way, a human manifestation.

There behind him a log-cabin breathed smokily through its mud-daubed
chimney; a pioneer habitation in every crude line and characteristic. On
the door hung, drying, the odorous pelt of a "varmint." Against the wall
leaned a rickety spinning wheel.

To all that, which he hated, he kept his stiff back turned, but his
ears had no defence against the cracked falsetto of an aged voice
crooning a ballad that the pioneers had brought across the ridges from
tide-water ... a ballad whose phrasing was quaintly redolent of antiquity.

The boy kicked his broganned heels and snorted. His clothes were
homespun and home sewed and his touselled shock of red-brown hair
cropped out from under a coon skin cap. His given name was Boone and his
life was as hobbled by pioneer restrictions as was that of the greater
Boone--but with a difference.

The overland argonauts who had set their feet and faces westward across
these same mountains bore on their memories the stimulating image of all
that they had left behind and carried before their eyes the alluring
hope of what they were to find.

This Boone, whose eyes, set in a freckled face, were as blue as overhead
skies and deep with a fathomless discontent, had neither past nor future
to contemplate--only a consuming hunger for a life less desolate. That
of his people was unaltered--save for a lapse into piteous human
lethargy--from the days when the other Boone had come on moccasined feet
to win the West--for they were the offspring of the stranded; the heirs
of the lost.

Over all the high, hunched steepness of the ranges, Autumn had wandered
with a palette of high colour and a brush of frost, splashing out the
summer's sun-burned green with champagne yellow, burgundy-red and
claret-crimson. To the nostrils, too, there floated with the
thistledown, hints of bursting ripe fox-grapes and apples ready for the
cider press.

Countless other times Boone had sat here on this top-rail in his
hodden-gray clothes and his slate-gray despair, making the same plaint,
and knowing that only a miracle would ever bring around the road's
turning anything less commonplace than a yoke of oxen or a native as
drab as the mule he straddled.

Yet as the boy capped his lamentation with a sigh that seemed to
struggle up from the depths of his being, a breeze whispered along the
mountain sides; the crisp leaves stirred to a tinkle like low laughter
and there materialized a horseman