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The Wiving of Lance Cleaverage

By

Alice MacGowan

Author of
"Judith of the Cumberlands," "The Last Word," "Huldah,"
"Return," etc.

With Illustrations in Colour by Robert Edwards

G. P. Putnam's Sons

New York and London

The Knickerbocker Press

1909

Copyright, 1909

ALICE MacGOWAN

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

To

Emma Bell Miles

WHO COULD WITHOUT DOUBT HAVE WRITTEN

MUCH BETTER THIS STORY OF HER OWN HOME COUNTRY

THE BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED

BY

The Author

CONTENTS

I. A Pair of Haggards 1

II. The Up-Sitting 19

III. The Burying 39

IV. A Dance and a Serenade 50

V. The Asking 70

VI. The Wedding 88

VII. Lance's Laurel 104

VIII. The Infare 124

IX. The Interloper 140

X. Poverty Pride 154

XI. "Long Sweetenin'" 168

XII. "What Shall He Have Who Killed the Deer?" 182

XIII. Broken Chords 193

XIV. Roxy Griever's Guest 211

XV. A Stubborn Heart 223

XVI. Lance Cleaverage's Son 237

XVII. The Coasts of the Island 247

XVIII. The Hegira 266

XIX. Callista Cleaverage Goes Home 277

XX. Drawn Blank 293

XXI. Flenton Hands 300

XXII. The Speech of People 309

XXIII. Buck Fuson's Idea 321

XXIV. Silenced 330

XXV. The Flight 340

XXVI. Roxy Griever 345

XXVII. In Hiding 357

XXVIII. The Sheriff Scores 371

XXIX. The Island at Last 377

Illustrations

"I was just a-studyin' on the matter." Frontispiece

"A Face, Passion-Pale, was Raised to him, and Eager, Tremulous
Lips Met his." 66

"You'll Marry us now--or not at all." 98

"He Placed the Instrument in Ola's Grasp." 202

"He Gazed long at Callista's Face on the Pillow." 246

"He Broke off, Staring with Open Mouth." 336

The Wiving of Lance Cleaverage

CHAPTER I.

A PAIR OF HAGGARDS.

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 Mountains,
Big and Little, lying side by side and one running so evenly
from the other that only the dweller upon them knew where to
differentiate, basked in the full glow of a Sabbath morning
radiance.

A young fellow of twenty-three, crossing the crown of a higher
hill, tonsured years ago by the axe of some settler, but offering
half way up its side resistance of undergrowth and saplings,
paused a moment in the open to look down. Below him the first
church bell had just rung in the little gray structure across
the creek. Shining above the ocean of woods and the cabin homes
that, like islets, dotted the forest at wide intervals, the Sabbath
sun caught and lightened upon something [2] bright, swung upon the
newcomer's back. Himself as yet unseen, he gazed down upon this
his world, spread map-like below him. He could pick out everybody's
home. Each one of those cabins wore to-day, from porch floors
hollowed with much scouring to inner cupboard niche, an air of
Sunday expectancy that lacked little of being sanctimonious. Only
the house-mother remained in charge of each, preparing the Sunday
company dinner with even more outlay of energy than the preceding
six had required. The men had, by common consent, adjourned to
spring, barn, the shelter of big trees in the yard; he caught
glimpses of the young folks below him on the woods-paths, attired
in their brightest frocks and shirts, and whatever finery they
could command, sauntering by twos and threes toward preaching.
His smiling, impersonal gaze was aware of Callista Gentry sitting
on a rock above the spring, holding a sort of woodland state like
a rustic queen. The time of roses was past in this southern land,
but every dooryard in the Turkey Tracks was painted gay with
hollyhocks, while in ravine and thicket flamed the late azaleas,
ranging from clear pale yellow, through buff and orange, to crimson.
These lay piled in a sheaf beside the big gray rock, and the girl
who sat there was showing her mates how to trim their hats with
them, while several boys looked on and presumably admired. [3]

The curious feature of Callista Gentry's following was, that it
included as many young women as young men, and the chariot
wheels of her mates looked robbed always, because, inferentially,
the man who courted any other would rather have Callista Gentry
if he might.

Coached and forwarded, exploited and made the most of ever since
she could remember; a bright, pretty child, and a dutiful student,
during her brief days of country schooling; her mother had from
infancy enforced all the rural arts of beauty culture to make
her what she was. Long home-knitted yarn gloves were worn to
protect the shapely hands and whiten them. The grand big mane of
ashen-blond hair was washed in fresh-caught rainwater, clipped
in the dark of the moon, combed and tended and kept as no one
else's hair was. Her sunbonnets were never the long-caped ungainly
affairs commonly seen; they took on, whether by accident or design
one could hardly say, the coquetry of a wood violet half-blown;
and when these were not in use, a broad hat shaded the exquisite
fairness of the oval cheek. Callista had grown up a delicate court
lady, smooth and fine to look upon, pink and white and golden, like
one of those rare orchids, marvelously veined and featured, known
only to the bees of the wood, whose loveliness is always ashiver
with peculiar vitality. This Sunday morning the lepidopteral
flutter of gay calicoes, and the bee-like murmur [4] of young male
voices in her court of youths and maidens, carried out well the
figure of the rare, moth-bewitching blossom.

"I wish't Lance Cleaverage'd come--then we'd see fun!" cried
Buck Fuson, rising to his knees and gazing across the slope.
"I'd ruther hear him and Callista fuss as to eat my dinner.
Them two has the masterest arguments I ever heared outside
of a law-court."

Brown little Ola Derf, sitting slightly apart from the others
braiding pine needles into a ring, looked up suddenly. A woman
at the spring below scooping a drink for a fat child, lifted a long
drab face and sighted in the same direction. This was the Widow
Griever, elder sister of Lance Cleaverage. Sour censor of public
morals that she was, Roxy Griever considered eighteen-year-old
Callista the young woman perfect, and found her own brother quite
unworthy of the paragon. Only the central figure of the group
appeared to take no notice, while the girls about her, at the
mere mention of Lance, all fluttered and resettled themselves
with a certain vague air of expectancy.

"You boys ought to be ashamed of yo'se'fs," Roxy Griever
reproved. Then apart to young Fuson, "Callista's got more sense
than to pay any attention to such a light-headed somebody as
that fool brother o' mine. Let me tell you, Callista Gentry has
more sense than any of you [5] men persons give her credit for.
She's a serious-minded gal. You Mary Ann Marthy, you quit
treadin' over yo' Sunday shoes." And she raised her small daughter
a bit from the pathway and set her down sharply, as though to
indicate the correct manner of walking in Sunday foot-gear.

The infant of the triple name--her Uncle Lance said she sounded
like twins if she didn't look it--put up a mutinous red mouth
and lowered from under flaxen brows.

"Me wants to hear 'em fuss," she muttered as she progressed
reluctantly toward the little church on the hill-side.

"Well, you ain't goin' to hear 'em fuss, and they ain't goin' to
fuss, and you couldn't hear 'em if they did," admonished her
mother lucidly, accelerating the infant's pace from the rear.
"The big spring ain't no place for chillen like you, and old
women like me. Let the light-minded and the ungodly do about in
such ef they will. You and me is goin' into the church house and
set thar till preachin'."

Fathers and mothers were herding their broods of lesser children
in, but boys and girls of older growth, young men and women of
an age to be thinking of mating, strolled by twos or sat on the
bank above the big spring that supplied the baptismal pool of
Brush Arbor church. Callista Gentry was wearing a new print
frock--and looking quite unconscious of the fact. [6]

"That ain't no five cent lawn," whispered Ola Derf enviously,
as she eyed it from afar. The Derf girl was an outsider at most
gatherings, and particularly so at church affairs. Everybody
knew she came to Brush Arbor only on a chance of seeing Lance
Cleaverage.

"Thar comes Lance now!" announced Fuson, and then winked at his
companions.

Callista never raised her glance, nor did the even tenor of her
speech falter, though something told the onlooker that she was
aware. A swift slight contraction of plumage like that of a hawk
suddenly on the alert, a richer glow on the softly oval cheek, a
light in the down-dropped eyes which she jealously hid, a
rearrangement, subtle and minute, of her attitude toward the
world, showed that she needed no sight nor hearing to advise her
of the coming of the lithe young fellow who approached from the
ragged second growth of the abandoned hillside clearing. He came
straight through, paying no attention to paths--that was Lance
Cleaverage. His step was light and sure, yet it rent and crushed
what was in his way. On his back swung the banjo; his soft felt
hat was off in his hand; as he moved, the sleeves of his blue
hickory shirt fluttered in the breeze that stirred his hair, and
he sang to himself as he came. What he sang was not a hymn. His
hazel eyes were almost as golden as the tan of his cheek, and
there was a spark [7] in the depths of them that matched the
audacious carriage of his head. At his advent the Widow Griever
turned and let the fat child find her way alone.

"You Lance," she began in a scandalized tone, "don't you bring
that sinful and ungodly thing into the house of the Lord. You
know mighty well and good the preacher is about to name you out
in meetin'; and here you go on seekin' the ways of the Evil One.
Pack that banjo straight back home this minute."

She evidently had as little expectation of Lance obeying her as
he had of doing so. Her words were plainly intended merely to
set forth her own position--to clear her skirts of reproach. The
young folks about her giggled and looked with open admiration at
the youth who dared to bring such a worldly object to Sunday
preaching.

"Banjo'll let the preacher alone, if the preacher'll let it
alone," smiled Lance, unconcernedly pulling the instrument
around to get at the strings, and touching them lightly. "You go
'long into the church and get your soul saved for Heaven, Sis'
Roxy. I reckon they need representatives of the Cleaverage
family in both places."

"Well, that's whar you're a-goin'--er more so," asserted the
widow with dignity, as she turned her back once more on the
young folks and moved away. [8]

Lance took the ribbon of his banjo from his neck and flung it
over a blossoming azalea bush.

     "I'll hang my harp on a willer tree,
      And away to the wars again,"

he hummed softly just above his breath.

"I don't aim to hurt the preacher's feelings. I won't take my
banjo into his church--sech doctrine as Drumright's is apt to be
mighty hard on banjo strings. Don't you-all want to have a
little dance after the meeting's out--on the Threshin'-floor
Rock up the branch?"

The girls looked duly horrified, all but Ola Derf, who spoke up
promptly,

"Yes--or come a-past our house. Pap don't mind a Sunday dance.
You will come, won't you, Lance?" pleadingly.

Callista Gentry did not dance. She had always, in the nature of
things, belonged to the class of young people in the mountains
who might be expected at any time to "profess" and join the
church. The musician laughed teasingly.

"I reckon we'd better not," he said finally. "Callista's scared.
She begged me into bringing my banjo to-day (you don't any of
you know the gal like I do), and now she's scared to listen to
it."

Callista barely raised her eyes at this speech, and spared to
make any denial.

"You-all that wants to dance on a Sunday [9] better go 'long
there," she said indifferently. "It's mighty near time for
preaching to begin, and you've got a right smart walk over to
the Derf place." Dismissing them thus coolly from her world, she
addressed herself once more to pinning a bunch of ochre and
crimson azaleas into the trimming of her broad hat.

"Lance," drawled Buck Fuson, "I hear you' cuttin' timber on yo'
land. Aimin' to put up a cabin--fixin' to wed?"

The newcomer shrugged his shoulders, but made no reply.

"When I heared it, I 'lowed Callista had named the day,"
persisted Fuson.

"Have ye, Callista?" Rilly Trigg put in daringly, as neither of
the principals seemed disposed to speak.

"The names that the days have already got suits me well enough,"
Callista observed drily. "I don't know why I should go namin'
ary one of 'em over again."

There was a great laugh at this, of which Cleaverage appeared
entirely oblivious.

"Yes," he began quietly, when it had subsided, "I'm about to put
me up a house--I like to be a-buildin'--a man might as well
improve his property. There's one gal that wants me mighty bad,
and has wanted me for a long while; sometimes I'm scared she'll
get me. Reckon I might as well be ready." [10]

"Ye hear that, Callisty?" crowed little Rilly Trigg. "Ye hear
that! Have ye told him adzackly the kind of house ye want? I
'low ye ort."

"Put a little yellow side o' that red," advised Callista
composedly, busying herself wholly with the hat Rilly was
trimming. "There--don't you think that looks better?"

Rilly made a face at Fuson and Cleaverage, and laughed.

"No need to ask her which nor whether," said Lance nonchalantly.
"Any place I am is bound to suit Callista. I intend that my
house shall be the best in the Turkey Tracks; but if it wasn't
she'd never find it out, long as _I_ was there."

Again there was a chorus of appreciative laughter.

"How's that, Callista--is it so for a fact?" inquired Fuson,
eager to see the game go on.

Callista opened her beautiful eyes wide, and smiled with lazy
scorn.

"Truly, I'm suited with whatever Lance Cleaverage builds, and
wherever and whenever he builds. Let it be what it may, it's
nothing to me."

"You Rilly!" called a shrill feminine voice from the direction
of the church. "Bring the basket."

"Help me with it, Buck," said Aurilla, and the two started down
the slope together.

"Now," suggested Lance, with an affectation of reluctance, "if
the rest of you-all don't mind giving us the place here, I
reckon Callista's got [11] a heap that she wants to say to me,
and she's ashamed to speak out before folks."

The mad project of a Sunday dance, which nobody but Ola Derf had
entertained for a moment, was thus tacitly dropped. There was a
general snickering at Lance's impudent assumption. Again
Callista seemed too placidly contemptuous to care to make
denial. Boys got up from their lounging positions on the grass,
girls shook out their skirts, and two and two the young folks
began to straggle toward the gray little church.

"You're a mighty accommodatin' somebody," observed Lance,
dropping lightly on the grass at Callista's feet. "I have been
told by some that you'd make a contentious wife; but looks to me
like you're settin' out to be powerful easy goin'. Ain't got a
word to say about how many rooms in the house, nor whar the
shelves is to be, nor nothin'--eh?"

