Chapter 9

The rest seemed quite willing to go slow, and, as they put their pistols up, Devil Judd laughed in his beard. Hale put young Dave on a horse and the little shotgun cavalcade quietly moved away toward the county-seat.

The crestfallen Falins dispersed the other way after they had taken a parting shot at the Hon. Samuel Budd, who, too, had a pistol in his hand. Young Buck looked long at him--and then he laughed:

“You, too, Sam Budd,” he said. “We folks'll rickollect this on election day.” The Hon. Sam deigned no answer.

And up in the store Devil Judd lighted his pipe and sat down to think out the strange code of ethics that governed that police-guard. Hale had told him to wait there, and it was almost noon before the boy with the cap came to tell him that the Falins had all left town. The old man looked at him kindly.

“Air you the little feller whut fit fer June?”

“Not yet,” said Bob; “but it's coming.”

“Well, you'll whoop him.”

“I'll do my best.”

“Whar is she?”

“She's waiting for you over at the boarding-house.”

“Does she know about this trouble?”

“Not a thing; she thinks you've come to take her home.” The old man made no answer, and Bob led him back toward Hale's office. June was waiting at the gate, and the boy, lifting his cap, passed on. June's eyes were dark with anxiety.

“You come to take me home, dad?”

“I been thinkin' 'bout it,” he said, with a doubtful shake of his head.

June took him upstairs to her room and pointed out the old water-wheel through the window and her new clothes (she had put on her old homespun again when she heard he was in town), and the old man shook his head.

“I'm afeerd 'bout all these fixin's--you won't never be satisfied agin in Lonesome Cove.”

“Why, dad,” she said reprovingly. “Jack says I can go over whenever I please, as soon as the weather gits warmer and the roads gits good.”

“I don't know,” said the old man, still shaking his head.

All through dinner she was worried. Devil Judd hardly ate anything, so embarrassed was he by the presence of so many “furriners” and by the white cloth and table-ware, and so fearful was he that he would be guilty of some breach of manners. Resolutely he refused butter, and at the third urging by Mrs. Crane he said firmly, but with a shrewd twinkle in his eye:

“No, thank ye. I never eats butter in town. I've kept store myself,” and he was no little pleased with the laugh that went around the table. The fact was he was generally pleased with June's environment and, after dinner, he stopped teasing June.

“No, honey, I ain't goin' to take you away. I want ye to stay right where ye air. Be a good girl now and do whatever Jack Hale tells ye and tell that boy with all that hair to come over and see me.” June grew almost tearful with gratitude, for never had he called her “honey” before that she could remember, and never had he talked so much to her, nor with so much kindness.

“Air ye comin' over soon?”

“Mighty soon, dad.”

“Well, take keer o' yourself.”

“I will, dad,” she said, and tenderly she watched his great figure slouch out of sight.

An hour after dark, as old Judd sat on the porch of the cabin in Lonesome Cove, young Dave Tolliver rode up to the gate on a strange horse. He was in a surly mood.

“He lemme go at the head of the valley and give me this hoss to git here,” the boy grudgingly explained. “I'm goin' over to git mine termorrer.”

“Seems like you'd better keep away from that Gap,” said the old man dryly, and Dave reddened angrily.

“Yes, and fust thing you know he'll be over hyeh atter YOU.” The old man turned on him sternly.

“Jack Hale knows that liquer was mine. He knows I've got a still over hyeh as well as you do--an' he's never axed a question nor peeped an eye. I reckon he would come if he thought he oughter--but I'm on this side of the state-line. If I was on his side, mebbe I'd stop.”

Young Dave stared, for things were surely coming to a pretty pass in Lonesome Cove.

“An' I reckon,” the old man went on, “hit 'ud be better grace in you to stop sayin' things agin' him; fer if it hadn't been fer him, you'd be laid out by them Falins by this time.”

It was true, and Dave, silenced, was forced into another channel.

“I wonder,” he said presently, “how them Falins always know when I go over thar.”

“I've been studyin' about that myself,” said Devil Judd. Inside, the old step-mother had heard Dave's query.

“I seed the Red Fox this afternoon,” she quavered at the door.

“Whut was he doin' over hyeh?” asked Dave.

