s course, lay a steeply sloping
field of young corn. Along its back grew rows of "shuckybeans," and
here Blossom took her station for her self-appointed task of sentry
duty.

CHAPTER V

Jerry Henderson had lost his way.

Aching muscles protested the extra miles because back there at Marlin
Town he had been advised to cross Cedar Mountain on foot.

"Unless they suspicions ye, 'most any man'll contrive ter take ye in
an' enjoy ye somehow," his counselors had pointed out. "But thar's
heaps of them pore fam'lies over thar thet hain't got feed fer a ridin'
critter noways."

Now Cedar Mountain is not, as its name mendaciously implies, a single
peak but a chain that crawls, zig-zag as herringbone, for more than a
hundred miles with few crossings which wheels can follow.

It is a wall twenty-five hundred feet high, separating the world from
"back of beyond." Having scaled it since breakfast, Jerry Henderson was
tired.

He was tanned and toughened like saddle-leather. He was broad of
shoulder, narrow of thigh, and possessed of a good, resolute brow and a
straight-cut jaw. His eyes were keen with intelligence and sufficiently
cool with boldness.

Arriving at a narrow thread of clear water which came singing out at
the edge of a corn-field, his eyes lighted with satisfaction. Tilled
ground presumably denoted the proximity of a human habitation where
questions could be answered.

So he stood, searching the forested landscape for a thread of smoke or
a roof, and as he did so he perceived a movement at the edge of the
field where the stalks had grown higher than the average and merged
with the confusion of the thicket.

Jerry turned and began making his way along the edge of the patch,
respecting the corn rows by holding close to the tangle at the margin.
Then suddenly with a rustling of the shrubbery as startling as the
sound with which a covey of quail rises from nowhere, a figure stepped
into sight and the stranger halted in an astonishment which, had
Blossom Fulkerson realized it, was the purest form of flattery.

He had seen many women and girls working in the fields as he had come
along the way and most of them had been heavy of feature and slovenly
of dress. Here was one who might have been the spirit of the hills
themselves in bloom; one who suggested kinship with the free skies and
the sunlit foliage.

With frank delight in the astonishing vision, Jerry Henderson stood
there, his feet well apart, his