Reckless of time or place he reached up, put a finger under her
chin, and turned her face toward him, puckering his lips
meditatively as though he meant to kiss her--or to whistle. He
got a swift, stinging slap for his pains, and Callista faced
around on the rock where she sat to put herself as far from him
as might be.

"Who said anything about wives and husbands?" she demanded. "I
was talking about you building on yo' land. Hit's nothin' to me.
I never expect to live in the houses you build, [12] nor so much
as set foot in 'em. When you named that girl that was tryin' to
wed you, I shorely thought you must have been meanin' Ola Derf.
As for me, if you heard me talkin' of the house I expected to
_live_ in, you'd hear a plenty--because I'm particular. I ain't
a-going to put up with no puncheon floor in my best room. Hit's
got to be boards, and planed at that. I ain't a-goin' to break
my back scouring puncheons for no man."

Lance nodded, with half closed eyes. It was plain he got her
message. One guessed that the house would be made to please her,
and, too, that he liked her the better for being fastidious.

The two were apparently alone together; but neither Ola Derf nor
Flenton Hands was among the young people moving away down the
further slope. Lance gazed after their retreating friends and
heaved a lugubrious sigh.

"Well, looks like they've all started off and left me for you
and you for me," he commented sadly.

"Have they?" inquired Callista without interest. "They show
mighty poor judgment."

"Same sort of judgment I'm showing, settin' here talking to you,
when I might as well spend my time with a good-lookin' gal,"
retorted Lance promptly.

"The Lord knows you waste yo' time talking to me," Callista sent
back to him with a musing, [13] unruffled smile on her finely
cut lips. "Your settin' up to me would sure be foolishness."

"Settin' up to you?"--Lance took his knees into an embrace and
looked quizzically at her as she reclined above him, milk-white
and pink, blue-eyed and flaxen-haired, a creature to cuddle and
kiss one would have said, yet with a gall-bag under her tongue
for him always. "Me settin' up to you?" He repeated the words
with a bubble of apparently unsubduable amusement in his tone.
"I reckon you're a-doin' the settin' up; everybody seems to
understand it so. I just mentioned that the rest of the folks
had left you and me alone together, and I was goin' on to say
that I began to suffer in the prospect of offerin' you my
company up to the church-house. Lord, some gals will make
courtin' out of anything!"

A subdued snicker sounded from the screen of leafage behind the
spring. Several young people lingered there for the fun of
hearing Lance Cleaverage and Callista Gentry fuss. The red began
to show itself in the girl's smooth, fair cheeks. She caught her
wide hat by its strings and got suddenly to her feet.

"Well, to tell you the truth, Mr. Lance Cleaverage," she said
coldly, "I never took enough notice of you to see was you
courtin' me or some other girl; and I'll thank you now to step
yourself out of my way and let me get on to the church-house.
I've got to lead the tribble, come service time. I [14] can't
stand fooling here with you, nor werry my-self to notice are
you courting me or somebody else."

She held her graceful head very high. If she swung the hat by
its strings a thought too rapidly, it was the only sign she gave
of any excitement as she gained the path.

Cleaverage ranged himself beside her, leaving the banjo in the
bushes. "All right--all right," he remarked in a pacifying tone.
"I'm willin' to walk up to the door with you, if that's what's
troublin' you so greatly; but I don't want to go in and sit
alongside of you on the middle seats. You take your place on the
women's side, like a good gal, and let me have some peace,
settin' over with the men."

For a moment she was dumb. Half a dozen had pushed into view,
and were listening to them now. They all understood that Lance
knew well enough she must sit with the singers, yet his open
refusal to accompany her to the middle seats, where the courting
couples generally found place, was not the less galling.

"Tell him you won't never step yo' foot in church beside him,
Callista," prompted a man's voice, and Flenton Hands stepped out
on the path, twisting a bit of sassafras in his fingers and
looking from one to the other with quick shiftings of his gray
eyes.

Lance laughed radiantly but soundlessly, his [15] face and eyes
shining with mirthful defiance. The girl looked down and trifled
with her hat ribbons.

"Why don't you say it?" inquired Cleaverage at length. Hands
leaned forward and stared eagerly at her, his mouth a little
open and his breath coming quick. He had always been the most
pertinacious of Callista's followers; an older man than any of
the others, he brought to bear on his wooing the persistence and
determination of his years.

Callista just glanced at the younger man, and let her gaze rest
on Hands.

"What's the use of telling him what he already knows mighty well
and good?" she said finally.

"Give me the pleasure of walking up with you this morning,
then," Hands encroached eagerly.

With negligent composure Callista looked about her. She was not
willing to walk with Lance--she doubted if he would ask her
again. She was not willing to discredit him and go with Hands.
She was determined that Cleaverage should not walk with another
girl.

"Come on, Ola," she coolly addressed the figure plainly to be
seen behind Hands. "Let's you and me hurry over and see what
hymns Brother Drumright is going to use. You sing mighty good
counter, and I'd like to have you next to me."

Ola Derf could not refuse. It was almost equal to social
rehabilitation to be allowed to walk with Callista Gentry from
the spring to the church, to [16] sit beside her in the singing
seats; yet the brown girl cast uneasy glances backward till she
saw Lance, whistling melodiously, turn to the blooming azalea
bush and catch up his banjo from it. She stopped in her tracks,
holding Callista back.

"Whar--whar ye gwine, Lance?" she inquired anxiously. If
Cleaverage was not coming to church it would scarcely be worth
while for her to torture herself with an hour of old Preacher
Drumright's holding forth. "Whar ye gwine?" she reiterated, as
the other girl pulled her sleeve and attempted to hurry on.

"Whar you and Callista ca'n't come," returned Lance, speaking
over his shoulder unceremoniously.

"Ain't ye gwine to stay to preachin'?" persisted the brown girl.
"I--I thought ye was, or I--ain't ye gwine to stay?"

"No," drawled Cleaverage. "I just brought the banjo to please
Callista--because I promised her I would, when she begged me to.
I had no notion of staying to listen to Drumright."

"Come on--if you're a-coming," Callista admonished the Derf
girl with a little flash of temper which Lance did not fail to
observe, any more than she missed the chuckle with which he
received it.

"Well, I'm a-goin' with ye," announced Ola. She let go
Callista's arm, and turned back to where Lance was taking a
shadowy path into the forest.

"I told you, gals couldn't come," Cleaverage bantered her. But
Ola persisted. [17]

"I can go wherever you can go. Lance--wait! Wait for me--I'm
a-comin'."

"Callista'll be mad," objected Cleaverage. "She begged and
begged me, and I wouldn't leave her come along of me; now if I
take you, she'll be mad."

"Like I cared where you went or who went with you!" Callista
retorted, eyes shining blue fire, head crested. "Come on, Mr.
Hands, it's time we were stepping, if we want to get in to go
through the hymns."

"And you will sit alongside of me?" Hands's voice pleaded close
to her ear.

Ola and Lance were of the same age; the blond girl, lingering
half indignant, could remember how hardy, free little Ola Derf
used to play with the boys, always singling Lance Cleaverage out
as the companion for her truant expeditions. Now in mute denial
of Hands's petition, Callista shook her head, and in doing so
managed to glance round and get a tormenting glimpse of Ola and
Lance disappearing together between the trees. Under the green
domes of oak and liriodendron, the latter starred all over now
with orange-tawny tulips, she saw them pass. Wine of summer was
in the veins of the forest. Even the sober oaks, wreathed like
bacchanals, overflowed with sweetness from their wrappings of
wild grape. The two with the banjo took their way down a steep
path toward a jade-green pool, a still reach [18] of water arched
over by fantastic tangles of laurel and rhododendron, black
as the tents of Kedar, lighted only by the flash of a water-fall
that caught the sun. This was the baptismal place.

The daughter of the house of Gentry turned her face resolutely
toward respectability and the church, albeit there was no joy in
the countenance. Strung out over a quarter of a mile were
courting couples bent toward the same destination. To these
young hearts it seemed well worth while to have lain under the
heel of winter to attain this marvelous summer morning with its
green-clothed forest, its wreathing of blossoms where they
passed. Clean and cool as a bell's note, the song of a thrush
deep in the wood spilled jeweled drops of sound through the
trembling branches overhead. A catbird's sonata rippled boldly
out upon the very path. A canopy of bloom was woven and flung
over the spring by the black, knotty fingers of the laurel. Bees
tumbled happily in the bosom of the fairest drooping clusters,
their hum nearly drowned by the heavy gurgle of the creek water.

Callista drew in her breath sharply. Summer and sun and light
and love everywhere--and she was walking up to the church-house
with Flenton Hands, while back on some forest by-path, with
music at his finger ends and Ola Derf beside him, Lance
Cleaverage forgot her with a laugh.

CHAPTER II.

THE UP-SITTING.

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 been
declining toward the end; and during the last months the family
had cared for her almost day and night. They were worn out with
the toil of it before she herself wore out. But now it was all
over. The first outburst of noisy lamentation, which is fairly
conventional in the Southern mountains, was past. The corpse had
been decently composed on a rude plank scaffold, while Octavia
Gentry and Roxy Griever took charge of the household and began
to order things in that curious half-ecclesiastical fashion
which follows the footsteps of death.

It was near noon, and Octavia dished up the dinner, while Roxy
paid more attention to the impending funeral arrangements. Before
the meal was over, young people began to come in, though none
could quite say how they had received word. The girls made proffer
of assistance, and swiftly the table was cleared away, the dishes
washed, and the house and surroundings put in immaculate  [20] order.
Work in the fields was stopped, that messengers might be sent, one
on horseback to notify distant-dwelling kin, another with a wagon
to buy the coffin down in Hepzibah, a third afoot to arrange with
the strong young men of the family connection about helping to dig
the grave. All the flowers in the dooryard were gathered and laid
round the corpse. The withered old face was covered with a damp
cloth, and then a borrowed sheet was drawn smoothly over the whole
mound. The Widow Griever was so deeply versed in the etiquette of
such occasions, and so satisfyingly exacting on all points, as to
make an undertaker even more highly superfluous than he would
usually have been among those simple folk. What with garments and
accessories she had brought from her own scant widow's wardrobe,
and articles hastily borrowed from the nearer neighbors, she
managed inside of two hours to have Little Liza and her two
sisters--the mother of the family was dead some years ago--clad
in black and seated in state inferior only to that of the dead.

More flowers were brought by girls and small boys from the
neighbors' yards--yellow and purple and red were the colors
mostly in bloom now, and those which would have been favored for
this occasion. Roxy gravely arranged them and set them in place.
She had veiled the looking-glass and stopped the clock as soon
as she came into the house. [21]

"A body cain't be too careful about all these here things," she
said with a solemn sniff. "Hit's easy at a time like this for
something to be did that crosses the luck."

Women came and went through the open doors, silent almost as
the little breeze that played between. Everybody wore the same
expression of mournful acquiescence in the natural order of things.
Greetings were exchanged in low tones. Callista, carrying a basket
of garden asters, came up the front walk, looking openly for her
mother, guarding a little warily against Flenton Hands's approach.
Some girls hurrying out to seek ferns in the low places of the wood
met her, and she turned back with them, joining her activities to
theirs and making a wreath of the flowers she had brought.

Flenton Hands was thirty years old. To have arrived at this age
unmarried is, in the mountains, in some measure a reproach.
True, he aligned himself sharply with the religious element of
the community, and this, when youthful masculinity is ever apt
to choose the broad way where there is more company, bespoke for
him a certain indulgence or toleration that would have been
denied a typical old bachelor.

He was cantankerous old Preacher Drumright's right hand at all
times, and Drumright was safe always to approve him. He was the
kind of man who seeks the acquaintance and company of those [22]
well-to-do and older than himself, paying a sober court to
respectability and money, and thus coming eventually to be rated
as one of the elders, while he yet held the dubious position of
an unmarried male who shilly-shallied in the matter of wedding.

No actual scandal ever attached to Flenton Hands. If there were
improprieties to be debited against him, he kept such matters
out of the sight of Turkey Track people, and only a vague rumor
of something discreditable associated itself with his Valley
connections to warrant young girls in pouting their lips and
referring to him as "that old Flenton Hands"; while their mothers
reproved and told them that he was one of the best young men, as
well as one of the best matches, in the neighborhood.

So far as personal appearance went, he was well enough, yet with
a curious suggestion of solidity as though his flesh might have
been of oak or iron. The countenance, too, with its round, high
cheek-bones, had an unpleasing immobility, resting always in a
somewhat slyish cast of expression which the odd slant of the
light gray eyes gave to it. For the rest, he was thin-lipped,
with thick, straight, dark hair, and an almost urban air of
gentlemanliness, an effort at gentility which, in a shorter and
more cheerful individual, would have been smug.

"Flenton's gone for the coffin," Sallie Blevins [23] said. "He
always tends to it when there's anything to do that calls for
money to be spent."

"I reckon he's got a plenty," supplied little Rilly Trigg; "but
someway I never could like his looks greatly. There, I oughtn't
to have said that--and his granny laying dead in the house
that-a-way."

Callista did not add her opinion to this discussion, but finding
that she was in no danger of meeting Flenton, hurried the others
promptly up to the house. As soon as she came in sight, Little
Liza, six feet tall, with a jimber-jaw and bass voice, came and
fell upon her neck and wept. Little Liza Hands got her
descriptive adjective from being the third of the name. To-day
she was especially prominent, because Granny Yearwood, the first
Eliza, ninety pounds of fiery energy and ambition, had at last
laid down the burden of her days. Her daughter, Eliza the
second, had lain beside her husband, Eliphalet Hands, in
churchyard mold these twenty years; and _her_ big daughter, with
the bovine profile, the great voice, and the timid, fluttered
soul of a small child, remained in the world, the only Eliza
Hands--yet still Little Liza to those about her. And for her
name's sake, Little Liza was chief mourner.