“Nothin',” she said, “jus' a-sneakin' aroun' the way he's al'ays a-doin'. Seemed like he was mighty pertickuler to find out when you was comin' back.”

Both men started slightly.

“We're all Tollivers now all right,” said the Hon. Samuel Budd that night while he sat with Hale on the porch overlooking the mill-pond--and then he groaned a little.

“Them Falins have got kinsfolks to burn on the Virginia side and they'd fight me tooth and toenail for this a hundred years hence!”

He puffed his pipe, but Hale said nothing.

“Yes, sir,” he added cheerily, “we're in for a hell of a merry time NOW. The mountaineer hates as long as he remembers and--he never forgets.”

XV

Hand in hand, Hale and June followed the footsteps of spring from the time June met him at the school-house gate for their first walk into the woods. Hale pointed to some boys playing marbles.

“That's the first sign,” he said, and with quick understanding June smiled.

The birdlike piping of hylas came from a marshy strip of woodland that ran through the centre of the town and a toad was croaking at the foot of Imboden Hill.

“And they come next.”

They crossed the swinging foot-bridge, which was a miracle to June, and took the foot-path along the clear stream of South Fork, under the laurel which June called “ivy,” and the rhododendron which was “laurel” in her speech, and Hale pointed out catkins greening on alders in one swampy place and willows just blushing into life along the banks of a little creek. A few yards aside from the path he found, under a patch of snow and dead leaves, the pink-and-white blossoms and the waxy green leaves of the trailing arbutus, that fragrant harbinger of the old Mother's awakening, and June breathed in from it the very breath of spring. Near by were turkey peas, which she had hunted and eaten many times.

“You can't put that arbutus in a garden,” said Hale, “it's as wild as a hawk.”

Presently he had the little girl listen to a pewee twittering in a thorn-bush and the lusty call of a robin from an apple-tree. A bluebird flew over-head with a merry chirp--its wistful note of autumn long since forgotten. These were the first birds and flowers, he said, and June, knowing them only by sight, must know the name of each and the reason for that name. So that Hale found himself walking the woods with an interrogation point, and that he might not be confounded he had, later, to dip up much forgotten lore. For every walk became a lesson in botany for June, such a passion did she betray at once for flowers, and he rarely had to tell her the same thing twice, since her memory was like a vise--for everything, as he learned in time.

Her eyes were quicker than his, too, and now she pointed to a snowy blossom with a deeply lobed leaf.

“Whut's that?”

“Bloodroot,” said Hale, and he scratched the stem and forth issued scarlet drops. “The Indians used to put it on their faces and tomahawks”--she knew that word and nodded--“and I used to make red ink of it when I was a little boy.”

“No!” said June. With the next look she found a tiny bunch of fuzzy hepaticas.

“Liver-leaf.”

“Whut's liver?”

Hale, looking at her glowing face and eyes and her perfect little body, imagined that she would never know unless told that she had one, and so he waved one hand vaguely at his chest:

“It's an organ--and that herb is supposed to be good for it.”

“Organ? Whut's that?”

“Oh, something inside of you.”

June made the same gesture that Hale had.

“Me?”

“Yes,” and then helplessly, “but not there exactly.”

June's eyes had caught something else now and she ran for it:

“Oh! Oh!” It was a bunch of delicate anemones of intermediate shades between white and red-yellow, pink and purple-blue.

“Those are anemones.”

“A-nem-o-nes,” repeated June.

“Wind-flowers--because the wind is supposed to open them.” And, almost unconsciously, Hale lapsed into a quotation:

“'And where a tear has dropped, a wind-flower blows.'”

“Whut's that?” said June quickly.

“That's poetry.”

“Whut's po-e-try?” Hale threw up both hands.

“I don't know, but I'll read you some--some day.”

By that time she was gurgling with delight over a bunch of spring beauties that came up, root, stalk and all, when she reached for them.

“Well, ain't they purty?” While they lay in her hand and she looked, the rose-veined petals began to close, the leaves to droop and the stem got limp.

“Ah-h!” crooned June. “I won't pull up no more o' THEM.”

'“These little dream-flowers found in the spring.' More poetry, June.”

A little later he heard her repeating that line to herself. It was an easy step to poetry from flowers, and evidently June was groping for it.

