The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Tempering, by Charles Neville Buck,
Illustrated by Ralph Pallen Coleman

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Title: The Tempering

Author: Charles Neville Buck

Release Date: September 16, 2010 [eBook #33736]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

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THE TEMPERING

by

CHARLES NEVILLE BUCK

Author of "The Call of the Cumberland," "The Battle Cry," etc., etc.

Frontispiece by Ralph Pallen Coleman

Garden City New York
Doubleday, Page & Company
1920

Copyright, 1920, by
Doubleday, Page & Company

All rights reserved, including that of
translation into foreign languages
including the Scandinavian

Copyright, 1919, by The Ridgeway Company

[Illustration: "'_I've never seen the evening star rise up over the
Kaintuck Ridges that I haven't ... thought of it as your own star._'"]

THE TEMPERING

CHAPTER I

"Nothin' don't nuver come ter pass hyarabouts!"

The boy perched disconsolately on the rotting fence threw forth his
lament aloud to the laurelled silences of the mountain sides and the
emptiness of space.

"Every doggone day's jest identical with all ther balance--save only
thet hit's wuss!"

He sat with his back turned on the only signs of human life within the
circle of his vision; unless one called the twisting creek-bed at his
front, which served that pocket of the Kentucky Cumberlands as a
high