fancying her standing there sometime beside
him, with her trim gloved hand by his on the prayer-book.

At length he rose and climbed on, presently turning at a right-angle to
bisect the strip to its boundary before he paused to rest. "I'm no
timber-cruiser," he said to himself as he wiped his brow, "but I
calculate there are all of three hundred trees big enough to cut. Why,
suppose they are worth on an average only a hundred apiece. That would
make--Good lord!" he muttered, "and I've been mooning about poverty!"

The growth was smaller and sparser now and before long he came, on the
hill's very crest, to the edge of a ragged clearing. It held a squalid
settlement, perhaps a score of dirt-daubed cabins little better than
hovels, some of them mere mud-walled lean-tos, with sod roofs and
window-panes of flour-sacking. Fences and outhouses there was none.
Littered paths rambled aimlessly hither and thither from chip-strewn
yards to starved patches of corn, under-cultivated and blighted. Over
the whole place hung an indescribable atmosphere of disconsolate filth,
of unredeemed squalor and vileness. Razor-backed hogs rooted everywhere,
snapped at by a handful of lean and spiritless hounds. A slatternly
woman lolled under a burlap awning beside one of the cabins from whose
interior came the sound of men's voices raised in a fierce quarrel.
Undisturbed by the hideous din, a little girl of about three years was
dragging by a string an old cigar-box in which was propped a rag-doll.
She was barelegged and barearmed, her tiny limbs burned a dark red by
the sun, and she wore a single garment made from the leg of a patched
pair of overalls. Her hair, bleached the color of corn-silk, fell over
her face in elfin wildness.

With one hand on the dog's collar, hushing him to silence, Valiant,
unseen, looked at the wretched place with a shiver. He had glimpsed many
wretched purlieus in the slums of great cities, but this, in the open
sunlight, with the clean woods about it and the sweet clear blue above,
stood out with an unrelieved boldness and contrast that was doubly
sinister and forbidding. He knew instantly that the tawdry corner was
the community known as Hell's-Half-Acre, the place to which Shirley had
made her night ride to rescue Rickey Snyder.

A quick glad realization of her courage rushed through him. On its heels
came a feeling of shame that a spot like this could exist, a foul blot
on such a landscape. It was on his own l