watched the
scarlet figure ride from the woods, and climb slowly up through the
sunny corn. On the spur above and full in the rich yellow light, she
halted, half turning in her saddle. He rose to his feet, to his full
height, his head bare, and thrown far back between his big shoulders,
and, still as statues, the man and the woman looked at each other across
the gulf of darkening air. A full minute the woman sat motionless, then
rode on. At the edge of the woods she stopped and turned again.

The eagle under Rome leaped one stroke in the air, and dropped like a
clod into the sea of leaves. The report of the gun and a faint cry of
triumph rose from below. It was good marksmanship, but on the cliff Rome
did not heed it. Something had fluttered in the air above the girl's
head, and he laughed aloud. She was waving her bonnet at him.

II

JUST where young Stetson stood, the mountains racing along each bank of
the Cumberland had sent out against each other, by mutual impulse,
two great spurs. At the river's brink they stopped sheer, with crests
uplifted, as though some hand at the last moment had hurled them apart,
and had led the water through the breach to keep them at peace. To-day
the crags looked seamed by thwarted passion; and, sullen with firs, they
made fit symbols of the human hate about the base of each.

When the feud began, no one knew. Even the original cause was forgotten.
Both families had come as friends from Virginia long ago, and had lived
as enemies nearly half a century. There was hostility before the
war, but, until then, little bloodshed. Through the hatred of change,
characteristic of the mountaineer the world over, the Lewallens were for
the Union. The Stetsons owned a few slaves, and they fought for them.
Peace found both still neighbors and worse foes. The war armed them,
and brought back an ancestral contempt for human life; it left them a
heritage of lawlessness that for mutual protection made necessary the
very means used by their feudal forefathers; personal hatred supplanted
its dead issues, and with them the war went on. The Stetsons had a good
strain of Anglo-Saxon blood, and owned valley-lands; the Lewallens
kept store and made "moonshine"; so kindred and debtors and kindred and
tenants were arrayed with one or the other leader, and gradually the
retainers of both settled on one or the other side of the river. In time
of hostility the Cumberland came to be the boundary between life