The Hands girls all had a sort of adoring attitude toward
Callista Gentry. Flenton wanted her, and they had been trying to
get Flenton everything he wanted since he was small enough to
[24] cry for the moon, and strike at the hand which failed to
pluck it down for him. Callista had not intended to stay. She
was to be over later in the day--or the same night, rather--with
the young people who sat up. But Little Liza managed to detain
her on one pretext or another until the coffin arrived and
Granny was finally placed therein.

"Just look at them thar shiny trimmin's on that thar coffin,"
admired Little Liza, jogging Callista's elbow. "That's Flent.
That's my brother Flent. They ain't a thing he grudges to them
he loves."

Callista uttered a soothing and satisfactory reply, and was
making her escape, when Hands himself overtook her at the door.
His features were drawn to an expression of great solemnity, one
which suited them ill, for he had the upslanting brow, the
pointed face and the narrow eye that, lightened by mirth, may be
antic, but without the touch of humor is forbidding and even
sinister.

"You're not going to leave us, air you?" he inquired in a
carefully muffled tone, as though indeed Granny was sleeping
lightly and might be easily wakened.

"Mother's going to stay now, and I'm coming back to-night,"
Callista hastened to say.

"I'm mighty glad you air," returned Flenton, with a heavy sigh.
"In these times of affliction, [25] hit's a powerful comfort to
me to have you in sight."

Callista edged closer to the others. She was not unwilling to be
seen standing whispering with Flenton. He was a good match, a
creditable captive of any girl's bow and spear; yet she did not
enjoy his love-making, least of all now that it was mingled with
this ill-sorted solemnity.

"Flenton, have they sent word to your Uncle Billy's folks?"
asked Octavia Gentry, making her appearance in the doorway
behind the two.

"Yes'm," returned Flenton, not pleased to be interrupted, yet
necessarily civil to the woman whom he hoped to have for a
mother-in-law.

"And does the Bushareses and Adam Venable and his wife know hit?
Is Mary a-comin'?" she pursued the catalog. "What about the
Aspel Yearwoods out in Big Buck Gap--has anyone went out there?
And Faithful Yearwood, that married Preacher Crowley--ain't they
livin' down in the Tatum neighborhood?"

"Yes'm, they air," confirmed Flenton. "Cousin Ladd 'lowed to
send one o' his chaps on a nag to Faithful Crowley's folks; and
Ab Straley was to let them at Big Buck Gap know." Though
impatient, he made a decent end. When he looked around, Callista
had quietly moved away.

The day's work was over; men and boys began to arrive at the
Hands place, some carrying lanterns. [26] From early candle
lighting till near the turn of the night the house would be
full; then the elders, men and women on whose day labor a family
must depend, would begin to slip away, except a few old widowers
and bachelors who might remain smoking on the steps outside; and
a circle of young folks who would be left sitting in the lamplight
and fireshine of the main room. Flenton knew of old experience just
how the night would go. He longed inexpressibly to be one of those
up-sitting young people that he might push his chair close to
Callista Gentry's and whisper to her in the privilege of the hour.
Yet he was held back by a consideration for his dignity as one of
the bereaved.

"Miz. Gentry," said Roxy Griever, "will you stay and he'p with
the supper--they aim to have a reg'lar meal put on the table at
about midnight--settin' up with the dead is mighty wearin'."

"I 'low the gals would rather tend to that theirselves,"
deprecated Octavia, mildly. "I mind how it was when I was a gal.
I never did want some old women pesterin' around at sech a
time."

She cast a swift glance to where Callista sat, her fair head
bent, the lamplight upon its bright burden of corn-colored
braids, Lance Cleaverage, his hands in his pockets, standing
before the girl regarding her, and evidently about to say
something. [27]

The Widow Griever's look followed Octavia's to the front room in
which half-a-dozen couples had paired off, whispering, giggling
a bit if the truth must be told, with an occasional undernote of
hysteria in the giggles.

"That's jest the reason," she announced, straightening up from
the hearth where she had been stirring a vast boiler full of
very strong coffee. "The gals that lets tham men have their way
is foolish. They'll rue the day they done so. Men persons would
always have the old folks leave, and the young folks run things
to suit theirselves; but I don't believe in sech."

On the mental horizon of the Widow Griever there hovered ever a
vast, dun, evil-promising cloud known as "tham men." She never
alluded to the opposite sex in any way other than collectively,
and named them in this manner, which held in it all of reproach.
Her father--gentle soul--presented himself to her under the name
of Poppy, as somewhat set apart from the raging mass of predatory
males addressed more or less openly and directly to destruction.
Poppy and a young brother, Sylvanus, though belonging to the
vicious sex and thereby under suspicion, were possible; but Lance,
the lawless and debonair, was not only one of the enemy--he was
Roxy Griever's horrible example. The church-house where "tham
men" were kept on the one side so that the gentler half of creation
might sit peacefully [28] on the other, was to her thinking the
only safe and proper place of public gathering.

"I tell you, Miz. Gentry," she now pursued, her reprehending eye
going past the person she answered to fasten itself on Lance's
lounging figure and note the careless, upward fling of his head,
"I tell you that I ain't never been back to the Settlement sence
I left it a widder. What would I be doin' down thar amongst all
tham men? But Lance, he goes down, and every time he goes, I
think he gits more of the Old Boy in him, 'caze evil is a-walkin'
around at noonday down in tham settlements, and you cain't be
safe anywhars."

"Might just as well quit being scared then," drawled Lance's
soft voice. He had stepped noiselessly to the door, at Callista's
suggestion to see if the coffee were ready.

"You Lance Cleaverage!" returned his sister in a carefully
suppressed tone that was sufficiently acid to make up for its
lack of volume, "I ain't a-goin' to quit bein' scared for yo'
say-so. You ought to be ashamed to name such--in the house with
the dead this a-way. No, the coffee'll not be ready for
somewhile yet. When hit is, you'ns can fetch cheers and he'p
yourselves to it. I'm a-goin' to show Miz. Gentry my gospel
quilt that I brung with me to lay over Granny."

Roxanna Cleaverage had married rather late in life. Girlhood had
been but an unsatisfactory season to her; young women in a primitive
society [29] are not given much prominence, and Roxy had neither
beauty nor charm to command what was to be had. Lacking these,
she made a great point of religion, which led incidentally to her
marriage with John Griever, an itinerant preacher, and brought her
two blissful years and Mary Ann Martha. As the wife of a preacher
she had been able to assume some dignity, to instruct, to lay down
the law, to keep herself measurably in the public eye.

When she was widowed, it was bitter to her to go back to Kimbro
Cleaverage's poor home and drop once more into obscurity. She
yearned desperately to wear some mark of distinction, to have at
least some semblance of social power. And in direct response to
this longing, there came a vision in the night, and Roxy rose up
and took her bits of quilt pieces and began to fashion a new
thing. Other women might have the Rising Sun, the Log Cabin, the
Piney-blow, the Basket of Posies; she had conceived and would
execute a master work in the way of quilts, quite outside the
line of these. Roxy lacked entirely that crude art sense which
finds its expression in the mountain woman's beautifully pieced
quilt; she only burned to startle admiration, to command respectful
attention by some means. The big square of muslin was bought at
the expense of considerable pinching and saving, and she began to
set upon it those figures which had occupied her [30] mind, her
time and her fingers through the years since. Clumsily done, with
no feeling whatever for form, proportion, or color, she poured into
it a passion of desirous energy which yet produced its effect. The
quilt was always at hand for such occasions as this, or when the
Presiding Elder came on one of his rare visits. And it was useful
to bring out if there were trouble, if someone needed to be overawed
or to be threeped down. But that member of the Cleaverage Clan who
in her eyes most needed threeping was proof against the gospel
quilt. She had never put it forth for Lance's confusion since the
day he took such an expressive interest in the undertaking, and
advised--in the presence of Preacher Drumright--the adding of a
sightly little border of devils around the semi-sacred square.

"A fine row o' davils would help the looks of it mightily, Sis'
Roxy," he had argued. "They're named frequent in the Bible, and
I'd cut 'em out for you. I would sure enough," he laughed, as
she looked heavy reproach at him. "You give me a sharp pair o'
shears and I can cut out as fine a lookin' davil as you or
anybody need wish for!"

After that she let him alone, aware that his more gifted eye
criticized her failures, even when he did not seek the circle
about the exhibited quilt and wilfully mistake her angels for
turkey buzzards.

The two older women now passed into that [31] cool, shaded little
chamber where lay the dead. The windows were open, and the white
curtains blew gustily in the night breeze, making the candle Roxy
carried flicker. She set it on a high shelf, and got out a thick
roll of stuff, unwrapping and spreading forth her contribution to
the solemnity of the occasion.

"Hit's jest the top on it," she communicated in a hoarse
whisper. "I hain't got the heart to put it in frames and quilt
it, 'caze I keep thinkin' of something else that ort to go on
it, time I say I'm done. Cur'us that I ain't never showed it to
you before." (This was a common formula with the widow, and
nobody ever disputed it). "See, that's Adam and Eve, to begin
on," and she indicated a pair of small, archaic figures cut from
blue checked gingham, their edges turned neatly in and whipped
to the white domestic background--when one thinks of it, a
domestic background is fairly proper for Adam and Eve. "That
ginghams they' cut out'n was a piece o' John's shirt--the last
one I made him."

"Tut, tut," responded Octavia, making that little clicking sound
with the tongue which does duty variously to express sympathy,
reprehension, surprise, or deprecation. She regarded the artistic
achievement before her with attention and respect. One could
readily distinguish Eve from Adam, because Eve was endowed with
petticoats, while Adam rejoiced in legs. Of course Eve had [32]
feet; but it would have taken someone less well acquainted with
the moral character of the Widow Griever than was Octavia Gentry
to deduce legs from those feet.

"What's that thar?" she made the customary inquiry, putting her
finger on a twisty bit of polka-dotted calico. "That must be the
sarpent."

"Hit air." Roxy returned the expected answer solemnly.

The Ancient Evil was represented as standing sociably on his
tail, facing the tempted pair.

"My! Don't he look feisty?" commented Octavia, with courteous
admiration. "Watch him jest a-lickin' out his tongue in Eve's
face. Lord," she sighed conventionally, "how prone women air to
sin!"

"Women? Huh!" snorted Mrs. Griever. "Not nigh so prone as tham
men. Look-a-here," turning the quilt to get at the Tree of Good
and Evil; "look at them thar apples. Now I made some of 'em out
of red calico, and some out of yellow. Do you think I ort to
have a few green, Miz. Gentry? Look like green apples is mighty
sinful and trouble makin'."

"I don't know," Octavia debated, as she ran her fingers over a
brave attempt at one of the Beasts of Revelation. "You might add
a few green ones. Hit does stand to reason that the Old Boy is
in green apples more than in ripe ones; but ef them that Eve
tempted Adam [33] with had been green--do you reckon he'd 'a' bit?"

The scandal was such an old one, that Roxy was evidently a little
irritated at its revival.

"Well, o' course," she said with some asperity, "a body cain't
gainsay what's in the Bible; but I have my doubts about that
thar apple fuss. Hit's men that prints the Good Book, and does
about with it--not women; an' I've always had a feelin' that mo'
likely hit was Adam got into that apple business first."

"Well, I don't know," repeated Octavia doubtfully. "I always
'lowed the Bible was the Bible. But what's a-goin' to be here?"
pointing to a sizable blank space.

"Why, that's a part that I ain't got to finish yet," explained
Roxy. "Miz. Abner Dowst given me the prettiest piece o' goods
last time I was at her house, and I been studyin' whether to use
hit a-depicturin' the Queen of Sheba or Phar'oh's daughter; and
then I thought I'd do better to show up Joseph a-dreamin', and
the sun and the moon and eleven stars jist over his head--see,
they'd set around sorter biassin' this-a-way, betwixt Adam-an'-Eve
and this golden harp. Hit's a piece of that dress her gals all
had on a-Sunday--you know Dows the always gits a bolt, and time
her and the gals all has a dress out of hit, and him a shirt and
the boys a shirt apiece, why the bolt's about gone. Well, this
time that [34] The'dory May, she axed for something bright, and
he was bent on pleasin' her, so he picked for the brightest thing
in the store. Hit looked sort o' gay a-comin' into church, one
behind another; but now hit'll do fine for Joseph's coat. Ah, law,
Miz. Gentry, hit'll be right here in my quilt long after their
dresses is wore out and forgot about."

"Yes, indeed, hit will that, Sister Griever," her listener
assented, a good deal impressed. "Is these sorter round things---"

"Them's the loaves an' fishes," Roxy hastened to elucidate.
"They ain't so very well done, ye see. I was a-workin' on them
when I hearn that Granny Yearwood was about to go, an' I hurried
'em up, 'caze I'd promised her that I'd spread the quilt over
her when she was laid out. You he'p me with it now, Miz. Gentry,
and we'll fold it back this-a-way so as not to show the part
that ain't done."

"Laws, Miz. Griever," said Octavia, as the great square, with
its many small, gaily colored figures, whipped laboriously into
place, was spread out between their hands, "I don't see how you
ever did think of all them things."

"I reckon it comes from havin' a preacher for a mate," returned
Roxy. "Mr. Griever, he was always a cotin' scriptur' round the
house, and now he's gone I remember his words--and put 'em down
on the quilt, as a body may say. I love to have it by me to work
on in time of trouble, [35] an' I love to put it on the bed if a
preacher sleeps the night at our house. Looks like a body ought
to have good dreams un'neath the gospel that-a-way. Thar, ain't
that fixed all right now? Cain't we leave here? I 'low them
young folks out in the other room might need attention."

Octavia glanced through the slightly open door and saw that
Lance and Callista had gone into the kitchen alone to look after
the supper. They were talking together, and the mother noted
hopefully that neither of them was laughing, and that the girl's
color had risen, while her eyes looked troubled.

"Law honey," she said smiling, "sho'ly they can manage for
theirselves one while. I'm plumb tired, an' I know good an' well
you air. Le's sit here a spell whar it's cool an' quiet, an'
have a little visit."

