“Co’se I know hit ’ud be better fer Chad, but, Lawd, how we’d hate to give him up.  Still, I reckon I’ll have to let him go, but I can stand hit better, if you can git him to leave Jack hyeh.”  The Major smiled.  Did old Joel know where Nathan Cherry lived?  The old hunter did.  Nathan was a “damned old skinflint who lived across the mountain on Stone Creek—­who stole other folks’ farms and if he knew anything about Chad the old hunter would squeeze it out of his throat; and if old Nathan, learning where Chad now was, tried to pester him he would break every bone in the skinflint’s body.”  So the Major and old Joel rode over next day to see Nathan, and Nathan with his shifting eyes told them Chad’s story in a high, cracked voice that, recalling Chad’s imitation of it, made the Major laugh.  Chad was a foundling, Nathan said:  his mother was dead and his father had gone off to the Mexican War and never come back:  he had taken the mother in himself and Chad had been born in his own house, when he lived farther up the river, and the boy had begun to run away as soon as he was old enough to toddle.  And with each sentence Nathan would call for confirmation on a silent, dark-faced daughter who sat inside:  “Didn’t he, Betsy?” or “Wasn’t he, gal?” And the girl would nod sullenly, but say nothing.  It seemed a hopeless mission except that, on the way back, the Major learned that there were one or two Bufords living down the Cumberland, and like old Joel, shook his head over Nathan’s pharisaical philanthropy to a homeless boy and wondered what the motive under it was—­but he went back with the old hunter and tried to get Chad to go home with him.  The boy was rock-firm in his refusal.

“I’m obleeged to you, Major, but I reckon I better stay in the mountains.”  That was all Chad would say, and at last the Major gave up and rode back over the mountain and down the Cumberland alone, still on his quest.  At a blacksmith’s shop far down the river he found a man who had “heerd tell of a Chad Buford who had been killed in the Mexican War and whose daddy lived ’bout fifteen mile down the river.”  The Major found that Buford dead, but an old woman told him his name was Chad, that he had “fit in the War o’ 1812 when he was nothin’ but a chunk of a boy, and that his daddy, whose name, too, was Chad, had been killed by Injuns some’eres aroun’ Cumberland Gap.”  By this time the Major was as keen as a hound on the scent, and, in a cabin at the foot of the sheer gray wall that crumbles into the Gap, he had the amazing luck to find an octogenarian with an unclouded memory who could recollect a queer-looking old man who had been killed by Indians —­“a ole feller with the curiosest hair I ever did see,” added the patriarch.  His name was Colonel Buford, and the old man knew where he was buried, for he himself was old enough at the time to help bury him.  Greatly excited, the Major hired mountaineers to dig into the little hill that the old man pointed out, on which