so good-natured that anybody could banter him,
but nobody ever carried it too far except a bully from an adjoining
county one court day. Lum picked him up bodily and dashed him to the
ground so that blood gushed from his nose and he lay there bewildered,
white, and still. Lum rarely went to church, and he never talked religion,
politics, or neighborhood gossip. He was really thought to be quite
stupid, in spite of the fact that he could make lightning calculations
about crops, hogs, and cattle in his head. However, one man knew better,
but he was a "furriner," a geologist, a "rock-pecker" from the Bluegrass.
To him Lum betrayed an uncanny eye in discovering coal signs and tracing
them to their hidden beds, and wide and valuable knowledge of the same.
Once the foreigner lost his barometer just when he was trying to locate
a coal vein on the side of the mountain opposite. Two days later Lum
pointed to a ravine across the valley.

"You'll find that coal not fer from the bottom o' that big poplar over
thar." The geologist stared, but he went across and found the coal and
came back mystified.

"How'd you do it?"

Lum led him up Wolf Run. Where the vein showed by the creek-side Lum
had built a little dam, and when the water ran even with the mud-covered
stones he had turned the stream aside. The geologist lay down, sighted
across the surface of the water, and his eye caught the base of the
big poplar.

"Hit's the Lord's own level," said Lum, and back he went to his work,
the man looking after him and muttering:

"The Lord's own level."

Hardly knowing it, Lum waited for grinding day. There was the same
exchange of "how-dyes" between him and the girl, going and coming,
and Lum noted that the remaining hind shoe was gone from the old
nag and that one of the front ones was going. This too was gone
the next time she passed, and for the first time Lum spoke:

"Yo' hoss needs shoein'."

"She ain't wuth it," said the girl. Two hours later, when the girl came
back, Lum took up the conversation again.

"Oh, yes, she is," he drawled, and the girl slid from her sack of meal
and watched him, which she could do fearlessly, for Lum never looked
at her. He had never asked her name and he did not ask her now.

"I'm Jeb Mullins's gal," she said. "Pap'll be comin' 'long hyeh some
day an' pay ye."

"My name's Lum--Lum Chapman."

"They calls me Marthy."

He lifted her bag to the horse's bony withers with one hand, but he
did no