This was a sort of invitation which Roxy Griever could not
refuse, and the courting couples were spared her surveillance
for a little longer.

"Callista," Lance began abruptly, when they were out of earshot
of those in the front room, "I raised the roof-beams of my cabin
to-day--two big rooms and a porch between, with a cooking place
for summer. Ain't that about right?"

Callista looked toward the other room uneasily. She had no audience
now--how should she act, how demean herself so as to seem
indifferent? Lance's undecipherable, clear hazel eyes were on [36]
her; they rested carelessly in what seemed a passing glance;
yet at the back of that regard looked out a demand which she
could scarcely comprehend.

"I--I don't know," she faltered. "Lance, won't you please lift
that there coffee off o' the fire? It's boiled enough."

Lance bent lithely to the hearth and did her bidding.

"I've got me two horses now," he said in the same even undertone.
"I matched Satan with a little black filly that Derf brought over
from the Far Cove neighborhood. They're jest of a size, and they
step together like a couple of gals with their arms around each
other's waists. Derf said the filly was named Cindy; but I call
her Sin--how do you like that?--Satan and Sin?"

"Well, I think it sounds right wicked, if you ask me," Callista
plucked up courage to say. "But I don't reckon you care whether
I like it or not."

Lance shook his head and smiled.

"Nope," he agreed easily. Then he added, "Havin' two horses helps
out a good deal. I've been doing haulin' on Derf's contract. I'll
have a right smart of money left, even after my house is all done.
There'll be a-plenty laid up by next spring; and I'm goin' to put
in the winter clearing land. I reckon we'll be good ready by April."

By April! A sweet perturbation took possession [37] of Callista's
breast. She dared not raise her eyes lest he should read in them
what she yet jealously sought to conceal. He was not like the
other boys; with all the raillery and badinage that went on between
them--famous in their circle; with all the unusual parade, in the
open play of courtship, he had never really approached her as a
lover, never laid his hand on her in tenderness, nor offered her
a caress, save as a public, saucy threat. Nor had he asked for
her, as the mountain phrase goes; but surely now he meant her to
understand that he expected to be married in the spring. If only
he would ask her--if only! She had always meant--if she dared--to
refuse him--at least the first time; to reluctantly give in under
repeated importunities--but that was past. With her heart beating
in her throat, she made shift to say,

"I hope you'll be better to your horses than most of the men
that hauls. I do love a good horse."

"You goin' to ride with me to the buryin' tomorrow?" Lance
inquired casually. "If you want to, we could leave the buryin'
ground after the funeral's over and go up Lance's Laurel, to my
place, and on round to your home the long way. I could show you
whether I was good to my horses or not."

The color glowed softly in Callista's cheeks and her veiled eyes
were bright. But before she could say yes or no, the Widow Griever
came in. [38]

"Good land, Lance Cleaverage!" she began on her usual formula.
"Why hain't you bidden out all them folks in thar? This here
coffee's done, an' a-gittin' cold. The biscuits ain't no better.
They got to eat now, 'caze I want 'em to sing a good wake of
hymns--I promised Granny I'd tend to pickin' 'em out."

With a grimace of good-natured acquiescence, Lance went to
execute his sister's orders. Out on the porch a half-dozen young
boys had succumbed to drowsiness, one by one, stretched on the
boards, taking elbow or saddle for a pillow. The crickets and
katydids were loud in the grove. Lance passed through the front
rooms, speaking to the couples there, and called in those outside.
The supper of good warm food, and hot, strong coffee was eaten
gratefully. Then all went into the front room and the hymns were
sung. Finally the up-sitting was over, and Callista had made no
opportunity for further speech with Lance. He had not sought one,
and chance had not offered it. She regretted a little that she
really wanted so much to ride at his side to-morrow. If she did
not, she would quite enjoy treating that cavalier invitation as
though she had never heard it. But the very thought brought a
quick apprehension of failure, and she resolved to be ready and
waiting, so that she might seem to be carelessly picked up at
the last moment, lest Lance himself anticipate her in this game
of indifference. [39]

CHAPTER III.

THE BURYING.

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 climbed the
stairs to a loft room, set apart for the Hands girls, and,
partially undressing, lay down for a few hours of sleep. Her
mother and Roxy Griever had gone home shortly after midnight.
Coming and going increased with the rising day. Roxy Griever had
now returned, bringing with her a hastily ruffled cap of cheap
lace.

"Sylvane," she called, coming out to the porch where the men
were standing about conversing in undertones, "you got to ride
over to Miz. Gentry's and git a black veil and a belt for Jane.
Little Liza ain't a-goin' to be able to go to the buryin' at
all, and Jane has obliged to have a veil and belt, her bein' a
mourner that-a-way."

Already, along the fence there was a string of dingy, unkempt
teams and wagons; while in the horse lot were more, those who
had come earlier having unhitched. Granny Yearwood was near
ninety--Eliza Hands had been her youngest--and she was known to
the whole region around. [40] Roxy stood in the door shading her
eyes, picking out this one and that among those in attendance.
The gathering looked much like any other, except that one missed
the shouts of hail and farewell, the effusive welcoming and
hearty speeding of guests.

The stir outside waxed. By some subjective movement, Callista,
sleeping in the loft room, was aware of it, wakened, rose,
dressed and made ready herself.

"I don't know what we-all ever would a' done without you,
honey," Little Liza told her, gazing across from the bed on
which she lay. "Looks like to me some folks is born comforters."

The pale eyes of the big woman took in Callista's sweet,
significant beauty, with an appreciation that was hardly
vicarious. She did love Callista for her brother's sake; and
much, too, for her own.

"You come up and tell me jest how Granny looked before you-all
go, won't you?" she urged. "I want to see you before you start,
anyhow."

Callista promised and hurried downstairs. Those who had remained
over night were standing about a table, eating a hasty
breakfast. By eight o'clock the gathering was ready, and the
hitching up began. After a great deal of consultation and
argument as to where each one should ride, the procession began
to arrange itself. There were to be no services at the house,
but it was hoped that Preacher Drumright would be able to [41]
meet the funeral party at the burying ground and conduct the
ceremonies there--the funeral sermon would be at the church on
some later Sunday.

"Who you goin' to ride with, Callista?" inquired the Widow
Griever, a weighty frown on her brow. "We got to git this thing
all straightenened out so the family an' friends won't be
scrouged from they' places, like is mighty apt to happen at a
funeral. There is them that's bound to have a ride, whoever gits
to go."

Roxy's quilt had been removed from the coffin and draped over a
near-by stand. Six bronzed, heavy-breathing, embarrassed looking
men were marshalled in by the widow, and instructed how to lift
the black-painted pine box, carry it to the waiting buckboard,
and place it safely there with one end wedged under the seat.
Then Roxy turned to Flenton.

"Go git Ellen and Jane," she prompted.

He hastened to the house and up stairs, and soon returned with a
sister on each arm, black-draped and wailing, clinging to him. He
helped them into their seats in his own vehicle. But when Ellen made
room for him, he drew back and motioned Kimbro Cleaverage forward.

"Couldn't you drive, Mr. Cleaverage?" he said in an undertone.
"Sylvane can take yo' team, with Miz. Griever and the chillen;
and I've got to go in--" he reddened with embarrassment--"in
another place." [42]

The crowd was pretty much all in the yard now, clambering into
ox-carts and board-seated wagons. Roxy Griever, with Mary Ann
Martha and Sylvane, were waiting in Kimbro Cleaverage's small wagon
drawn by an old mule, while half-a-dozen undesired additions were
offered to their party. Callista looked about her vainly for Lance.
She had already defended herself two or three times from being
thrust into some vehicle and carried away from the possibility of
riding with him, when she finally saw him approaching down the
road. He was on one black horse and leading another. She could
not know that he had been over to Derf's that morning to get the
filly.

"Callista," said Flenton Hands's voice at her shoulder, "Little
Liza sent me down to see would you come up to her right quick.
She's mighty bad off."

With one last, furtive glance toward the black horse and his
rider, Callista turned and hurried up to Liza.

"Air they gittin' off," inquired the ailing woman, eagerly lifting
her head with its camphor-drenched cloths. "Did Ellen and Jane cry
much? Looks to me like they wasn't much takin' on--I never heared
much. There wasn't nigh the fuss that they was at old Enoch Dease's
buryin'. I wish't to the land I could have been down there--the
Lord knows I'd 'a' cried. Granny ought to be [43] wept for. Think o'
livin' to be ninety years old--and then havin' to die at last! Oh,
ain't it awful, Callista? How did she look, honey? Was Vander
Blackshears here? Set right down there on my bed and tell me."

One might almost have guessed that the lengthened inquiries were
dictated by someone who wanted Callista detained. The girl answered
them hastily, with her heart galloping, her ears alert for sounds
from below.

"Don't you be uneasy," Little Liza soothed her. "Flenton said
he'd wait and take you in his new buggy that he bought when he
got the coffin a-yesterday. You'll be the first one to ride in
it--ain't that fine? Flent's jest that-a-way. He don't grudge
anything to them he loves. You hadn't promised somebody else to
ride with 'em, had ye, Callisty?"

She brought the point-blank question out after a little halt,
reddening a bit at the boldness of it. Plainly this was at
another's dictation. Callista shook her head. Words were beyond
her at the moment; for, looking down from the tiny window of the
loft room, she saw the procession getting underway, one clumsy
vehicle after another falling into line behind the buckboard
that was now slowly disappearing beyond the bend of the road.
And at the fence. Lance Cleaverage was helping awkward little
Ola Derf to mount the black filly! [44]

"I said Granny deserved to be wept for," Little Liza intoned, as
she saw the tears that slipped down Callista's pink cheeks. "I
didn't know you cared so much about her, honey, but I know you've
got a mighty tender heart."

"Is that all, now, Liza? Are you all right till the folks get back?"
questioned Callista. "Well, then I'll leave you--they're a-going,"
and with an effort for composure, she turned and made her way down
to Flenton Hands and the new buggy. Her mother was staying to get
dinner for everybody--a piece of genuine self-sacrifice, this--and
as Callista passed her in the kitchen, she made a half-hearted offer
to change places.

"No, honey," said Octavia, resolutely. "You go right along. I
don't mind this. I"--she lowered her tone to a whisper of
furtive pleasure--"I seen Lance bringing up the prettiest little
black mare for you to ride." With unwonted demonstrativeness she
bent forward and kissed the young, smooth, oval cheek. "We ain't
got each other for always," she said gently. "Let's be kind and
lovin' while we have. Go 'long, honey, an' ride with Lance.
Granny Yearwood wouldn't begrudge it to ye."

Flenton met the girl at the door, and walked with her down to
the gate. It was an almost shocking breach of etiquette for him
to let the entire procession get away without him, yet neither
mentioned it. Callista's eyes were on two [45] mounted figures that
closed the train, and she scarcely spoke as she seated herself
in the new vehicle.

The graveyard was a stony, briery patch of ground, as desolate a
spot as could well be found. In a country where the houses were
so scattered that the word "neighborhood" had scarcely any
meaning, there was no public sentiment concerning the care of
the abandoned God's acre; but each, when a grave was dug in it
for one of his clan, resolved on making some effort toward its
improvement, and, in the struggle for existence, promptly
forgot. It was guarded partly by a rail fence that Derf's Old
Piedy, a notorious rogue, could lay down with practised horns
any time she liked; and partly by a crooked, crumbling wall of
stones, picked up off the land itself and laid there by hands
which had long been dust. A wide place it was, for its scanty
tenantry, with hollows hidden in liana-woven thickets and
straggling knolls yellowed with sedge-grass. As is usual where a
hard-wood forest has been cleared, young pines were springing up
all over the waste; one could see, between their dark points,
the blue rim of the world; for this land lay high, on a sort of
divide or shed, where nothing would grow.

The unmended road was full of vehicles, the graveyard filling
with people, as Callista and Flenton came up. The ride had been
one of [46] discomfort to the girl. She liked to have her conquests
to display before others; but she always shrank from being alone
with Flenton Hands, and to-day his insistent love-making had
filled her with cold distaste.

"And you are certainly the sweetest comforter ever a man had in
time of affliction," he told her over and over again, with
sanctimonious inflections. "If I had you always by my side,
looks like to me the world's sorrows wouldn't have no power on
me."

It was a relief to her when they reached the fence, and he
stepped out to help her down and tie his horse. There had been
some uncertainty up to the last as to whether Preacher Drumright
could be got for the occasion, but the sound of his voice from
the press of calico-clad and jeans-covered shoulders and backs,
reassured Flenton.

"I'm mighty glad Drumright's thar," he said to Callista, as he
lifted her down. "He'll preach Granny's funeral come Sunday, he
said; but thar ain't anyone can pray like he can. I do love a
good servigorous prayer."

Callista's anxious eyes were searching the animals tethered
about for sight of the two black horses that stepped together
"like a couple of gals with their arms around each other's
waists." At last she found them in the grove, and hastily turned
with her escort to go through the gap in the fence to where the
preacher was, where yawned [47] the open grave, and stood the coffin.
A tangle of dewberry vines, with withering fruit on them, here
and there, and beginning even in their mid-summer greenness to
show russet and reddened leaves, scrambled all over the poor
soil. Most of the graves were unmarked, some had a slab or block
of wood; only here and there gleamed a small stone.

Callista passed that of her father, good-looking, ne'er-do-well
Race Gentry, whom the romantic young Octavia Luster had run away
to marry. A honeysuckle vine covered it with a tangle of green,
offering now its bunches of fawn and white, heavy-scented
blossoms from a closely compacted mound.

"I'm a-goin' to have a real monument put up for Granny," Flenton
whispered to her as they went forward together. "I wish't she'd
lived to be a hundred, so I could have put that on the stone;
but we're mighty proud of her holdin' out to ninety."

