he more
reasonable he passed for a harmless creature, a sort of link between the
mountain and civilized folk, who occasionally came down and did a little
wood cutting for a farmer when hands were short. Besides, she knew the
Mountain people would never hurt her: Liff himself had told her so
once when she was a little girl, and had met him one day at the edge
of lawyer Royall's pasture. "They won't any of 'em touch you up there,
f'ever you was to come up.... But I don't s'pose you will," he had added
philosophically, looking at her new shoes, and at the red ribbon that
Mrs. Royall had tied in her hair.

Charity had, in truth, never felt any desire to visit her birthplace.
She did not care to have it known that she was of the Mountain, and was
shy of being seen in talk with Liff Hyatt. But today she was not sorry
to have him appear. A great many things had happened to her since the
day when young Lucius Harney had entered the doors of the Hatchard
Memorial, but none, perhaps, so unforeseen as the fact of her suddenly
finding it a convenience to be on good terms with Liff Hyatt. She
continued to look up curiously at his freckled weather-beaten face,
with feverish hollows below the cheekbones and the pale yellow eyes of
a harmless animal. "I wonder if he's related to me?" she thought, with a
shiver of disdain.

"Is there any folks living in the brown house by the swamp, up under
Porcupine?" she presently asked in an indifferent tone.

Liff Hyatt, for a while, considered her with surprise; then he scratched
his head and shifted his weight from one tattered sole to the other.

"There's always the same folks in the brown house," he said with his
vague grin.

"They're from up your way, ain't they?"

"Their name's the same as mine," he rejoined uncertainly.

Charity still held him with resolute eyes. "See here, I want to go there
some day and take a gentleman with me that's boarding with us. He's up
in these parts drawing pictures."

She did not offer to explain this statement. It was too far beyond Liff
Hyatt's limitations for the attempt to be worth making. "He wants to see
the brown house, and go all over it," she pursued.

Liff was still running his fingers perplexedly through his shock of
straw-colored hair. "Is it a fellow from the city?" he asked.

"Yes. He draws pictures of things. He's down there now drawing the
Bonner house." She pointed to a chimney just visible over the dip of the
pasture below the wood.