my way. How about
it?"

Boone did not immediately reply. He merely poured out of his wide and
innocent blue eyes a scrutiny as inquisitorial as though he had been
stationed here on picket duty and were vested with full authority to
halt whomsoever approached.

While the newcomer sat, waiting in his saddle, Boone Wellver vaulted
lightly down from fence rail to gravel roadway and, standing there as
slim yet as sturdy as a hickory sapling, raised one hand towards the
mule's flank, but arrested it midway as he inquired, "Thet critter o'
yourn--hit don't foller kickin', does hit?"

"Stand clear of its heels," cautioned the man hastily. "I've known this
beast only since morning--but as acquaintance ripens, admiration wanes.
What's your name?"

"Boone Wellver. What's yourn?"

"Mine is Victor McCalloway. Does your father live near here?"

"Hain't got no daddy."

"Your mother, then?"

"Hain't got no mammy nuther."

The stranger gazed down from his saddle with interested eyes, and under
the steadiness of his scrutiny Boone was smitten with an abrupt
self-consciousness.

"Don't you belong to any one at all?" The question was put slowly, but
the reply came with prompt and prideful certitude.

"I'm my own man. I dwells with a passel of old granny folks an'
gray-heads, though." Having so enlightened his questioner, he added with
a ring of pride, as though having confessed the unflattering truth about
his immediate household, he was entitled to boast a little of more
distant connections:

"Asa Gregory's my fust cousin by blood. I reckon ye've done heered tell
of him, hain't ye?"

Across the face of Victor McCalloway flitted the ghost of a satirical
smile, which he speedily repressed.

"Yes," he said briefly with non-committal gravity, "I've heard of him."

To the outer world from which McCalloway came few mountain names had
percolated, attended by notability. A hermit people they are and
unheralded beyond their own environment--yet now and then the reputation
of one of them will not be denied. So the newspaper columns had given
Asa Gregory space, headlines even, linking to his name such appositives
as "mountain desperado" and "feud-killer."

When he had shot old John Carr to death in the highway, such unstinted
publicity had been accorded to his acts--such shudder-provoking fulness
of detail--that Asa had found in it a very embarrassment of fame.

But the boy spoke the name of his kinsman in accents of unquestio