Quite against her will, Callista found herself taken up to the
front of the gathering, placed between Ellen and Flenton Hands
beside the coffin. Preacher Drumright was speaking with closed
eyes; he had embarked on one of those servigorous prayers which
Hands admired. The two girls, Ellen and Jane, were sobbing in
long, dry gasps. After the prayer came a hymn, the lulls in the
service being filled in by the sobs of the Hands [48] girls, little
responsive moans from some woman in the assembly, and the purr
of the wind in the young pines, where scared rabbits were hiding;
and by the far, melodious jangle of Old Piedy's bell--Old Piedy,
dispossessed and driven away.

With the appearance of Callista and her escort on the scene, a
young fellow who had been lying full length on the top of the
ruining stone wall tilted his hat quite over his eyes and
relaxed a certain watchfulness of demeanor which had till then
been apparent in him. When the girl was finally ensconced in the
middle of the lamenting Hands family, this person leaned down
and whispered to Ola Derf, whose square little back was resting
against the wall close beside him,

"Come on, let's go. Haven't you had about enough of this?"

"Uh-huh," agreed Ola in a whisper, "but we mustn't git our
horses till the preacher quits prayin'. Hit'll make too much
noise."

Again Lance relaxed into his quiescent attitude, and had to be
roused when the hymn began, with,

"He's done finished, Lance. Do you want to go now?"

The wind soothed its world-old, sighing monody in the young
pines overhead; beneath the waxing warmth of the morning sun
faint whiffs, resinous, pungent, came down from their boughs, to
mingle with the perfume from the vagrant honeysuckle that flung
a long green arm toward [49] the trunk of one of them. Suddenly a
woman's tenor, wild and sweet, rose like a winged thing and led
all the other voices.

"Huh-uh," grunted Lance, from his sun-warmed couch. "Let's wait
awhile now."

After the hymn, Drumright read from the Scripture. Even his
rasping voice could not disguise the immemorial beauty of the
sombre Hebrew imagery, "Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or
the golden bowl be broken."

Lance drew a long quivering breath. Something in the sounds, the
hour and the occasion, had appealed to that real Lance
Cleaverage, of which the man Ola Derf knew was only custodian,
to whose imperious needs the obvious Lance must always bend.

Yet, long before poor Callista could be released and allowed to
ride home, by her own earnest petition, in the buckboard with
Jane and Ellen, the two by the stone wall had found their way
across to the black horses in the grove, and were scurrying down
the dusty summer road, racing as soon as they were out of sight
of the graveyard. [50]

CHAPTER IV.

A DANCE AND A SERENADE.

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 elsewhere for
that matter. One branch of the family had received money
compensation for their holdings from the Government. Leola's
father had at that time taken possession of an allotment of land
in the Indian Territory. The eldest daughter, Iley, married out
there, and brought back her Indian husband when Granny Derf,
pining for her native mountains, had to be carried home to Big
Turkey Track.

It was not the blood of another race that set the Derfs apart;
but it may have been traits which came with the wild strain.
There was a good deal of money going among the clan. Old man
Derf was a general trader; also he engaged in tanbark hauling in
the season, and some other contracting enterprises such as
required the use of ready cash. In the back room of the main
house there was quite a miscellaneous stock of provisions,
goods, and oddments for sale. Derf was more than suspected of
being a moonshiner or [51] of dealing with moonshiners. He gave
dances or frolics of some sort at his house very frequently, and
there was always plenty of whisky. At one time or another the
family had lived in the Settlement a good deal, and come off
rather smudged from their residence in that place. Indeed, your
true mountaineer believes that sin is of the valley, and looks
for no good thing to come out of the low ground. In a simple
society, like that of the mountains, the line is drawn with such
savage sharpness that the censors hesitate to draw it at all.
Yet a palpable cloud hung over the Derfs. While not completely
outcast, they were of so little standing that their house was
scarcely a respectable place for a young, unmarried woman to be
seen frequently. Ola, Garrett Derf's second daughter, a girl of
twenty, and a homely, high-couraged, hard muscled little
creature, was permitted in the neighborhood circle of young
girls rather on sufferance; but she did not trouble them greatly
with her presence, preferring as a rule her own enterprises.

Lance Cleaverage, a free, unfettered spirit, trammeled by no
social prejudices, came often to the frolics at Derf's. He
seldom danced himself, whisky he never touched; but he loved to
play for the others, and he got all the stimulation which his
temperament and his mood asked out of the crowd, the lights, the
music, and some indefinable element into which these fused for him. [52]

It was nearly two months after the incident at the church and
the funeral of Granny Yearwood, that Ola was redding up and
putting to rights for a dance. She had hurried through an early
supper; the house was cleared, like the deck of a ship for
action, of all furniture that could not be sat upon. What
remained--a few chairs and boxes, and the long benches on which,
between table and wall, the small fry of the family crowded at
meal time--were arranged along the sides of the room out of the
way. The girl herself was wearing a deep pink calico dress and a
string of imitation coral beads. Generally, she gave little
thought to her appearance; but everybody believed now that the
time was set for the marriage of Lance Cleaverage and Callista
Gentry; neither of the young people denied it, Callista only
laughing scornfully, and Lance lightly admitting that there was
a mighty poor chance for a fellow to get away when a girl like
Callista made up her mind to wed him. In the face of these
things, the little brown girl clad her carefully, laboring with
the conscienceless assiduity of Nature's self to do her utmost
to get her chosen man away from the other woman--to get him for
herself. She went out past the wood-pile to view the evening sky
anxiously, and seeing only a few cloud-roses blooming in the
late light over the hills, came back with satisfaction to
attempt once more putting her small brothers and sisters out of
the way. [53]

A little after dark her guests began to arrive, coming in by
ones and twos and threes, some of the boys in mud-splashed
working clothes, some in more holiday attire. About moonrise
Lance strolled down the road, and by way of defending himself
from the importunities of Ola's conversation, if one might
guess, kept his banjo twanging persistently. There was a certain
solemnity over the early comers, although Derf roared a hearty
greeting from his door of the cabin, and occasionally some of
the men adjourned to his special room and came out wiping their
mouths.

"Ain't nobody never goin' to dance?" inquired Ola impatiently.
"Here's Lance a-playin' and a-playin', and nobody makin' any
manner of use of the music."

There was nearly ten minutes of hitching and halting, proposals
and counter propositions, before a quadrille was started. It was
gone through rather perfunctorily, then they all sat down on the
boxes and benches and stared into the empty middle of the room.

"Good land!" cried Ola, coming from the other side of the house,
"play 'Greenbacks', Lance--let's dance 'Stealing partners'."

The new amusement--half dance, half play--proved, as she had
guessed, a leaven to the heaviness of the occasion. People began
to laugh a little, and speak above their breath. Two awkward
boys, trying to "shoot dominickers" [54] at the same moment, collided
under the arch and went sprawling to the floor. The mishap was
greeted with a roar of mirth in which all chill and diffidence
were drowned.

And now the arrivals from the far cabins were on hand. Small
children who had been allowed to sit up and look on nodded in
corners, or stretched themselves across their fathers' knees and
were tumbled just as they were upon a pallet in the loft. The
usual contingent of bad little boys collected outside the door
and began to shout at the dancers by name, calling out comments
on personal peculiarities, or throwing small chips and stones
under foot to trip up the unwary. These were finally put down by
the strong hand.

Clapping and stamping increased as the dancers moved more
rapidly; calls were shouted; the laughter was continuous. Lance
Cleaverage leaned forward in his place, striking the humming
strings with sure, tense fingers, his eyes aglow, and on his
mouth a half smile. The fun waxed furious; the figures whirled
faster and faster, gathering, disparting, interweaving, swinging
and eddying before his eyes. Coats were thrown off, the feet
thudded out the measure heavily. This was his dissipation, the
draught that the mirth of others brewed for him. Its fumes were
beginning to mount to his brain, when Ola's hard brown little
hand came down across his strings and stopped [55] the music. There
was an instant and indignant outcry and protest.

"Consarn yo' time, Ola! What did you want to do that for?"
demanded a tall young fellow who had broken down in the midst of
a pigeon wing, as though he drew his inspiration from the banjo
and could not move without its sound.

"I want to hear Buck play on his accordion--and I want Lance to
dance with me," Ola said petulantly. "What's the use of him
settin' here all the time playin' for you-all to have fun, and
him never gettin' any? Come on, Lance."

Ola Derf was not used to the consideration generally accorded
young women. When she made a request, she deemed it well to see
that her requirements were complied with. Deftly she lifted the
banjo from Lance's lap and passed it to someone behind her, who
put it on the fireboard. Then laying hold of the young man
himself, she pulled him out into the middle of the room.

"Play, Buck, play," she admonished Fuson, who had his accordion.
"You made yo' brags about what fine music you could get out of
that thar box,--now give us a sample."

Buck played. When a dance has swung so far as this one had,
nothing can check its rhythmic movement. The notes dragged
wheezily from the old accordion answered as well to the
gathering's warm, free, fluent mood as the truer harmonies of [56]
Lance's banjo. Hand clasping hand, Ola and Lance whirled among
the others, essaying a simple sort of polka. She was a tireless
dancer, and he as light footed as a panther. The two of them
began to feel that intoxication of swift movement timed to music
which nothing else in life can quite furnish, intensified in the
girl by a gripping conviction that this was her hour, and she
must make the most of it. She was aflame with it. When Buck
broke down she instantly proposed a game of Thimble. Boldly,
almost openly, she let herself forfeit a kiss to Lance.

There was a babble of tongues and laughter, a hubbub of mirth, a
crossfiring and confusion of sound and movement which wrought
upon the nerves like broken chords, subtle dissonances, in
music. Buck was trying to play again, some of the boys were
patting and stamping, others remonstrating, jeering, making
ironic suggestions, when Lance, a bit flushed and bright of eye,
dropped his arm around the brown girl's waist to take his
forfeit. As in duty bound she pulled away from him. He sprang
after, caught her by the shoulders, turned her broad little face
up to his and kissed her full on the laughing, red mouth.

Then a miracle! Kissing Ola Derf was not a serious matter; indeed
common gossip hinted that it was a thing all too easily accomplished.
But tonight the girl was wrought beyond herself--a [57] magnet. And
Lance's sleeping spirit felt the shock of that kiss. But alas for
Ola, it was for her rival's behoof the miracle was worked; it was
in her rival's cause she had labored, enlisting all her primitive
arts, all her ingenuity and resolution! The lights, the music, the
movement, the gayety of others, these had, so far, pleased and
stimulated Lance as they always did. But the unaccustomed warmth
and contact of the dance; the daring and abandon of the kissing
game afterward; finally the sudden ravisher's clasp and snatched
kiss--these set free in him an impulse which had slumbered till
now. To this bold, aggressive, wilful nature it was always the
high mountain, the long dubious road, the deep waters--never the
easy way, the thing at hand; it was ever his own trail--not the
path suggested to his feet. And so, in this sudden awakening, he
took no account of Ola Derf, and his whole soul turned toward
Callista--Callista the scornful, whose profile, or the side of whose
cheek, he was always seeing; Callista who refused to lift her lashes
to look at him, and who was ever saying coolly exasperating things
in a tone of gentle weariness. If Callista would look at him as Ola
Derf had done--if he might catch her thus in his arms--if those lips
of hers were offered to his kiss--!

Without a word of excuse or explanation he dropped the girl's
hand as he stood in the ring of [58] players, caught his banjo down
from the shelf, and leaving open mouths and staring eyes behind him,
strode through the door. A moment later he was footing it out in
the moonlight road, walking straight and fast toward the church
where protracted meeting was going on, and where he guessed Callista
would be with her family. A javelin, flame-tipped, had touched
him. Something new and fiery danced in his veins. He would see her
home. They would walk together, far behind the family group, in
this wonderful white moonlight.

When he reached Brush Arbor church he avoided the young fellows
lounging about the entrance waiting to beau the girls. He moved
lightly to a window at the back of the building and looked in.
There sat Octavia Gentry on the women's side, and old Ajax, her
father-in-law, on the men's. Callista he could not find from his
coign of vantage. An itinerant exhorter was on his feet,
preaching loud, pounding the pulpit, addressing himself now and
again to the mourners who knelt about the front bench. Lance
cautiously put his head in and looked further. Somehow he knew,
all in a moment, that this was what he had expected--what he had
hoped for; Callista was at home waiting for him. Yet none the
less he carefully examined the middle seats where might be found
the courting couples. He would not put it beyond his Callista to
go to church with some [59] other swain and sit there publicly
advertising her favor to the interloper.

When he was at last satisfied that she was not in the building,
he turned as he had turned from Ola Derf, and made a straight
path for himself from Brush Arbor to the Gentry place. Scorning
the beaten highway of other men's feet, he struck directly into
the forest, and through a little grove of second-growth
chestnut, with its bunches of silver-gray stems rising slim and
white in the light of the moon. Moonshine sifting through the
leaves changed his work-a-day clothing to the garb of a
troubadour. The banjo hung within easy reach of his fingers; he
took off his old hat and tucked it under his arm, striking now
and again as he went a twanging chord.

It was an old story to him, this walking the moonlit wild with his
banjo for company. Many a time in the year's release, the cool,
fragrant, summer-deep forest had called him by its delicate silver
nocturnes, its caverns of shadow and milky pools of light, bidden
him to a wild spring-running. On such nights his heart could not
sleep for song. Sometimes, intoxicated with the rhythm, he had
swung on and on, crashing through the dew-drenched huckleberry
tangles, rocking a little, with eyes half closed, and interspersing
the barbaric jangle of his banjo with quaint jodeling and long,
falsetto-broken whoops, the heritage that the Cherokee left behind
him in this land. But [60] now it was no mere physical elation of
youth and summer and moonlight. It was the supreme urge of his
nature that sent his feet forward steadily, swiftly, as toward a
purpose that might not be let or stayed. Speed--to Callista--that
was all. He fell into silence, even the banjo's thrumming hushed
to an intense quivering call of broken chords, hardly to be
distinguished from the insect cries of love that filled the summer
wood about him.

