“At first he was struck dumb, but then that passed.  He give a yell of rage an’ started toward us on th’ run.  She jumped, with me a-hinderin’ her.  Like a mountain deer she run, in spite of that.  She was lighter on her feet than he was upon his, an’ soon outdistanced him.  He hadn’t stopped to pick his rifle up—­he only had th’ knife he’d done th’ killin’ with, so he couldn’t do what he’d ‘a’ liked to done—­shoot down a woman an’ a baby!

“We lived where I live now, alone, an’ then, as now, there was a little bridge that took th’ footpath over th’ deep gully.  Them days was wicked ones in these here mountains, an’ daddy’d had that foot-bridge fixed so it would raise.  My mother just had time to pull it up, when we had crossed, before Lem Lindsay reached there.  He stopped, to keep from fallin’ in the gully, but stood there, shakin’ his bare fist an’ swearin’ that he’d kill us yet.  But that he couldn’t do.  Folks was mightily roused, and he had to leave th’ mountings, then an’ thar, an’ ain’t been in ’em since, so far as anybody knows.”

Her brows drew down upon her eyes.  Her sweet mouth hardened.  “He’d better never come!” she added, grimly.

After a moment’s pause she went on, slowly:  “So, now, here we be—­Joe Lorey, Ben’s son, an’ me.  My mother died, you see, not very many years after Lindsay’d killed my daddy.  Seein’ of it done, that way, had been too much for her.  I reckon seein’ it would have killed me, too, if I’d been more’n a baby, but I wasn’t, an’ lived through it.  Ben’s lived here, workin’ his little mounting farm, an’—­an’—­”

She hesitated, evidently ill at ease, strangely stammering over an apparently simple and unimportant statement of the condition of her fellow orphan.  She changed color slightly.  Layson, watching her, decided that the son of the one victim must be the sweetheart of the daughter of the other, and would have smiled had not the very thought, to his surprise, annoyed him unaccountably.  Whether that was what had caused her stammering, he could not quite decide, although he gave the matter an absurd amount of thought.  She went on quickly: 

“He’s lived here, workin’ of his little mounting farm an’—­an’—­an’ doin’ jobs aroun’, an’ such, an’ I’ve lived here, a-workin’ mine, a little, but not much.  After my mother died there was some folks down in th’ valley took keer of me for a while, but then they moved away, an’ I was old enough to want things bad, an’ what I wanted was to come back here, where I could see th’ place where mother an’ my daddy had both loved me an’ been happy.  I’ve got some land down in th’ valley—­fifty acres o’ fine pasture—­but I never cared to live down there.  Th’ rent I get for that land makes me rich—­I ain’t never wanted for a single thing but just th’ love an’ carin’ that my daddy an’ my mother would ‘a’ give me if that wicked man hadn’t killed ’em both.  For he did kill my mother, just as much as he killed daddy.  She died o’ that an’ that alone.”