appy Valley or anywhar else--ef you leave out bitin',
gougin', and wrasslin'."

"Did ye lose yo' gal, too?" asked Pleasant Trouble.

"Huh!" said Jay, "I reckon _not_--she knows _her_ boss."

The two walked home slowly and in silence--Ira in front and Allaphair,
as does the woman in the hills, following close behind, in a spirit quite
foreign to her hitherto. The little school-teacher had turned shy again
and said never a word, but, as he opened the gate to let her pass through,
she saw the old, old telltale look in his sombre eyes. Her mother was
crooning in the porch.

"No ploughin' termorrer, mammy. Me an' Iry want the ole nag to go down
to the Couht House in the mornin'. Iry's axed me to marry him."

Perhaps every woman does not love a master--perhaps Allaphair had
found hers.

THE COMPACT OF CHRISTOPHER

The boy had come home for Sunday and must go back now to the Mission
school. He picked up his battered hat and there was no good-by.

"I reckon I better be goin'," he said, and out he walked. The mother
barely raised her eyes, but after he was gone she rose and from the low
doorway looked after his sturdy figure trudging up the road. His whistle,
as clear as the call of a quail, filled her ears for a while and then
was buried beyond the hill. A smaller lad clutched her black skirt,
whimpering:

"Wisht I c'd go to the Mission school."

"Thar hain't room," she said shortly.

"The teacher says thar hain't room. I wish to God thar was."

Still whistling, the boy trudged on. Now and then he would lift his
shrill voice and the snatch of an old hymn or a folk-song would float
through the forest and echo among the crags above him. It was a good
three hours' walk whither he was bound, but in less than an hour he
stopped where a brook tumbled noisily from a steep ravine and across
the road--stopped and looked up the thick shadows whence it came.
Hesitant, he stood on one foot and then on the other, with a wary
look down the road and up the ravine.

"I said I'd _try_ to git back," he said aloud. "I said I'd _try_."

And with this self-excusing sophistry he darted up the brook. The banks
were steep and thickly meshed with rhododendron, from which hemlock shot
like black arrows upward, but the boy threaded through them like a snake.
His breast was hardly heaving when he reached a small plateau hundreds of
feet above the road, where two branches of the stream met from narrower
ravines right and left. To