All the fathomless gulf of the sky was poured full of the
blue-green splendors that flooded the night world of the mountains.
Drops of dew spilled from leaf to leaf; down in the spring
hollow he was spattered to the knees by the thousand soft,
reaching fronds of cinnamon fern. Wild fragrances splashed him
with great waves of sweetness. So the lords of the wild, under
pelt and antler, have ever been wont to rove to their wooing; so
restless are the wings that flutter among summer branches and
under summer moons.

Between the banjo's murmuring chords, as he neared the Gentry
clearing, once more a melody began to stray, like smoke which
smoulders fitfully and must presently burst into flame.--Thrum-dum,
thrum-dum, and then the tune's low call. It was a gypsy music, that
lured with vistas of unknown road, the glint of water, and the
sparkle of the hunter's fire; a wildly sweet note that asked, "How
many miles?"--and [61] again, out of colorless drumming, "How many
years? . . . how many miles?" . . . a song shadow-like in its
come-and-go, rising at intervals to the cry of a passion no
mortality has power to tame, and then, ere the ear had fairly
caught its message, falling again into dim harmonies as of rain
blown through the dark;--a question, and the wordless, haunting
refrain for all answer. Just above his breath Lance voiced the
words:

   "How many years, how many miles,
   Far from the door where my darling smiles?
   How many miles, how many years.
   Divide our hearts by pain and fears?"

The melody sank and trailed, drowned in a cadence of minors that
sobbed like the rush of storm. Out of this, wild, as the wind's
pleading, it rose again;

   "It may be far, it may be near,
   The water's wide and the forest drear,
   But somewhere awaiting, surely I
   Shall find my true love by and bye."

The lithe limbs threshed through the dew-drenched, scented
undergrowth. The trees grew more openly now; clearing was at
hand.

   "--My true love--by and bye,"

hummed the light, sweet baritone.

Callista had petulantly refused to go to church with her mother
and grandfather. For no reason which she could assign, she
wanted to be alone. [62] Then when they were all gone, she wished she
had accompanied them. An indefinable disquiet possessed her. She
could not stay in the house. Candle in hand she sought an
outside cabin where stood the loom. Climbing to the loft room of
this she set her light down and began to search out some quilt
pieces, which she figured to herself as the object of her
present excursion. Though she would have denied it with scorn,
the idea of Lance Cleaverage filled her completely; Lance, the
man who was preparing to marry her, yet upon whom--of all those
who had come near her, in the free, fortuitous commerce of
marriageable youth in the mountains--she had, it seemed to her,
been able to lay no charm, to exert no influence. He met her; he
exchanged cut and thrust with her, and he went his ways after
their encounters, neither more nor less than he had been before.
He came back seemingly at the dictates of time and chance only,
and never hotter nor colder, never hastening to nor avoiding
her. A bitterness tinged all her thought... She wondered if she
would have seen him had she gone to meeting . . . She reflected
jealously that he was much more likely to be at the frolic at
Derf's. . . . She wished she knew how to dance.

All at once, on the vague introspection of her mood, she became
aware of the recurrent stroke of a soft musical note--the
humming of Lance's banjo. Crouching rigidly by the little chest
that [63] held her quilt scraps, she listened. It was a trick of the
imagination--she had thought so much about him that she fancied
him near. Then, with a sudden heavy beating of the heart, she
realized that if he had been at the dance and gone home early he
might be passing now on the big road. She smiled at her own
folly; this tremulous low call could never be heard across two
fields and the door-yard.

And it was a banjo . . . it was Lance's banjo . . . he was
playing whisperingly, too, as he loved to do.

Then the strings ceased to whisper. Clearer came their voice and
louder. Without thinking to extinguish her candle, she ran to
the window and knelt hearkening. She looked down on the moonlit
yard. All was silent and homely . . . but that was Lance's
banjo. Even as she came to this decision. Lance himself broke
through the greenery at the edge of the near field, vaulted a
low fence, and emerged into the open. He came on in the soft
light, singing a little, apparently to himself.

Spellbound she listened, gripping the window ledge hard, holding
her breath, choking, wondering what this new thing was that had
come to her. Above him she was set like a saint enshrined, with
the moonlight to silver her rapt, shining face, and the glow of
the candle behind making a nimbus of her fair hair. Yet never at
all (or she [64] thought so) did Lance look up. Light footed,
careless of mien, he circled the house once, still humming under
his breath, and striking those odd, tentative chords on the
banjo. Then, abruptly, when she had realized her position and
would have hidden herself, or put out the candle which betrayed
her, he stopped under her window and with upflung head was
smiling straight into her eyes. She rallied her forces and
prepared for the duel which always ensued when she and Lance met.
She would give him as good as he sent. She would tell him that she
had stayed away from church for fear she should see him. If he
hinted that she had expected this visit, she would--she would say--

But this was a new Lance Cleaverage looking into her eyes--a man
Callista had never seen before. Subtly she knew it, yet scarcely
dared trust the knowledge. The young fellow below in the
moonlight sent up no challenge to a trial of wits; he offered
her no opportunity for sarcastic retort. Tossing aside his hat,
making ready his banjo, he lifted his head so that the lean,
dark young face with its luminous eyes was raised fully to her
in the soft radiance, and struck some chords--strange,
thrilling, importunate chords--then began to sing.

The serenade is a cherished courtship custom of primitive
societies. Lance Cleaverage, the best banjo player in the Turkey
Tracks, with a flexible, [65] vibrant, colorful baritone voice, had
often gone serenading with the other boys; but this--tonight--was
different. He felt like singing, and singing to Callista; for the
moment it was his form of expression. What he sang was his own
version of an old-world ballad, with his love's name in place of
the Scottish girl's to whom it was addressed three hundred years ago
in the highlands of another hemisphere. Unashamed, unafraid--would
anything ever make Lance either ashamed or afraid?--he stood in the
white moonlight and sent forth his passionate, masterful call of
love on the wings of song.

Callista's heart beat wildly against her arms where she rested
on the window sill. Her lips were apart, and the breath came
through them quick and uneven. Despite herself, she leaned
forward and looked back into the eyes that gazed up at her. Was
this Lance, the indifferent, taunting, insouciant, here under
her window alone, looking up so at her--playing, singing, to
her? Oh, yes, it was Lance. He wanted her, said the swift
importunate notes of the banjo, the pleading tones of his voice,
the bold yet loverlike attitude of the man. He wanted her. Well--a
flood of tender warmth rose in her--she wanted him! For the first
time probably in her life--misshapen, twisted to the expression
of the coquette, the high and mighty, scornful miss who finds no
lover to her taste--Callista was all a woman. The fires [66] of
her nature flamed to answer the kindred fire of his. The last,
teasing note of the banjo quavered into silence. Lance pulled
the ribbon over his head, laid the instrument by--without ever
taking his eyes from her face--and said, hardly above a whisper,

"Callista, honey, come down."

No retort was ready for him.

"I--oh, I can't, Lance," was all Callista could utter.

With a "Well, I'm a-comin' up there, then," he sprang into the
muscadine vine whose rope-like trunks ran up around the doorway
below her. She only caught her breath and watched in desperate
anxiety the reckless venture. And when he reached the level of
her window, when, swinging insecurely in a loop of the vine, he
stretched his arms to her, ready arms answered him and went
round his neck. A face passion pale was raised to him, and
eager, tremulous lips met his.

They drew apart an instant, then Callista--overwhelmed,
frightened at herself--with a swift movement hid her face on his
breast. He bent over her, and laid his dark cheek against hers,
that was like a pearl. His arms drew her closer, closer; the two
young hearts beat plungingly against each other. The arms that
strained Callista so hard to Lance's breast trembled, and her
slender body trembled within them. Lance's shining eyes closed. [67]

[Illustration: "A face passion-pale was raised to him and eager
tremulous lips met his."]

"Callista--honey--darlin'," he whispered brokenly, "you do love me."

"Oh, Lance--Oh, Lance!" she breathed back.

And then his lips went seeking hers once more. She lifted
them to him, and the lovers clung long so. The world swung
meaninglessly on in space. The two clasped close in each other's
arms were so newly, so intensely, blindingly, electrically
awake to themselves and to each other, that they were utterly
insensible to all else.

Finally Lance raised his head a bit. He drew a long, sobbing
breath, and laying his face once more against the girl's
murmured with tender fierceness,

"An' we ain't going to wait for no spring, neither. You'll wed
me to-morrow--well, next week, anyway"--as he felt her start and
struggle feebly.

"Oh, Lance--honey--no," she began. But he cut her short with
vehement protestations and demands. He covered her face, her
hair, her neck with kisses, and then declared again and again,
in a voice broken with feeling, that they would be wedded the
next week--they wouldn't wait--they wouldn't wait.

Shaken, amazed by her own emotions, terrified at the rush of
his, Callista began to plead with him; and when that availed
nothing, save to inflame his ardor, her cry was,

"Yes, Lance. Yes--all right--we [68] will. We will, Lance--whenever
you say. But go now, honey, won't you--please? Oh, Lance!
They'll be coming home any minute now. If they was to find you
here. Lance--Won't you go now, please, honey? Lance, darlin',
please. I'll do just like you say--next week--any time, Lance.
Only go now."

There was no sense of denying, or drawing herself back, in
Callista's utterance. It was only the pleading of maiden terror.
When Lance acquiesced, when he crushed her to him in farewell,
her arms went round him once more, almost convulsively; with an
equal ardor, her lips met the fierce, dominating kiss of his.

He got down from the window, his head whirling. Mechanically he
found his banjo, flung the ribbon over his neck and turned the
instrument around so that it hung across his shoulders. Thus,
and with his hat again tucked under his arm, without ever
looking back toward the house, he walked swiftly and unsteadily
away, once more through the young chestnut wood, with its
dapplings of shadow and moonlight. He dipped into the hollow
where the spring branch talked to itself all night long in
the silence and the darkness under the twisted laurel and
rhododendrons; once more he stood on the little tonsured hill
above the church. The lights were out; they had all gone home.

Below him was spread his world; the practised [69] eye of this free
night rover could have located every farm and cabin, as it all
lay swimming in this wonderful, bewitched half-light. Those were
his kindred and his people; but he had always been a lonely soul
among them. The outposts of levity which he had set about the
citadel of his heart had never been passed by any. Tonight, with
an upheaval like birth or death, he had broken down the barriers
and swept another soul in beside him; close--close. He would
never be alone again--never again. There would always be
Callista. In the intoxication, the ravishment of the moment, he
made no reckoning with the Callista he had heretofore known, the
Lance that had been; they should be always as now on this night
of magic. [70]

CHAPTER V.

THE ASKING.

ON the comb of a tall ridge back of the Cleaverage place, Ola
Derf caught up with Lance at last.

"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 yo' head. I
believe in my soul you heared me the first time I called."

Cleaverage did not take the trouble to affirm or deny. He flung
himself back on the fern and pine needles with his hat over his
face, and remarking, "Wake me up when you get your breath,"
affected to go to sleep. Ola Derf was as comfortable a companion
as a dog, in that you could talk to her or let her alone, as the
humor ran.

A cicada's whir overhead swelled to a pulsating screech and died
away. The woods here opened into calm and lofty spaces which at a
little distance began to be dimmed as with vaporized sapphire--the
blue that melted the hills into the sky. His eyes were caught by
an indigo-bird in the branches--a [71] drop of color apparently
precipitated by this marvel of azure held in solution by the summer
air.

It was the morning after Lance had sung to Callista under her
window, and his mind was yet swimming in dreams of her. He was
roused from these by Ola's voice.

"Lance," she began and broke off. "Oh, Lance, I want to talk to
you about--about--" Again her voice lapsed. She could see
nothing of his face. His chest rose and fell rhythmically.
"Lance--air you asleep?"

"Huh-uh. But if you keep on talkin' right good maybe I'll get to
sleep."

She paid no attention to the snub, but addressed herself once
more to what seemed a difficult bit of conversational tactics.

"Lance," came the plaint for the third time, "I wanted to name
Callista Gentry to you. I--I--that thar gal don't care the
rappin' o' her finger about you, nor any man."

Cleaverage, with the memory of last night warm at his heart,
smiled under his hat brim and made no answer, save a little
derisive sound which might have meant denial, indifference, or
mere good-humored contempt of Ola herself.

"Oh, yes, I know," Ola nodded to her own thought, "they's a heap
of 'em lets on not to like the boys; but with Callista Gentry hit
goes to the bone. She don't care for nary soul in this round world
but her own pretty self. She 'minds me [72] of a snake--a white
snake, if ever there was such a thing. You look at her. You ain't
never seen her change color, whatever came or went."

The picture evoked of Callista's flushed, tender face lying upon
his breast made the pulses of the man on the warm pine needles
leap.

"Well," he prompted finally, "what's the trouble? Are you a true
friend, that doesn't want me to get snake bit?"

Ola laughed out a short laugh.

"No," she said, drearily, "I'm just a fool that's got yo' good
at heart, and don't like to see you get a wife that cares
nothin' for you. Thar--I've said my say. Thar's no love in her,
and thar's no heart in her. But if a pretty face and high and
mighty ways is what takes you, of course you can follow yo'
ruthers."

"Uh-huh," agreed Lance, pushing his hat back and sitting up. He
cast a laughing, sidelong glance in her direction. "Ola," he
said softly, "I'm a goin' to let you into a secret. The gals has
pestered me all my life long with too much lovin', and my great
reason for bein' willin' to have Callista Gentry is that she
seems like you say, sorter offish."

To his intense surprise (he had been wont to jest much more
hardily with her than this), Ola's face flushed suddenly a dark,
burning red. She jumped to her feet like a boy.

"All right," she said in a throaty tone, her [73] countenance turned
away from him. "If that's so, I'm sorry I spoke. Tell Miz.
Cleaverage all about it--and all about me and the other gals
that run after you so turrible. I don't care."

But half way down the ridge her swift, angry, steps began to
lag, and a little further on Lance overtook her.

"They's a-goin' to be a dance at our house a-Wednesday," she
said in a penitent voice. "You're a-comin', ain't you, Lance?"

"Nope," returned the invited guest briefly.

