“Tell Aunt Doris I’m going for a long walk and not to worry if I’m not home for luncheon.”

Jed repeated this message over and over aloud.  He fumbled it, corrected it, and then finally gripped it long enough to speak the words automatically to Doris and Doctor Martin.

“That old fellow,” Martin said, looking keenly after him, “is going to go all to pieces some day like the one-hoss shay.  He looks about a hundred.  I wonder how old he is?”

Doris smiled.

“I imagine,” she said, “that he is not as old as he looks.  He told me that his grandfather was married in short trousers and never lived to get in long ones.  They begin life so early and just shuffle through it.”

“You find that thing in the South more than anywhere else.”  Martin was nodding understandingly.  “It’s like a dream—­more like looking at life than living it.  I suppose when they die they wake up and stretch and have a laugh at what they feared and passed through in their sleep.”

“We will all do that, more or less, Davey.”

“More or less—­yes!” Then suddenly: 

“Doris, I think you can plan on three months in New York next winter.  My boy is coming on from the West.  I’m going to take my shingle down and hang his up.”

“Really, David?  Take yours down?” Doris looked dubious.

“Yes.  I’ll stay around with him, but I’m going to put my shack on the map right under Blowing Rock.  I’ve brought the plans to show you.”

Martin took them from his pocket and sat down beside Doris, and while they became absorbed, Nancy was climbing her way up Thunder Trail.

Before she realized that she had come so far, she was in the open, the sunlight almost blinding her.  She started back and screwed her eyes to make sure that she saw aright.  Not only was she out of the woods but she was on the edge of a trim garden plot; there was a dilapidated cabin just beyond it, and an ancient creature standing in the doorway.

At first Nancy could not make out whether it was a man or a woman.  She had never seen any one so old, and the eyes in the shrunken face were like burning holes—­caverns with fire in them!

Nancy was too stunned to move or speak.  Her knowledge of the hills forbade the usual fear, but a supernatural terror seized her and she waited for the old woman—­she decided it was a woman—­to make the first advance.  This the woman presently did.  She turned, and with trembling haste took up a rusty spade by the door; she shuffled toward a corner of the opening and began to dig at a mound that was covered with loose earth.  Weakly, fearfully, the claw-like hands worked while Nancy stood fascinated and bewildered.  Finally the old woman came toward her and there was a tragic pathos on the wrinkled face that tended to quiet the girl’s rising fear.  The cracked voice was pleading: 

“How did yo’ get out?” The words came anxiously and with difficulty, like the words of a deaf mute that had been taught to speak mechanically.