had taken a great fancy to Jason, gave him a mount whenever the boy pleased.  And so John Burnham saw the pair galloping the turnpikes or through the fields, or at dusk going slowly toward Marjorie’s home.  Besides, Marjorie organized many hunting parties that autumn, and the moon and the stars looking down saw the two never apart for long.  About the intimacy Mrs. Pendleton and the colonel thought little.  Colonel Pendleton liked the boy, Mrs. Pendleton wanted Marjorie at home, and she was glad for her to have companionship.  Moreover, to both, Marjorie was still a child, anything serious would be absurd, and anyway Marjorie was meant for Gray.

In the mountains Gray’s interest in his life was growing every day.  He liked to watch things planned and grow into execution.  His day began with the screech of a whistle at midnight.  Every morning he saw the sun rise and the mists unroll and the drenched flanks of the mountains glisten and drip under the sunlight.  During the afternoon he woke up in time to stroll down the creek, meet Mavis after school and walk back to the circuit rider’s house with her.  After supper every night he would go down the spur and sit under the honeysuckles with her on the porch.  The third time he came the old man and woman quietly withdrew and were seen no more, and this happened thereafter all the time.  Meanwhile in the Blue-grass and the hills the forked tongues of gossip began to play, reaching last, as usual, those who were most concerned, but, as usual, reaching them, too, in time.  In the Blue-grass it was criticism of Colonel and Mrs. Pendleton, their indifference, carelessness, blindness, a gaping question of their sanity at the risk of even a suspicion that such a mating might be possible—­the proud daughter of a proud family with a nobody from the hills, unknown except that he belonged to a fierce family whose history could be written in human blood; who himself had been in jail on the charge of murder; whose mother could not write her own name; whose step-father was a common tobacco tenant no less illiterate, and with a brain that was a hotbed of lawless mischief, and who held the life of a man as cheap as the life of a steer fattening for the butcher’s knife.  But in all the gossip there was no sinister suggestion or even thought save in the primitive inference of this same Steve Hawn.

In the mountains, too, the gossip was for a while innocent.  To the simple democratic mountain way of thinking, there was nothing strange in the intimacy of Mavis and Gray.  There Gray was no better than any mountain boy.  He was in love with Mavis, he was courting her, and if he won her he would marry her, and that simply was all—­particularly in the mind of old grandfather Hawn.  Likewise, too, was there for a while nothing sinister in the talk, for at first Mavis held to the mountain custom, and would not walk in the woods with Gray unless one of the school-children was along—­nothing sinister except to little Aaron Honeycutt, whose code had been a little poisoned by his two years’ stay outside the hills.