A few days later the service-berry swung out white stars on the low hill-sides, but Hale could tell her nothing that she did not know about the “sarvice-berry.” Soon, the dogwood swept in snowy gusts along the mountains, and from a bank of it one morning a red-bird flamed and sang: “What cheer! What cheer! What cheer!” And like its scarlet coat the red-bud had burst into bloom. June knew the red-bud, but she had never heard it called the Judas tree.

“You see, the red-bud was supposed to be poisonous. It shakes in the wind and says to the bees, 'Come on, little fellows--here's your nice fresh honey, and when they come, it betrays and poisons them.”

“Well, what do you think o' that!” said June indignantly, and Hale had to hedge a bit.

“Well, I don't know whether it REALLY does, but that's what they SAY.” A little farther on the white stars of the trillium gleamed at them from the border of the woods and near by June stooped over some lovely sky-blue blossoms with yellow eyes.

“Forget-me-nots,” said Hale. June stooped to gather them with a radiant face.

“Oh,” she said, “is that what you call 'em?”

“They aren't the real ones--they're false forget-me-nots.”

“Then I don't want 'em,” said June. But they were beautiful and fragrant and she added gently:

“'Tain't their fault. I'm agoin' to call 'em jus' forget-me-nots, an' I'm givin' 'em to you,” she said--“so that you won't.”

“Thank you,” said Hale gravely. “I won't.”

They found larkspur, too--

“'Blue as the heaven it gazes at,'” quoted Hale.

“Whut's 'gazes'?”

“Looks.” June looked up at the sky and down at the flower.

“Tain't,” she said, “hit's bluer.”

When they discovered something Hale did not know he would say that it was one of those--

“'Wan flowers without a name.'”

“My!” said June at last, “seems like them wan flowers is a mighty big fambly.”

“They are,” laughed Hale, “for a bachelor like me.”

“Huh!” said June.

Later, they ran upon yellow adder's tongues in a hollow, each blossom guarded by a pair of ear-like leaves, Dutchman's breeches and wild bleeding hearts--a name that appealed greatly to the fancy of the romantic little lady, and thus together they followed the footsteps of that spring. And while she studied the flowers Hale was studying the loveliest flower of them all--little June. About ferns, plants and trees as well, he told her all he knew, and there seemed nothing in the skies, the green world of the leaves or the under world at her feet to which she was not magically responsive. Indeed, Hale had never seen a man, woman or child so eager to learn, and one day, when she had apparently reached the limit of inquiry, she grew very thoughtful and he watched her in silence a long while.

“What's the matter, June?” he asked finally.

“I'm just wonderin' why I'm always axin' why,” said little June.

She was learning in school, too, and she was happier there now, for there had been no more open teasing of the new pupil. Bob's championship saved her from that, and, thereafter, school changed straightway for June. Before that day she had kept apart from her school-fellows at recess-times as well as in the school-room. Two or three of the girls had made friendly advances to her, but she had shyly repelled them--why she hardly knew--and it was her lonely custom at recess-times to build a play-house at the foot of a great beech with moss, broken bits of bottles and stones. Once she found it torn to pieces and from the look on the face of the tall mountain boy, Cal Heaton, who had grinned at her when she went up for her first lesson, and who was now Bob's arch-enemy, she knew that he was the guilty one. Again a day or two later it was destroyed, and when she came down from the woods almost in tears, Bob happened to meet her in the road and made her tell the trouble she was in. Straightway he charged the trespasser with the deed and was lied to for his pains. So after school that day he slipped up on the hill with the little girl and helped her rebuild again.

“Now I'll lay for him,” said Bob, “and catch him at it.”

“All right,” said June, and she looked both her worry and her gratitude so that Bob understood both; and he answered both with a nonchalant wave of one hand.

