clashed, but the clash was of course inevitable.
Equally inevitable was it, too, that the two clans
should take the quarrel up, and for half a century
the two families had, with intermittent times of truce,
been traditional enemies. The boy’s father,
Jason Hawn, had married a Honeycutt in a time of peace,
and, when the war opened again, was regarded as a
deserter, and had been forced to move over the spur
to the Honeycutt side. The girl’s father,
Steve Hawn, a ne’erdo-well and the son of a ne’er-do-well,
had for his inheritance wild lands, steep, supposedly
worthless, and near the head of the Honeycutt cove.
Little Jason’s father, when he quarrelled with
his kin, could afford to buy only cheap land on the
Honeycutt side, and thus the homes of the two were
close to the high heart of the mountain, and separated
only by the bristling crest of the spur. In time
the boy’s father was slain from ambush, and
it was a Hawn, the Honeycutts claimed, who had made
him pay the death price of treachery to his own kin.
But when peace came, this fact did not save the lad
from taunt and suspicion from the children of the
Honeycutt tribe, and being a favorite with his Grandfather
Hawn down on the river, and harshly treated by his
Honeycutt mother, his life on the other side in the
other cove was a hard one; so his heart had gone back
to his own people and, having no companions, he had
made a playmate of his little cousin, Mavis, over
the spur. In time her mother had died, and in
time her father, Steve, had begun slouching over the
spur to court the widow—his cousin’s
widow, Martha Hawn. Straightway the fact had
caused no little gossip up and down both creeks, good-natured
gossip at first, but, now that the relations between
the two clans were once more strained, there was open
censure, and on that day when all the men of both
factions had gone to the county-seat, the boy knew
that Steve Hawn had stayed at home for no other reason
than to make his visit that day secret; and the lad’s
brain, as he strode ahead of his silent little companion,
was busy with the significance of what was sure to
come.
At the mouth of the branch, the two came upon a road
that also ran down to the river, but they kept on
close to the bank of the stream which widened as they
travelled—the boy striding ahead without
looking back, the girl following like a shadow.
Still again they crossed the road, where it ran over
the foot of the spur and turned down into a deep bowl
filled to the brim with bush and tree, and there,
where a wide pool lay asleep in thick shadow, the
lad pulled forth the ball of earth and worms from his
pocket, dropped them with the fishing-pole to the
ground, and turned ungallantly to his bow and arrow.
By the time he had strung it, and had tied one end
of the string to the shaft of the arrow and the other
about his wrist, the girl had unwound the coarse fishing-line,
had baited her own hook, and, squatted on her heels,
was watching her cork with eager eyes; but when the
primitive little hunter crept to the lower end of
the pool, and was peering with Indian caution into
the depths, her eyes turned to him.