The old mother had been his mother and, once more, Chad leaned his head against the worn lintel and wept silently.  So far, nobody had seemed to care particularly who he was, or was not—­nor had Chad.  Most people were very kind to him, looking upon him as one of the wandering waifs that one finds throughout the Cumberland, upon whom the good folks of the mountains do not visit the father’s sin.  He knew what he was thought to be, and it mattered so little, since it made no discrimination against him, that he had accepted it without question.  It did not matter now, except as it bore on the question as to where he should start his feet.  It was a long time for him to have stayed in one place, and the roving memories, stirred within him now, took root, doubtless, in the restless spirit that had led his unknown ancestor into those mountain wilds after the Revolution.

All this while he had been sitting on the low threshold, with his elbows in the hollows of his thighs and his left hand across his mouth.  Once more, he meant to be bound to no man’s service and, at the final thought of losing Jack, the liberty loving little tramp spat over his hand with sharp decision and rose.

Just above him and across the buck antlers over the door, lay a long flint-lock rifle; a bullet-pouch, a powder-horn, and a small raccoon-skin haversack hung from one of the prongs:  and on them the boy’s eyes rested longingly.  Old Nathan, he knew, claimed that the dead man had owed him money; and he further knew that old Nathan meant to take all he could lay his hands on in payment:  but he climbed resolutely upon a chair and took the things down, arguing the question, meanwhile: 

“Uncle Jim said once he aimed to give this rifle gun to me.  Mebbe he was foolin’, but I don’t believe he owed ole Nathan so much, an’, anyways,” he muttered grimly, “I reckon Uncle Jim ud kind o’ like fer me to git the better of that ole devil—­jes a leetle, anyways.”

The rifle, he knew, was always loaded, there was not much powder in the horn and there were not more than a dozen bullets in the pouch, but they would last him until he could get far away.  No more would he take, however, than what he thought he could get along with—­one blanket from the bed and, from the fireplace, a little bacon and a pone of corn-bread.

“An’ I know Aunt Jane wouldn’t ‘a’ keered about these leetle fixin’s, fer I have to have ’em, an’ I know I’ve earned ’em anyways.”

Then he closed the door softly on the spirits of the dead within, and caught the short, deer skin latch-string to the wooden pin outside.  With his Barlow knife, he swiftly stripped a bark string from a pawpaw bush near by, folded and tied his blanket, and was swinging the little pack to his shoulder, when the tinkle of a cow-bell came through the bushes, close at hand.  Old Nance, lean and pied, was coming home; he had forgotten her, it was getting late, and he was anxious