“Never you mind--and don't you tell Mr. Hale,” and June in dumb acquiescence crossed heart and body. But the mountain boy was wary, and for two or three days the play-house was undisturbed and so Bob himself laid a trap. He mounted his horse immediately after school, rode past the mountain lad, who was on his way home, crossed the river, made a wide detour at a gallop and, hitching his horse in the woods, came to the play-house from the other side of the hill. And half an hour later, when the pale little teacher came out of the school-house, he heard grunts and blows and scuffling up in the woods, and when he ran toward the sounds, the bodies of two of his pupils rolled into sight clenched fiercely, with torn clothes and bleeding faces--Bob on top with the mountain boy's thumb in his mouth and his own fingers gripped about his antagonist's throat. Neither paid any attention to the school-master, who pulled at Bob's coat unavailingly and with horror at his ferocity. Bob turned his head, shook it as well as the thumb in his mouth would let him, and went on gripping the throat under him and pushing the head that belonged to it into the ground. The mountain boy's tongue showed and his eyes bulged.

“'Nough!” he yelled. Bob rose then and told his story and the school-master from New England gave them a short lecture on gentleness and Christian charity and fixed on each the awful penalty of “staying in” after school for an hour every day for a week. Bob grinned:

“All right, professor--it was worth it,” he said, but the mountain lad shuffled silently away.

An hour later Hale saw the boy with a swollen lip, one eye black and the other as merry as ever--but after that there was no more trouble for June. Bob had made his promise good and gradually she came into the games with her fellows there-after, while Bob stood or sat aside, encouraging but taking no part--for was he not a member of the Police Force? Indeed he was already known far and wide as the Infant of the Guard, and always he carried a whistle and usually, outside the school-house, a pistol bumped his hip, while a Winchester stood in one corner of his room and a billy dangled by his mantel-piece.

The games were new to June, and often Hale would stroll up to the school-house to watch them--Prisoner's Base, Skipping the Rope, Antny Over, Cracking the Whip and Lifting the Gate; and it pleased him to see how lithe and active his little protege was and more than a match in strength even for the boys who were near her size. June had to take the penalty of her greenness, too, when she was “introduced to the King and Queen” and bumped the ground between the make-believe sovereigns, or got a cup of water in her face when she was trying to see stars through a pipe. And the boys pinned her dress to the bench through a crack and once she walked into school with a placard on her back which read:

“June-Bug.” But she was so good-natured that she fast became a favourite. Indeed it was noticeable to Hale as well as Bob that Cal Heaton, the mountain boy, seemed always to get next to June in the Tugs of War, and one morning June found an apple on her desk. She swept the room with a glance and met Cal's guilty flush, and though she ate the apple, she gave him no thanks--in word, look or manner. It was curious to Hale, moreover, to observe how June's instinct deftly led her to avoid the mistakes in dress that characterized the gropings of other girls who, like her, were in a stage of transition. They wore gaudy combs and green skirts with red waists, their clothes bunched at the hips, and to their shoes and hands they paid no attention at all. None of these things for June--and Hale did not know that the little girl had leaped her fellows with one bound, had taken Miss Anne Saunders as her model and was climbing upon the pedestal where that lady justly stood. The two had not become friends as Hale hoped. June was always silent and reserved when the older girl was around, but there was never a move of the latter's hand or foot or lip or eye that the new pupil failed to see. Miss Anne rallied Hale no little about her, but he laughed good-naturedly, and asked why SHE could not make friends with June.

“She's jealous,” said Miss Saunders, and Hale ridiculed the idea, for not one sign since she came to the Gap had she shown him. It was the jealousy of a child she had once betrayed and that she had outgrown, he thought; but he never knew how June stood behind the curtains of her window, with a hungry suffering in her face and eyes, to watch Hale and Miss Anne ride by and he never guessed that concealment was but a sign of the dawn of womanhood that was breaking within her. And she gave no hint of that breaking dawn until one day early in May, when she heard a woodthrush for the first time with Hale: for it was the bird she loved best, and always its silver fluting would stop her in her tracks and send her into dreamland. Hale had just broken a crimson flower from its stem and held it out to her.

“Here's another of the 'wan ones,' June. Do you know what that is?”

“Hit's”--she paused for correction with her lips drawn severely in for precision--“IT'S a mountain poppy. Pap says it kills goslings”--her eyes danced, for she was in a merry mood that day, and she put both hands behind her--“if you air any kin to a goose, you better drap it.”

“That's a good one,” laughed Hale, “but it's so lovely I'll take the risk. I won't drop it.”

“Drop it,” caught June with a quick upward look, and then to fix the word in her memory she repeated--“drop it, drop it, DROP it!”

