The Wiving of Lance Cleaverage

After his father left him, Lance slept, the sleep of a condemned and shriven man, long and deep and dreamless, the first sound rest his tortured nerves and flagging powers had k...

GRANNY YEARWOOD--the grandmother of Flenton Hands and his sisters--was dead. The work-hardened old body had parted with its flame of life reluctantly; for nearly a year she had...

THE inheritance of Lance Cleaverage came to him from his maternal grandfather. Jesse Lance had felt it bitterly when his handsome high-spirited youngest daughter ran away with K...

THE Derfs occupied a peculiar position among their Turkey Track neighbors. They had a considerable tincture of Cherokee Indian blood, no discredit in the Tennessee mountains, or...

LANCE Cleaverage remained at his father's house for a week, saying little, assisting deftly and adequately in the care of Callista, wondering always at the marvelous newcomer, a...

AFTER the episode of the ruined venison, Callista tried sulking--refusing to speak. But she found in Lance a power of silence that so far overmatched her own as to leave her dau...

NOON of summer in the highlands of Tennessee; the Cumberlands, robed in the mid-season's green, flashed here and there with banding and gemming of waters. The two Turkey Track M...

"I got to set down awhile till I can ketch my breath," the girl said jerkily. "I reckon I run half a mile hollerin' yo' name every step. Lance Cleaverage--and you never turned y...

WHEN Callista's gaze could no longer distinguish Lance on Satan, when the thick woods had swallowed up his moving figure at last, she turned to make ready the house for the even...

CALLISTA reached her grandfather's gate when the old man was just finishing that last pipe he loved to smoke in his big hickory arm chair on the porch before he lay down for his...

CALLISTA never referred to what Kimbro Cleaverage had told her; but she presently began, of necessity, to buy some things at the store for her own use, where she had formerly pu...

MARY ANN MARTHA GRIEVER was notorious all over the Big and Little Turkey Track neighborhoods, as "the worst chap the Lord A'mighty ever made and the old davil himself wouldn't h...

IT was inevitable that Callista should find promptly how impossible is the attitude of scornful miss to the married wife, particularly when her husband's daily labor must provid...

IN the skull-shaped pocket--which was the inner chamber of the cave where Lance lay, was neither light nor life. They were the bare ribs of the mountain that arched above him in...

LANCE found his father and Octavia Gentry awaiting him in the lean-to kitchen, Kimbro Cleaverage anxious and deprecating. Old Ajax had dodged the issue, and Sylvane was out in t...

IT was a strange day whose gray dawn brought Callista to her father-in-law's door. Where she had wandered, questioning, debating, agonizing, since she dismissed Flenton Hands at...

AND now gossip began to weave a confusing veil of myth around the deserted man, such as time and idle conjecture spread about a deserted house. One day, visitors to the cabin in...

WINTER was upon the cabin in the Gap. Through the long months much bitter knowledge had come to Callista. She found that she knew nothing a mountain wife ought to know. Finicall...

IT was nearly noon when Sylvane, reaching home by an obscure, roundabout trail, half perished from the cold, scouting the place long and fearfully before he dared enter, found t...

WEDNESDAY came, a glamorous day in early September. A breath of autumn had blown upon the mountains in the night, leaving the air inspiring--tingling cool in the shade, tingling...

DAWN was gray in the sky, a livid light beginning to make itself felt rather than seen above the mountains, while vast gulfs of shadows lingered in their folds, when Callista cl...

CALLISTA roused that morning, to see Lance moving, light-footed, a shadow between her and the first struggling blaze of the fire he had kindled. With sleepy surprise she noted h...

SUMMER lasted far into fall that year, its procession of long, fair, dreamful days like a strand of sumptuous beads. At the last of November came a dash of rain, frost, and agai...

UP the street tramped the two young fellows, Lance silent, pulling his hat down over his face, Fuson whistling in an absent, tuneless fashion. When they came to the store, Buck...

DOWN in Hepzibah, Flenton Hands and Derf had rented a store building close under the shadow of the Court House. Furtive grins were exchanged among those who knew; since it was e...

LANCE CLEAVERAGE'S wife had been many weeks in the home of her grandfather when it was noticed that Flenton Hands made occasion to come very frequently to the Gentry place. Ajax...

FOR a region of dwellers so scattered as those of the Turkey Tracks, the word neighborhood is a misnomer. Where the distances are so great from house to house, where there is no...

LANCE CLEAVERAGE lay in the cavern above the East Fork of Caney for nearly two weeks. The search for him was persistent, even savage, the reason given being that he had attempte...

THE dark hours of that January night saw the two brothers riding hard up into the mountains toward that tiny cleft in the peaks above East Caney where Lance now remembered the c...