like that it is; and if the boy does
what's right, he's to get it all some day; Ollie and Sammy has
been promised ever since the talk first began about his goin'; but
they'll wait now until he gets through his schoolin'. It'll be
mighty nice for Sammy, marryin' Ollie, but we'll miss her awful;
the whole country will miss her, too. She's just the life of the
neighborhood, and everybody 'lows there never was another girl
like her. Poor child, she ain't had no mother since she was a
little trick, and she has always come to me for everything like,
us bein' such close neighbors, and all. But law! sir, I ain't a
blamin' her a mite for goin', with her Daddy a runnin' with that
ornery Wash Gibbs the way he does."

Again the man felt called upon to express his interest; "Is Mr.
Lane in business with this man Gibbs?"

"Law, no! that is, don't nobody know about any business; I reckon
it's all on account of those old Bald Knobbers; they used to hold
their meetin's on top of Dewey yonder, and folks do say a man was
burned there once, because he told some of their secrets. Well,
Jim and Wash's daddy, and Wash, all belonged, 'though Wash himself
wasn't much more than a boy then; and when the government broke up
the gang, old man Gibbs was killed, and Jim went to Texas. It was
there that Sammy's Ma died. When Jim come back it wasn't long
before he was mighty thick again with Wash and his crowd down on
the river, and he's been that way ever since. There's them that
says it's the same old gang, what's left of them, and some thinks
too that Jim and Wash knows about the old Dewey mine."

Mr. Howitt, remembering his conversation with Jed Holland, asked
encouragingly, "Is this mine a very rich one?"

"Don't nobody rightly know about that, sir," answered Aunt Mollie.
"This is how it was: away back when the Injuns was makin' trouble
'cause the government was movin' them west to the territory, this
old man Dewey lived up there somewhere on that mountain. He was a
mighty queer old fellow; didn't mix up with the settlers at all,
except Uncle Josh Hensley's boy who wasn't right smart, and didn't
nobody know where he come from nor nothing; but all the same,
'twas him that warned the settlers of the trouble, and helped them
all through it, scoutin' and such. And one time when they was
about out of bullets and didn't have nothin' to make more out of,
Colonel Dewey took a couple of men and some mules up on that
mountain yonder in the night, and