Nobody gave heed that the girl rode a mule or that the saddle was not her own, and both facts she herself quickly forgot.  This half log, half frame house on a corner had stood a siege once.  She could yet see bullet holes about the door.  Through this window, a revenue officer from the Blue Grass had got a bullet in the shoulder from a garden in the rear.  Standing in the post-office door only just one month before, she herself had seen children scurrying like rabbits through the back-yard fences, men running silently here and there, men dodging into doorways, fire flashing in the street and from every house—­and not a sound but the crack of pistol and Winchester; for the mountain men deal death in all the terrible silence of death.  And now a preacher with a long scar across his forehead had come to the one little church in the place and the fervor of religion was struggling with feudal hate for possession of the town.  To the girl, who saw a symbol in every mood of the earth, the passions of these primitive people were like the treacherous streams of the uplands—­now quiet as sunny skies and now clashing together with but little less fury and with much more noise.  And the roar of the flood above the wind that late afternoon was the wrath of the Father, that with the peace of the Son so long on earth, such things still could be.  Once more trouble was threatening and that day even she knew that trouble might come, but she rode without fear, for she went when and where she pleased as any woman can, throughout the Cumberland, without insult or harm.

At the end of the street were two houses that seemed to front each other with unmistakable enmity.  In them were two men who had wounded each other only the day before, and who that day would lead the factions, if the old feud broke loose again.  One house was close to the frothing hem of the flood—­a log-hut with a shed of rough boards for a kitchen—­the home of Becky Day.

The other was across the way and was framed and smartly painted.  On the steps sat a woman with her head bare and her hands under her apron—­widow of the Marcum whose death from a bullet one month before had broken the long truce of the feud.  A groaning curse was growled from the window as the girl drew near, and she knew it came from a wounded Marcum who had lately come back from the West to avenge his brother’s death.

“Why don’t you go over to see your neighbor?” The girl’s clear eyes gave no hint that she knew—­as she well did—­the trouble between the houses, and the widow stared in sheer amazement, for mountaineers do not talk with strangers of the quarrels between them.

“I have nothin’ to do with such as her,” she said, sullenly; “she ain’t the kind—­”

“Don’t!” said the girl, with a flush, “she’s dying.”

“Dyin?”

“Yes.”  With the word the girl sprang from the mule and threw the reins over the pale of the fence in front of the log-hut across the way.  In the doorway she turned as though she would speak to the woman on the steps again, but a tall man with a black beard appeared in the low door of the kitchen-shed.