Colonel Pendleton looked at the sturdy mountain lad, his compact figure, square shoulders, well-set head with its shock of hair and bold, steady eyes, and at the slim, wild little creature shrinking against the mantel-piece, and then he turned to his own son Gray and his little cousin Marjorie.  Four better types of the Blue-grass and of the mountains it would be hard to find.  For a moment he saw them in his mind’s eye transposed in dress and environment, and he was surprised at the little change that eye could see, and when he thought of the four living together in these wilds, or at home in the Blue-grass, his wonder at what the result might be almost startled him.  The mountain lad had shown no surprise at the talk about him and his cousin, but when the stranger man caught his eye, little Jason’s lips opened.

“I knowed all about that,” he said abruptly.

“About what?”

“Why, that mighty hunter—­and Mavis.”

“Why, who told you?”

“The jologist.”

“The what?” Old Jason laughed.

“He means ge-ol-o-gist,” said the old man, who had no little trouble with the right word himself.  “A feller come in here three year ago with a hammer an’ went to peckin’ aroun’ in the rocks here, an’ that boy was with him all the time.  Thar don’t seem to be much the feller didn’t tell Jason an’ nothin’ that Jason don’t seem to remember.  He’s al’ays a-puzzlin’ me by comin’ out with somethin’ or other that rock-pecker tol’ him an’—­” he stopped, for the boy was shaking his head from side to side.

“Don’t you say nothin’ agin him, now,” he said, and old Jason laughed.

“He’s a powerful hand to take up fer his friends, Jason is.”

“He was a friend o’ all us mountain folks,” said the boy stoutly, and then he looked Colonel Pendleton in the face—­fearlessly, but with no impertinence.

“He said as how you folks from the big settlemints was a-comin’ down here to buy up our wild lands fer nothin’ because we all was a lot o’ fools an’ didn’t know how much they was worth, an’ that ever’body’d have to move out o’ here an’ you’d get rich diggin’ our coal an’ cuttin’ our timber an’ raisin’ hell ginerally.”

He did not notice Marjorie’s flush, but went on fierily:  “He said that our trees caught the rain an’ our gullies gethered it together an’ troughed it down the mountains an’ made the river which would water all yo’ lands.  That you was a lot o’ damn fools cuttin’ down yo’ trees an’ a-plantin’ terbaccer an’ a-spittin’ out yo’ birthright in terbaccer-juice, an’ that by an’ by you’d come up here an’ cut down our trees so that there wouldn’t be nothin’ left to ketch the rain when it fell, so that yo’ rivers would git to be cricks an’ yo’ cricks branches an’ yo’ land would die o’ thirst an’ the same thing ’ud happen here.  Co’se we’d all be gone when all this tuk place, but he said as how I’d live to see the day when you furriners would be damaged by wash-outs down thar in the settlements an’ would be a-pilin’ up stacks an’ stacks o’ gold out o’ the lands you robbed me an’ my kinfolks out of.”