"

Then the figure of a young man appeared, swinging along with an
effortless stride down the steep grade of the mountain which was richly
mottled with the afternoon sun. He came between giant clusters of
flowering laurel, along aisles pink with wild roses and white with the
foaming spray of elder blossoms; flanked by masses of colossal rock,
and every movement was a note of frictionless power.

Like his father, Turner Stacy measured a full six feet, but age and the
yoke of hardship had not yet stooped his fine shoulders nor thickened
his slenderness of girth. His face was striking in its clear chiseling
of feature and its bronzed color. It would have been arrestingly
handsome but for its marring shadow of surliness.

In one hand he held a battered book, palpably one used with the
constancy and devotion of a monk's breviary, and a forefinger was still
thrust between the dog-eared pages. "Lincoln: Master of Men,"--such was
the title of the volume.

As Turner Stacy arrived at the house, his father's uncompromisingly
stern eyes dwelt on the book and they were brimming with displeasure.

"Didn't ye know I hed work for ye ter do terday?"

The boy nodded indifferently.

"I 'lowed ye hed ther power ter shout fer me when ye war ready, I
wasn't more'n a whoop an' a holler distant."

The mother, hovering in the shadowed interior of the house, listened
silently, and a little anxiously. This friction of unbending temper
between her husband and son was a thing to which she could never quite
accustom herself. Always she was interposing herself as a buffer
between their threats of clashing wills.

"Turner," said the elder man slowly, and now he spoke quietly with an
effort to curb his irascibililty, "I knows thet boys often-times gits
uppety an' brash when they're a-growin' inter manhood. They've got thar
growth an' they feel thar strength an' they hain't acquired neither
sense ner experience enough ter realize how plumb teetotally much they
_don't_ know yit. But speakin' jedgmatically, I hain't never heered
tell of no Stacy afore what hain't been loyal ter his family an' ther
head of his house. 'Pears like ter me hit pleasures ye beyond all
reason ter sot yoreself crost-wise erginst me."

The boy's eyes grew somberly dark as they met those of his father with
undeviating steadiness. An analyst would have said that the outward
surliness was after all only a mask for an inner questioning--the
inarticulate stress of a cramped