened by the dark. And all night the cedar tree which
stood close to the porch edge below moved in the wind of spring, and,
chafing against the shingles, spoke through the miniature music in its
deep, muffled legato, a soft baritone note like a man's voice--a lover's
voice--calling to her beneath her window.

It roused her from fitful slumbers to happy waking, when she lay and
stared into the dark, and painted for herself on its sombre background
Creed Bonbright's figure, the yellow uncovered head close to her knee as
he stood and talked at the foot of the mountain t