Early in the afternoon Marjorie and Gray drove over with Christmas greetings and little presents.  Mavis went out to meet them, and when Jason half-staggered out to the gate, the visitors called to him merrily and became instantly grave and still.  Mavis flushed, Marjorie paled with horror and disgust, Gray flamed with wonder and contempt and quickly whipped up his horse—­the mountain boy was drunk.

Jason stared after them, knowing something had suddenly gone wrong, and while he said nothing, his face got all the angrier, he rushed in for his belt and pistol, and shaking his head from side to side, swaggered out to the stable and began saddling his old mare.  Mavis stood in the doorway frightened and ashamed, the boy’s mother pleaded with him to come into the house and lie down, but without a word to either he mounted with difficulty and rode down the road.  Steve Hawn, who had been silently watching him, laughed.

“Let him alone—­he ain’t goin’ to do nothin’.”  Down the road the boy rode with more drunken swagger than his years in the wake of Marjorie and Gray—­unconsciously in the wake of anything that was even critical, much less hostile, and in front of Gray’s house he pulled up and gazed long at the pillars and the broad open door, but not a soul was in sight and he paced slowly on.  A few hundred yards down the turnpike he pulled up again and long and critically surveyed a woodland.  His eye caught one lone tree in the centre of an amphitheatrical hollow just visible over the slope of a hill.  The look of the tree interested him, for its growth was strange, and he opened the gate and rode across the thick turf toward it.  The bark was smooth, the tree was the size of a man’s body, and he dismounted, nodding his head up and down with much satisfaction.  Standing close to the tree, he pulled out his knife, cut out a square of the bark as high as the first button of his coat and moving around the trunk cut out several more squares at the same level.

“I reckon,” he muttered, “that’s whar his heart is yit, if I ain’t growed too much.”

Then he led the old mare to higher ground, came back, levelled his pistol, and moving in a circle around the tree, pulled the trigger opposite each square, and with every shot he grunted: 

“Can’t hit a barn, can’t I, by Heck!”

In each square a bullet went home.  Then he reloaded and walked rapidly around the tree, still firing.

“An’ I reckon that’s a-makin’ some nail-holes fer his galluses!”

And reloading again he ran around the tree, firing.

“An’ mebbe I couldn’t still git him if I was hikin’ fer the corner of a house an’ was in a leetle grain of a hurry to git out o’ his range.”