the old miller.

"Some day a mountain man will rise up as steadfast as the hills he
sprung from--an' he'll change hit all like ther sun changes fog!"
Perhaps Turner Stacy was ripe for hero-worship.

Over the mountain top appeared the beacon of the evening star--luminous
but pale. As if saluting it the timber became wistful with the call of
whippoorwills and fireflies began to flit against the sooty curtain of
night.

Something stirred in the boy, as though the freshening breeze brought
the new message of an awakening. Here was the talk of wise men,
concurring with the voices of his dreams! But at that moment his mother
appeared in the doorway and announced

"You men kin come in an' _eat_, now."

CHAPTER VI

In former days an Appalachian tavern was a "quarter-house"; a hostelry
where one paid a quarter for one's bed and a quarter, each, for meals.
Now the term has fallen into such disuse as to be no longer generic,
but locally it survived with a meaning both specific and malodorous.
The press of Kentucky and Virginia had used it often, coupled with
lurid stories of blood-lettings and orgies; linking with it always the
name of its proprietor, Kinnard Towers.

How could such things go on in the twentieth century? questioned the
readers of these news columns, forgetting that this ramparted isolation
lives not in the twentieth century but still in the eighteenth; that
its people who have never seen salt water still sing the ballads of
Walter Raleigh's sea-rovers, and that from their lips still fall, warm
with every-day usage, the colloquialisms of Chaucer and of Piers the
Ploughman.

The Quarterhouse stood in a cleft where the mountains had been riven.
Its front door opened into Virginia and its rear door gave into
Kentucky. Across the puncheon floor was humorously painted a stripe of
whitewash, as constantly renewed as the markings of a well-kept tennis
court--and that line was a state boundary.

Hither flocked refugees from the justice of two states, and if a
suddenly materializing sheriff confronted his quarry in the room where
each day and each night foregathered the wildest spirits of a wild
land, the hounded culprit had only to cross that white line and stand
upon his lawful demand for extradition papers. Here, therefore, the
hunted foxes of the law ran to ground. The man who presided as
proprietor was a power to be feared, admired, hated as individual
circumstance dictated, but in any case one who