horseman quietly, with the manner of one who teaches by precept. "I'm a preacher of ther Gawspel. Air ye Fletch's boy?"

"Huh-huh. Hain't thet woman got no terbaccy nuther?"

Evidently whatever other characteristics went into this youth's nature he was admirably gifted with tenacity and singleness of purpose. Juanita Holland smiled, as she shook her head and replied, "I'm a woman and I don't use tobacco."

"The hell ye don't!" The boy paused, then added scornfully, "My mammy chaws and smokes, too—but she don't straddle no hoss." After that administration of rebuke he deigned once more to recognize the missionary's insistent queries, though with the laconic impatience of extreme ennui.

"I tell ye Fletch hain't hyar." The boy started disgustedly away, but paused in passing to jerk his head toward the house and added, "Ye mout axe thet woman ef ye've a mind ter."

The travelers raised their eyes and saw a second figure standing with hands on hips staring at them from the distance. It was the slovenly figure of a woman, clad in a colorless and shapeless skirt and an equally shapeless jacket which hung unbelted about her thick waist. As she came slowly forward the girl began to take in other details. The woman was barefooted and walked with a shambling gait which made Juanita think of bears pacing their barred enclosures in a zoo. Her face was hard and unsmiling, and the wrinkles about her eyes were those of anxious and lean years, but the eyes themselves were not unkind.

Her lips were tight clamped on the stem of a clay pipe.

"Evenin', ma'am," began the mountaineer. "I'm Good Anse Talbott. I reckon mebby ye've heered tell of me. This lady is Miss Holland from down below. I 'lowed Flech mout let us tarry hyar till sun-up.” "I reckon he mout ef he war hyar, though we don't foller takin' in strangers," was the dubious reply; "but he hain't hyar."

66

"Where air he at?"

"Don't know.

ye rid along?"

Didn't ye see him down the road as

“Wall, now—" drawled the missionary, "I hain't skeercely as well acquainted hyarabouts as further up Tribulation. What manner o' lookin' man air he?"

"He don't look like nothin' much," replied his wife morosely. "He's jest an ornery-lookin' old man.” "Whither did he sot out ter go when he left hyar?" The woman shook her head, then a grim flash of latent wrath broke in her eyes.

"I'll jest let ye hev the truth, stranger. Some triflin' fellers done sa'ntered past hyar with a jug of licker, an' thet fool Fletch hes jest done follered 'em off. Thet's all thar is to hit an' he hain't got no license ter ack thetaway nuther. I reckon by now he's a-layin' drunk somewhars."

For a moment there was silence through which drifted the distant tinkle of cowbells down the creek. Beyond the crests lingered only a lemon afterglow as relict of the dead day. The brown, colorless man astride his mule sat stupidly looking down at the brown colorless woman across the stile. The waiting girl

heard the preacher surmising that "mebby he'd better sot out in s'arch of Fletch." The words seemed to come from a great distance and her head swam giddily. Then overcome with disgust and weariness, Juanita Holland saw the afterglow turn slowly to pale gray and then to black shot through with orange spots. She grew suddenly indifferent to the situation. She swayed in her saddle and slipped limply to the ground. The young woman who had come to conquer the mountains and carry a torch of enlightenment to their illiteracy, had fainted from heartsickness and weariness at the threshold of her invasion.

CHAPTER III

HE weariness which caused the fainting spell

THE

must have lengthened its duration, for when Juanita's lashes flickered upward again and her brain came gropingly back to consciousness she was no longer out by the stile. Yet there could not have been a great interval either for now as the girl looked up the parallelogram of a door frame showed that though the twilight was dying the twilight's ghost still lingered. At the top of the opening was yet a streak of afterglow, paling and graying, and over it hung a single, diamond-clear star.

She noticed that detail before she became aware of nearer things. Gradually consciousness ceased to be fragmentary. She was lying in the smothering softness of a feather bed. On her palate and tongue lingered an unfamiliar, sweetish taste, while through her veins she felt the coursing of a warm glow. Over her stood the woman who had been across the stile when she fainted. Her attitude was anxiously watchful. In one hand she held a stone jug, and in the other a gourd dipper. So that accounted for the taste and the glow, and as Juanita took in the circumstance she heard the high nasal voice, pitched none the less in a tone of kindly reassurance.

"Ye'll be spry as a squirrel in a leetle spell, honey. Don't fret yoreself none. Ye war jest plumb tuckered

out an' ye swooned. I've been a rubbin' yore hands an' a pourin' a little white licker down yore throat. Don't worrit yoreself none. We're pore folks an' we hain't got much, but I reckon we kin mek out ter enjoy ye somehow."

The four walls of the cabin might have been the rocky confines of a mountain cavern, so completely did they merge into the impalpable and sooty murk that hung between them, obliterating all remoter outline. Only things in a narrow circle grew visible and at the center of this lighted area was the slender figure of a girl, holding up a lard taper, whose radius of light was yellow and flickering.

The girl on the bed smiled and murmured her thanks, and as the other girl, younger and unspeakably shy, felt the eyes of the strange woman from the great unknown world upon her, her own dark lashes fell timidly and the hand that held the taper trembled, while into her cheeks crept a carmine self-consciousness. She was looking at the most beautiful creature she had ever seen, and the diffidence with which her isolated little life had been always fettered grew as poignant as though she were in the presence of some rare and superior being. And Juanita, for her part, felt in her veins a new and subtler glow than that which the moonshine whiskey had quickened. The men and women of the hills had made her heart-sick with their stolid and animal-like coarseness. Now she saw a slender figure in which the lines were yet transitory between the straightness of childhood and the budding curves of womanhood. She saw a well-borne head surmounted by a mass of tangled hair which the taper lighted into