He volunteered no excuse or explanation; and so, when the
parting of their ways was reached, she demanded with imploring
eyes on his face,

"Ye ain't mad with me, air ye. Lance? Why won't you come to my
party?"

"Got somethin' else to do," Cleaverage returned nonchalantly.
"Callista and me is goin' to be married a-Wednesday night."

Ola fell back a step, and clutched the sunbonnet which she
carried rolled in her hands.

"You're a--w'y, Lance--you're jest a foolin'," she faltered.

Lance shook his head lightly, without a word.

"But--why, I was over at Gentry's this morning," she exclaimed
finally. "Nobody thar said anything about it." She still watched
his face incredulously. "They shorely would have said somethin',
if Callista had named the day." [74]

"She never named it," said Lance easily. "I named it myself,
back there on the ridge whilst you was catchin' your breath--or
wastin' it. We had allowed that a week from yesterday would do
us, but it sort of come over me that Wednesday was the right
time, and I'm goin' along by there right now to settle it all.
Reckon if you folks are givin' a dance you won't heed a invite?
Good-bye," and he turned away on his own trail.

Swift, unsmiling, preoccupied as a wild thing on its foreordained
errand--the hart to the spring, the homing bird--Cleaverage made
his way to the Gentry place. Callista felt him coming before he
turned into the big road; she saw him while yet the leafage of the
door maples would have confused any view less keen. She longed
to flee. Then in a blissful tremor she could do nothing but remain.
Octavia Gentry, carrying hanks of carpet chain to the dye-pot in
the yard, caught sight of him and called out a greeting.

"Is Mr. Gentry about the place?" Lance asked her, as he lingered
a moment with Callista's eyes on him from the doorway.

"Yes, Pappy's makin' ready to go down to the Settlement, and he
ain't been to the field to-day. He's in the house somewhar's.
Did you want to see him special, Lance?"

Cleaverage made no direct reply; and the widow added,

"Thar he is, right now," as Ajax Gentry stepped [75] out into the
open passage with a bit of harness in his hand which he was
mending. A certain gravity fell on her manner as the two walked
toward the house. It went through her mind that Cleaverage had
never formally asked for Callista, and that now he was about to
do so. She lifted her head proudly and glanced round at him.
Lance Cleaverage was not only the best match in the whole Turkey
Track region, but he had been the least oncoming of all "Sis's
love-yers." You never could be sure whether Lance wanted the
girl or was merely amusing himself; and Octavia had always been
strongly set upon the match. When they came to the porch edge,
Lance seated himself upon it and looked past the old man to
where Callista's flower face was dimly discernible in the entry
beyond.

"Good morning," he said impersonally. "I'm glad to find you at
home, Mr. Gentry. I stopped a-past to name it to you-all that
Callista and me has made up our minds to be wed a-Wednesday
evening."

There was a soft exclamation from within; but mother and
grandfather remained dumb with astonishment. Cleaverage glanced
round at them with a slight impatience in his hazel eyes that
held always the fiery, tawny glint in their depths. He detested
having people receive his announcements as though they were
astonishing--that is, unless it was his humor to astonish. [76]

"Well," Grandfather Gentry began after a time, "ain't this
ruther sudden?"

"Marryin' has to be done all of a sudden," Lance remarked
without rancor. "I never yet have heard of gettin' married
gradual."

"Why, Lance, honey," said the widow in a coaxing tone, "you
ain't rightly ready for a wife, air ye? Ef you two young folks
had named this to me--well, six months ago--I'd 'a' had
Callista's settin' out in good order. Looks like Pappy's right,
and it is sorter suddent."

"What do you say, Callista?" inquired the postulant bridegroom
without looking up.

In the soft dusk of the interior the girl's face was crimson.
Here came the time when she could no longer pretend to be urged
into the marriage by her mother, her grandfather, the course of
events; but must say "yes" or "no" openly of her own motion.
Last night's startling accost yet shook her young heart; the
glamour of that hour came back upon her senses.

"I say whatever you say, Lance," she uttered, scarcely above a
whisper.

Ajax Gentry laughed out.

"Well--I reckon that settles it," he said, jingling his harness
and turning to leave.

"No--it don't settle nothin'," broke in Octavia anxiously.
"Lance ain't got any land cleared to speak of over on his place,
and he ain't put in any crop; how air the both of 'em to live? [77]
They'll just about have obliged to stay here with us. You can
find work for Lance on the farm, cain't ye, Pappy?"

Old Ajax measured his prospective grand-son-in-law with a steady
eye, and assured himself that there was not room on the farm nor
in the house for two masters. He read mastery in every line of
face and figure. Lance got to his feet so suddenly that he might
have been said to leap up.

"I've built me a good cabin, and it's all ready. Callista and me
are goin' into no house but our own," he said brusquely. "Ain't
that so, Callista?"

Again the girl within the doorway answered in that hushed,
almost reluctant voice,

"Just as you say. Lance."

And though grandfather laughed, and Mother Gentry objected and
even scolded, that ended the argument.

"I'll stop a-past and leave the word at Hands's," Lance told
them as he turned to go. "Is there anyone else you'd wish me to
bid, mother?"

That "mother," uttered in Lance's golden tones, went right to
the widow's sentimental heart. She would have acceded to
anything he had proposed in such a way. Old Ajax smiled,
realizing that Lance meant to triumph once for all over Flenton
Hands.

As Cleaverage walked away, the mother prompted, almost
indignantly, [78]

"Why didn't ye go down to the draw-bars with him, Callista? I
don't think that's no way to say farewell to a young man when
you've just been promised."

Gentry looked at his daughter-in-law through narrowed eyes, then
at Callista; his glance followed Lance Cleaverage's light-footed
departure a moment, and then he delivered himself.

"I ain't got nothing agin your marryin' Lance Cleaverage
Wednesday evening," he said concisely to Callista. "I ain't been
axed; but ef I had been, my say would still be the same. All
I've got to tell you is that thar was never yet a house built of
logs or boards or stones that was big enough to hold two
families."

"Why, Pap Gentry!" exclaimed Octavia in a scandalized tone.
"This house is certainly Callista's home, and I'm sure I love
Lance as well as I ever could a own son. If they thought well to
live here along of us this winter, I know you wouldn't hold to
that talk."

"I reckon you don't know me so well as ye 'lowed ye did,"
observed Gentry; "for I would--and do. Lance Cleaverage has took
up with the crazy notion of marryin' all in haste. He ain't got
no provision for livin' on that place of his. Well, I tell you
right now, he cain't come and live in my house. No, nor you
cain't pack victuals over to 'em to keep 'em up."

A coquette according to mountain ideals, carrying [79] her head high
with the boys, famous for her bickerings with Lance, Callista
Gentry had always been a model at home, quiet, tractable,
obedient. But the face she now turned upon her grandfather was
that of a young fury. All her cold pride was up in arms. That
secret, still spirit of hers, haughty, unbent, unbroken, reared
itself to give the old man to understand that she wanted nothing
of him from this on. She--Lance's wife--the idea of her begging
food from Grandfather Gentry!

"If you two'll hush and let me speak," she said in an even tone,
"I reckon I'll be able to set grandpappy's mind at rest. You can
give me the wedding--I reckon you want to do so much as that for
your own good name. But bite or sup I'll never take afterwards
in this house. No, I won't. So far from carryin' victuals out of
it, you'll see when I come in I'll have somethin' in my hand,
grandpap. I invite you and mother right now to take yo' Sunday
dinners with me when you want to ride as far as the Blue Spring
church. But,"--she went back to it bitterly--"bite or sup in
this house neither me nor Lance will ever take." Then, her eyes
bright, her usually pale cheeks flaming, she turned and ran up
the steep little stairs to her own room. Octavia looked reproach
at her father-in-law; but Ajax Gentry spat scornfully toward the
vacant fireplace, and demanded, [80]

"Now she's a pretty somebody for a man to wed and carry to his
home, ain't she? I say, Sunday dinners with her! Can she mix a
decent pone o' corn bread, and bake it without burnin' half her
fingers off? She cain't. Can she cut out a hickory shirt and
make it? She cain't. Could she kill a chicken and pick and clean
it and cook it--could she do it ef she was a starvin'? She could
not. She cain't so much as bile water without burnin' it. She
don't know nothin'--nothin' but the road. She's shore a fine
bargain for a man to git. To have a passel o' fool boys
follerin' after her and co'tin' her, that's all Callisty's ever
studied about, or all you ever studied about for her."

"Well, pappy," Octavia bridled, considerably stung, "I don't
think you' got much room to talk. In yo' young days, from all I
ever heared--either from you or from others--you was about as
flighty with the gals, and had about as many of 'em follerin'
after you, as Sis is with the boys."

She looked up at her father-in-law where he lounged against the
fire-board. Grandly tall was old Ajax Gentry, carrying his
seventy years and his crown of silver like an added grace. His
blue eye had the cold fire of Callista's, and his lean sinewy
body, like hers, showed the long, flowing curves of running
water.

"O-o-o-oh!" he rejoined, with an indescribable lengthened
circumflex on the vowel that lent it [81] a world of meaning.
"O-o-o-oh! . . . a man! Well--that's mighty different. If a feller's
got the looks--and the ways--he can fly 'round amongst the gals
for a spell whilst he's young and gaily, and it don't do him no
harm. There's some that the women still foller after, even when
he's wedded and settled down" (Ajax smiled reminiscently). "But
when a man marries a gal, he wants a _womern_--a womern that'll
keep his house, and cook his meals, and raise his chillen right.
The kind o' tricks Callisty's always pinned her faith to ain't
worth shucks in wedded life. Ef I was a young feller to-morrow,
I wouldn't give a chaw o' tobaccer for a whole church-house full
o' gals like Callisty, an' I've told you so a-many's the time.
Yo' Maw Gentry wasn't none o' that sort--yo' mighty right she
wasn't! She could cook and weave and tend a truck patch and
raise chickens to beat any womern in the Turkey Tracks, Big
_and_ Little. I say, Sunday dinner with Callisty!" he repeated.
"Them that goes to her for a dinner had better pack their
victuals with 'em."

Octavia gathered up her hanks of carpet-warp and started for the
door.

"All right, Pappy," she said angrily. "All right. I raised the
gal best I knowed how. I reckon _you_ think the fault--sence you
see so much fault in her--comes from my raisin'; but I know
mighty well an' good that the only trouble _I_ ever had with
Sis, was 'count o' her Gentry blood. [82] How you can expect the
cookin' o' corn pones and makin' o' hickory shirts from a gal
that's always got every man in reach plumb distracted over her,
is more'n I can see." Octavia went out hastily before her
father-in-law could make the ironic reply which she knew to
expect; and after a moment or two, Ajax himself moved away
toward the log stable to begin his harnessing.

Callista had hurried to her bedroom, slammed the door, and was alone
with her own heart. As for Lance, walking beneath the chestnuts, he
had no wish to have her beside him under the old man's humorous,
semi-sarcastic gaze and his prospective mother-in-law's sentimental,
examining eye. He wanted her to himself. He thought with a mighty
surge of rapture of the approaching time when they could shut out
all the world and find once more that island of delight where they
should dwell the only created beings. He, to share his honeymoon
with the Gentry family! He laughed shortly at the thought.

It was Little Liza that opened the Hands door to him, and her
light eyes softened unwillingly as they beheld his alert figure
on the step. Little Liza was tormented with an incongruously
soft heart, painfully accessible to the demands of beauty and
charm.

"Howdy," she said. She had not seen Lance Cleaverage since the day of
the funeral; but she had heard from her brother and her sisters that
[83] his behavior on that occasion was unseemly, if not positively
disrespectful.

Lance barely returned her greeting, then he broached his errand.

"Jane! Ellen! Oh, Flent!" she called distressfully, when she had
his news, "Come on out. Lance Cleaverage is here, waitin' to
invite you to his weddin'."

The two sisters came out on the porch, but Flenton did not make
his appearance.

"Howdy, Lance. Who is it?" inquired Ellen Hands. "Callista
Gentry hasn't took you, has she?"

"Well," drawled Lance, lifting a laughing eye to the line of
big, gray-faced women on the rude, puncheon-floored gallery,
"you can make it out best way you find. The weddin' is to be
held at the Gentry place. If it ain't Callista, it's somebody
mighty like her."

Little Liza's lip trembled.

"You Lance Cleaverage," she said huskily, "you're a-gettin' the
sweetest prettiest thing that ever walked this earth. I do know
that there ain't the man livin' that's fit for Callisty. I hope
to the Lord you'll be good to her."

Again Lance regarded the doleful visages before him and laughed.

"You-all look like I'd bid you to a funeral rather than to a
weddin'," he said, lingering a bit to see if Flenton would show
himself. [84]

Hands was just inside the window. He knew well what had been
said. Nothing could have been less to his taste than the going
out to receive such an invitation.

"Thar--you see now, Flent," said Little Liza tragically, as she
encountered her brother when they turned from watching Lance
away. "You've lost her. Oh, law! I always thought if I could
call Callisty Gentry sister, it would make me the happiest
critter in the world."

"You may have a chance so to call her yet," said Hands, who
showed any emotion the announcement may have roused in him only
by an added tightening of lip and eye. "Wednesday ain't come
yet--and hit ain't gone."

"Well, hit'll come and hit'll go," said Ellen heavily. "Lance
Cleaverage gits what he starts after, and that's the fact."

"Yes," agreed Little Liza, "he shore does. I don't reckon I
could have said no to him myself."

"Lance Cleaverage!" echoed her brother. "Well, he's born--but he
ain't buried. I never did yet give up a thing that I'd set my
mind on. I ain't said I've given up Callista Gentry."

The three looked at him rather wildly. Talk of this sort is
unknown among the mountain people. Yet they could but feel the
woman's admiration for his masculine high-handedness of speech.