“Got it now, June?”

“Uh-huh.”

It was then that a woodthrush voiced the crowning joy of spring, and with slowly filling eyes she asked its name.

“That bird,” she said slowly and with a breaking voice, “sung just that-a-way the mornin' my sister died.”

She turned to him with a wondering smile.

“Somehow it don't make me so miserable, like it useter.” Her smile passed while she looked, she caught both hands to her heaving breast and a wild intensity burned suddenly in her eyes.

“Why, June!”

“'Tain't nothin',” she choked out, and she turned hurriedly ahead of him down the path. Startled, Hale had dropped the crimson flower to his feet. He saw it and he let it lie.

Meanwhile, rumours were brought in that the Falins were coming over from Kentucky to wipe out the Guard, and so straight were they sometimes that the Guard was kept perpetually on watch. Once while the members were at target practice, the shout arose:

“The Kentuckians are coming! The Kentuckians are coming!” And, at double quick, the Guard rushed back to find it a false alarm and to see men laughing at them in the street. The truth was that, while the Falins had a general hostility against the Guard, their particular enmity was concentrated on John Hale, as he discovered when June was to take her first trip home one Friday afternoon. Hale meant to carry her over, but the morning they were to leave, old Judd Tolliver came to the Gap himself. He did not want June to come home at that time, and he didn't think it was safe over there for Hale just then. Some of the Falins had been seen hanging around Lonesome Cove for the purpose, Judd believed, of getting a shot at the man who had kept young Dave from falling into their hands, and Hale saw that by that act he had, as Budd said, arrayed himself with the Tollivers in the feud. In other words, he was a Tolliver himself now, and as such the Falins meant to treat him. Hale rebelled against the restriction, for he had started some work in Lonesome Cove and was preparing a surprise over there for June, but old Judd said:

“Just wait a while,” and he said it so seriously that Hale for a while took his advice.

So June stayed on at the Gap--with little disappointment, apparently, that she could not visit home. And as spring passed and the summer came on, the little girl budded and opened like a rose. To the pretty school-teacher she was a source of endless interest and wonder, for while the little girl was reticent and aloof, Miss Saunders felt herself watched and studied in and out of school, and Hale often had to smile at June's unconscious imitation of her teacher in speech, manners and dress. And all the time her hero-worship of Hale went on, fed by the talk of the boardinghouse, her fellow pupils and of the town at large--and it fairly thrilled her to know that to the Falins he was now a Tolliver himself.

Sometimes Hale would get her a saddle, and then June would usurp Miss Anne's place on a horseback-ride up through the gap to see the first blooms of the purple rhododendron on Bee Rock, or up to Morris's farm on Powell's mountain, from which, with a glass, they could see the Lonesome Pine. And all the time she worked at her studies tirelessly--and when she was done with her lessons, she read the fairy books that Hale got for her--read them until “Paul and Virginia” fell into her hands, and then there were no more fairy stories for little June. Often, late at night, Hale, from the porch of his cottage, could see the light of her lamp sending its beam across the dark water of the mill-pond, and finally he got worried by the paleness of her face and sent her to the doctor. She went unwillingly, and when she came back she reported placidly that “organatically she was all right, the doctor said,” but Hale was glad that vacation would soon come. At the beginning of the last week of school he brought a little present for her from New York--a slender necklace of gold with a little reddish stone-pendant that was the shape of a cross. Hale pulled the trinket from his pocket as they were walking down the river-bank at sunset and the little girl quivered like an aspen-leaf in a sudden puff of wind.

“Hit's a fairy-stone,” she cried excitedly.

“Why, where on earth did you--”

“Why, sister Sally told me about 'em. She said folks found 'em somewhere over here in Virginny, an' all her life she was a-wishin' fer one an' she never could git it”--her eyes filled--“seems like ever'thing she wanted is a-comin' to me.”

“Do you know the story of it, too?” asked Hale.

June shook her head. “Sister Sally said it was a luck-piece. Nothin' could happen to ye when ye was carryin' it, but it was awful bad luck if you lost it.” Hale put it around her neck and fastened the clasp and June kept hold of the little cross with one hand.

“Well, you mustn't lose it,” he said.