He looked, almost with aversion, at the book she held so closely.  He distrusted books.  Instinctively he felt them to be enemies.

“If you get them there ideas about learnin’, an’ all that, you will!” he gruffly said.  “Leastways you’ll be goin’ off, some day an’ leavin’ us—­me, the mountings an’—­an’ all yer friends up here.”

An expression of great earnestness, of almost fierce intensity grew in his face.  “Madge,” he said, “Madge Brierly, you’re makin’ a mistake!  You’re plannin’ things to take you off from here; you’re plannin’ things to make you suffer, later on.  You’re gettin’ bluegrass notions, an’ bluegrass notions never did no mounting-born no good.”  He stepped closer to her.

The latent fires in his approaching eyes were warning for her and she stepped back hastily.  “Joe Lorey, you behave yourself!” said she.  “I—­”

“Can’t ye see I love ye, Madge?” he asked, and then the fires died down, leaving in his eyes the pleading, worried look alone.  “Why, Madge, I—­”

She tried to make a joke of it.  “Joe Lorey,” she said, laughing, “I reckon you’re plum crazy.  An’ you ain’t givin’ me a chance to do what ’twas that I come down for.”

“But—­”

“I ain’t goin’ to listen to another word, to-day,” said she, and waved him off.

He went obediently, but slowly and unhappily, his rifle snuggling in the crook of his left elbow, his heavy boots finding firm footing in the rough and rocky trail as if by instinct of their own, without assistance from his brain.  A “revenuer,” coming up, just then, to bother him about his still and its unlawful product of raw whisky, would have met small mercy at his hands.  He would have been a bad man, then, to quarrel with.  His temper would have flared at slightest provocation.  He would not let it flare at her; but, unseeing any of the beauties which so vividly appealed to her, the bitter foretaste of defeat was in his heart; and in his soul was fierce revolt and disappointment.  He had not the slightest thought, however, of accepting this defeat as final.

Madge watched him go with a look of keen distress upon her fresh and beautiful young face.  She must not let him say what he had almost said, for she shrank from the thought of wounding him with the answer she felt in her heart that she would have to make.  He had slouched off, half-way down the trail and out of sight, before she put the thoughts of the unpleasant situation from her mind and turned again to the great matter which had brought her there, that day.

With a last glance at the gap in the rail fence, to make sure that it had been carefully replaced, so that there could be no danger of finding her ox gone when she returned, she started down the mountain, by a path different from that which Joe had taken.

She had not gone very far, when, from a clump of bunch-grass just in front of her, only partly, yet, renewed by the new season, a hare hopped awkwardly, endeavoring to make off.  Its progress was one-sided, difficult.