At the Cleaverage place they were making ready for the noonday
meal when Lance brought [85] his news home. The table, with its
cloth of six flour-sacks sewed end to end, was set in the cool
entry. The Dutch oven, half buried in ashes, was full of
buttermilk-dodgers, keeping hot. At the other side of the broad
hearthstone, Roxy Griever bent above a dinner-pot dishing up
white beans and dumplings. Beside her Mary Ann Martha held a
small yellow bowl and made futile dabs with a spoon she had
herself whittled from a bit of shingle, trying to get beans into
it. Her mother's reproofs dropped upon her tousled and
incorrigible head with the regularity of clockwork.

"You, Mary Ann Marthy, I do know in my soul you' the worst child
the Lord ever made: Where do you expect to go to when you die?
Look at that thar good victuals all splattered out in the ashes.
That's yo' doin'. You' jest adzackly like yo' uncle Lance."

Then Sylvane, who was shaping an axe-helve in the doorway,
looked up and said, "Here comes Lance himself." And Kimbro
Cleaverage pushed another chair towards the table.

"Well," said the bridegroom expectant, looking about on the
shadowed interior of the cabin, dim to his eyes after the glare
outside, "I've got a invite for you-all to a weddin'."

"Not you and Callista?" exclaimed Sylvane, his boyish face
glowing. "Oh, Lance--she ain't said yes, has she?" [86]

"No, Buddy," Lance flung over his shoulder, and you saw by his
smile the strong affection there was between them, "she ain't
said yes--but I have. I've set the time for Wednesday, and the
Gentry place is all uptore right now getting ready for it. I
reckon"--his eye gleamed with the mischievous afterthought--"I
reckon they'll clear the big barn for dancing."

As though the word had been a catch released in her mechanism,
Roxy Griever straightened up, spoon in hand, with a snort.

"You Lance Cleaverage--you sinful soul!" she began, pointing her
bean spoon at him and thus shedding delightful dribblings of
the stew which Mary Ann Martha instantly scraped up, "you air
a-gettin' the best girl in the two Turkey Tracks--and here you
take the name of dancin' on yo' sinful lips at the same time!"

"I reckon you'll not come if there's goin' to be dancin',"
remarked Lance, hanging up his hat and seating himself at the
table. "I hadn't thought of that. Well--we'll have to get along
without you."

Roxy snorted inarticulate reprobation. Suddenly she demanded.

"Sylvane, whar's that branch of leaves I sent you after?"

With the words, Mary Ann Martha, unnoticed by her mother,
abruptly dropped her shingle spoon, scrambled across Sylvane's
long legs, and [87] galloped wildly out into the bit of orchard
beside the house, her mass of almost white curling hair flying
comically about her bobbing head, a picture of energetic terror.
Her young uncle looked after her, smiling tolerantly, and said
nothing.

"The flies'll git more of this dinner than we'uns, if we don't
have something. Why'n't you git me that branch o' leaves,
Sylvane?" persisted his sister.

"Well, Sis' Roxy, I wanted to finish my axe-helve, so I
sub-contracted that order o' yourn," answered Sylvane,
deprecatingly. "Sent Ma'-An'-Marth' out to git a small limb."

"For the land's sake! An' her not taller than--" began Roxy
querulously. But her father put in, with pacific intention,

"Here's the chap now with her peach-tree branch. Come on,
Pretty; let Gran'pappy put it up 'side o' him at the table. Now
sons, now daughter, air ye ready? This is a bountiful meal; and
Roxy's cooked it fine as the best; we're mightily favored. We'll
ax God's blessing on the food." [88]

CHAPTER VI.

THE WEDDING.

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 hot in the sun. The
white clouds were vagabonds of May time, though the birds were
already getting together in flocks, chattering, restless for
migration. Now at night instead of the bright come-and-go of
fireflies there was a mild and steady lamping of glowworms in the
evening grass. The katydids' chorus had dwindled, giving place to
the soft chirr of ground and tree-crickets. There was a pleasant,
high-pitched rustle in the stiffening leaves; the dew was heavy in
the hollows, gray under the moon.

All day the woods were silent, except for the mocking whirr of
grasshoppers rising into the sunshine, and an occasional
squabble of crows in pursuit of a hawk.

Wild grapes were ripe--delicious, tart, keen-flavored things. In
the pasture hollow a fleece of goldenrod, painted on the purple
distance along with the scarlet globes of orchard fruit, was
stripped by laughing girls for Callista's wedding [89] decorations.
Yes, summer was definitely departed; a new presence was here, an
autumn wind in the treetops, an autumn light on the meadow, an
autumn haze on the hills--a fine luminous purple, flecked with
lights of rose and gold.

The Gentry place, with its central house of some pretensions and its
numerous outlying cabins, presented on Wednesday afternoon something
the appearance of a village undergoing sack. Open doors and windows,
heaps of stuff, or bundles of household gear, or sheaves of garments
being carried from place to place, suggested this impression, which
seemed further warranted by the female figures emerging suddenly
now and again from one cabin or another and fleeing with disheveled
hair, wild gestures and incoherent babblings as of terror, to some
other refuge. The girls had not come in yet from the pasture with
their armloads of goldenrod and wild aster; but all three of the
Hands sisters--good, faithful souls, neighborhood dependences for
extra help at weddings and funerals--were hard at work in the very
heart of the turmoil.

"Liza, have you seed Callista anywhar's?" panted Octavia Gentry,
appearing in the main house, laden with a promiscuous assortment
of clothing.

"Yes, I did," rumbled Little Liza from the chair on which she
stood adjusting the top of a window curtain. [90]

"I thought I heared Lance's banjo awhile ago," added the widow
as she folded and disposed of the garments she had brought in,
"and then I didn't hear it any more. I have obliged to get hold
of Callista to tell me whar she wants these things put at."

"Yes, and you did hear Lance Cleaverage's banjo," confirmed
Little Liza sadly. "Callisty heared it, too. She come a-steppin'
down from her room like as if he'd called her, and she's walked
herself out of the front door and up the road alongside o' him,
and that's why you don't hear the banjo no more."

"Good land!" cried the mother-in-law that was to be. "I don't
know what young folks is thinkin' of--no, I don't. It ain't
respectable for a bride and groom to walk side by side on their
weddin' day. Everybody knows that much. And I've got to have
Callista here. Roxy Griever's sent word that she cain't come to
the weddin' because its been given out to each and every that
they'd be dancin'. I want Callista to see Lance and have that
stopped. Hit's jest some o' Lance's foolishness. You know in
reason its got to be stopped. Oh, Sylvane!" as a boyish figure
appeared in the doorway. "Won't you go hunt up Callista and tell
her I want her? And you tell yo' sister Roxy when you go home
that there ain't goin' to be any dancin' here tonight. And just
carry these here pans out to the springhouse [91] whilst you're
about it, Sylvane. And if you find Ellen Hands there tell her to
come on in to me, please. I vow, nobody's been for the cows!
Sylvane, whilst you're out you go up to the milk gap and see are
they waitin' thar. Let down the draw-bars for 'em if they are."

Fifteen-year-old Sylvalnus Cleaverage laughed and turned
quickly, lest further directions be given him.

"All right," he called back. "I'll 'tend to most of those
things--as many of 'em as I can remember."

A privileged character, especially among the women, Sylvane made
willing haste to do Octavia's errands. The boy was like his
brother Lance with the wild tang left out, and feminine eyes
followed his young figure as he hurried from spring-house to
pasture lot. When he found Lance and Callista walking hand in
hand at the meadow's edge he gave them warning, so that the girl
might slip in through the back door, innocently unconscious of
any offence against the etiquette of the occasion, and the
bridegroom pass on down the big road, undiscovered.

"I reckon it's jest as well as 'tis," commented old Ajax from
the security of the front door-yard, to which he had been swept
out and cleaned out in the course of the preparations. "Ef
Octavy had been give a year's warnin', she would have [92] been
jest about tearin' up Jack this-a-way for the whole time."

As evening fell, teams began to arrive, and the nearer neighbors
came in on foot, with a bustle of talk and a settling of the
children. Old Kimbro Cleaverage brought his daughter, Roxy
Griever, with little Polly Griever, a relative of Roxy's
deceased husband, and Mary Ann Martha.

"I knowed in reason you wouldn't have dancin' on yo' place," the
widow shrilled, as she approached. Then as she climbed out over
the wheel, she added in a lower tone to Little Liza Hands, who
had come out to help her down, "But that thar sinful Lance is so
pestered by the davil that you never know whar he'll come up
next, and I sont Miz. Gentry the word I did as a warnin'. Tham
men has to be watched."

Callista was ready, dressed in a certain white lawn frock--not
for worlds would she have admitted that she had made it with
secret hopes of this occasion. The helpers were still rushing to
and fro, getting the wedding supper on the long tables,
contrived by boards over trestles, on the porch and in the big
kitchen, when Preacher Drumright rode sourly up.

It was Octavia Gentry who had been instrumental in bespeaking
Drumright's services for the marriage, and indeed he was the only
preacher in the Turkey Track neighborhoods at the moment or
anywhere nearer than the Settlement itself. [93] The church-going
element of the region stood before this somewhat cantankerous
old man in the attitude of confessed offenders. He was famous for
raking the young people over the coals, and he arrogated to himself
always the patriarch's privilege of scolding, admonishing, or
denouncing, whenever the occasion might seem to him fit. For ten
years Drumright had longed to get a fair chance at Lance Cleaverage.
Ever since the boy--and he was the youngest in the crowd--joined
with a half dozen others to break up a brush meeting which Drumright
was holding, the preacher's grudge had grown. And it did not thrive
without food; Lance was active in the matter of providing sustenance
for the ill opinion of the church party, and he had capped his
iniquities by taking his banjo as near the church as the big spring
on that Sunday in mid-July. Drumright had prepared the castigating
he meant to administer to Lance almost as carefully as he would
have gotten ready a sermon.

With the advent of the preacher the last frantic preparations
were dropped, and it was suddenly discovered that they were not
absolutely necessary for the occasion. The guests gathered into
the big front room, where the marriage was to be. Drumright took
his stand behind a small table at its further end; Callista came
down the stairs, joined Lance in the entry, and the two stepped
into the room hand in hand. [94]

That was a daunting front to address with reproof. People said
that they were the handsomest couple that ever stood up together
in the two Turkey Tracks. But after all, it was something more
than physical beauty that arrested the eye in that countenance.
Lance's face was lifted, and his eyes apparently saw not the
room, the preacher, nor even the girl whose hand he held. He
moved a thing apart, his light, swift step timed to unheard
rhythms, a creature swayed by springs which those about him knew
not of, addressed to some end which they could not understand.
And Callista seemed to look only to him, to live only in him.
Her fair face reflected the strange radiance that was on his
dark, intense young visage.

It was Drumright's custom to make a little talk when about to
perform the marriage ceremony, so there was neither surprise nor
apprehension as he began to speak.

"Befo' I can say the words that shall make this here man and
this here woman one flesh, I've got a matter to bring up that I
think needs namin'."

The old voice rasped aggressively, and a little flutter of
concern passed over Drumright's hearers.

"The Gentry family air religious, church-goin' people. Why
Callista Gentry ain't a perfessin' member in the church this day
is more than I can tell you-all here and now. Like enough some
will say hit is the influence of the man a-standin' [95] beside her;
and supposin' this to be so, hit cain't be too soon named out to
'em."

If Lance heard any word of Drumright's harangue, he gave no
sign; but Callista stirred uneasily, her nostrils flickered, and
she glanced from the preacher to her bridegroom.

"I wonder in my soul," Drumright went on, "that any God-fearin'
family would give they' child to a man that has been from his
cradle up, as a body may say, the scoffer that you air, Lance
Cleaverage."

Thus pointedly addressed, a slight start passed through the
bridegroom's taut body, and Cleaverage turned a half-awakened
eye upon the preacher.

"Are you aimin' to get 'em to stop the marriage?" he inquired
bluntly. As he spoke, he dropped Callista's hand, caught it once
more in the grasp of his other, and put his freed arm strongly
about her waist. Thus holding her, he turned a little to face
her mother and grandfather as well as the preacher.

A shock went through, the crowded room; pious horror and amaze
on the part of the older people; among the younger folk a
twittering tremor not unmixed with delight at the spirit of the
bridegroom. You might wince beneath the preacher's castigations;
you might privately grumble about them, and even refuse to pay
anything toward his up-keep, thereby helping to starve [96] his
wife and children; but that you should presume to answer a preacher
in the pulpit or elsewhere in the performance of his special
office, was a thing inconceivable.

The bridegroom's family drew together at one side of the room,
Kimbro Cleaverage, in his decent best, looking half affrightedly
at the man who was miscalling his son; Roxy Griever, divided
between her allegiance to the caste of preachers, all and
singular, and tribal pride; Sylvane clutching his hands into
fists, and hoping that Buddy would get the better of the
argument; while Mary Ann Martha, in the grasp of Polly Griever,
glowered and wondered.

"Lance Cleaverage," returned Drumright ponderously, "I respect
yo' father, for he's a good man. I respect yo' sister--she's one
too; for their sake I come here to perform this marriage,
greatly agin my grain."

He was taking a long breath, having barely got under way, when
Lance stopped him with a curt,

"Well,--are you goin' to do it--or are you not?"

People gazed with open mouths and protruding eyes. Where were
the lightnings of Heaven, set apart for the destruction of the
impious? Drumright himself was momentarily staggered.

"Er, yes--I am," he said finally, wagging his head in an
obstinate, bovine shake. "After I've said my say, I aim to marry
ye." [97]

The little points of light that always danced deep down in Lance
Cleaverage's eyes, flamed up like clear lamps at this statement.

"No, you'll not," he said promptly. "You'll marry us now--or not
at all. If I wanted any of your talk, I'd come to your church
and get it. I don't want any."

All this time his arm had been round Callista, the hand closed
on her slim waist gently, but with a grip of steel. Had she
wished to stir from his side, she could scarcely have done so.
Now he turned toward the door and moved quietly away from the
astonished preacher, taking her with him.

"Whar--whar you goin'?" faltered Drumright, dumbfounded.