morning after the stranger had arrived. She started out
at her usual reckless gait, but that was because she knew that
Young Matt was watching her.

Once in the timber, the brown pony was pulled to a walk, and by
the time they came out into the open again, the little horse,
unrebuked by his mistress, was snatching mouthfuls of grass as he
strolled along the trail. Sammy was thinking; thinking very
seriously. Aunt Mollie's parting question had stirred the girl
deeply.

Sammy had seen few people who did not belong to the backwoods. The
strangers she had met were hunters or cattlemen, and these had all
been, in dress and manner, not unlike the natives themselves. This
man, who had come so unexpectedly out of the mists the night
before, was unlike anyone the young woman had ever known. Like Jed
Holland, she felt somehow as if he were a superior being. The
Matthews family were different in many ways from those born and
raised in the hills. And Sammy's father, too, was different. But
this stranger--it was quite as though he belonged to another
world.

Coming to the big, low gap, the girl looked far away to the blue
line of hills, miles, and miles away. The stranger had come from
over these, she thought; and then she fell to wondering what that
world beyond the farthest cloud-like ridge was like.

Of all the people Sammy had ever known, young Stewart was the only
one who had seen even the edge of that world to tell her about it.
Her father and her friends, the Matthews's, never talked of the
old days. She had known Ollie from a child. With Young Matt they
had gone to and from the log school house along the same road.
Once, before Mr. Stewart's death, the boy had gone with his father
for a day's visit to the city, and ever after had been a hero to
his backwoods schoolmates. It was this distinction, really, that
first won Sammy's admiration, and made them sweethearts before the
girl's skirts had touched the tops of her shoes. Before the woman
in her was fairly awake she had promised to be his wife; and they
were going away now to live in that enchanted land.

Spying an extra choice bunch of grass a few steps to one side of
the path, Brownie turned suddenly toward the valley; and the
girl's eyes left the distant ridge for the little cabin and the
sheep corral in Mutton Hollow. Sammy always spoke of that cabin as
"Young Matt's house." And, all unbidden now, the thought came, who
would live with the big fellow down there i