Round Anvil Rock | Page 5

used to her wiles from babyhood
up. To be used to Ruth's ways only made them harder to resist. No
stranger could possibly have foreseen his defeat as clearly as David
foresaw his at the moment that she started toward him. But self-respect
required him to stand firm as long as possible, although he felt the
strength going out of his rifle arm under her clinging touch. She felt it
going, too, and began to smile through her tears. And then, sure of her
victory, she threw caution to the winds--as older and wiser women have
done too openly in vanquishing stronger and more masterful men. She
let him see that she knew she had conquered, which is always a fatal
mistake on the part of a woman toward a man. Smiling and dimpling,
she put up her hand and patted his cheek--precisely as if he had been a
child.
The boy shrunk as if the caress had been a touch of fire. He broke away
and strode off up the hillside with his longest, manliest stride. This
humiliation was past bearing or forgiving. He could have forgiven
being called a dreamer--a useless drone--among the men of clear heads
and strong hands who had already wrested a great state from the

wilderness, and who, through this conquest, were destined to become
the immortal founders of the Empire of the West. He could have
overlooked being spoken to like a child by a girl who might be younger
than himself for all he or she knew to the contrary--though this would
have been harder. He might even have forgiven that pat on his cheek
which was downy with beard, had he been either younger or older. But
as it was--well, the matter may safely be left to the sympathy of the
man who remembers the most sensitive time of his own youth; that
trying period when he feels himself to be no longer a boy and nobody
else considers him a man.
David did not know where he was going or what he meant to do. He
was blindly striding up the river bank away from Ruth, fairly aflame
with the determination to do something--anything--to prove his
manhood. For nothing ever makes a boy resolve quite so suddenly and
firmly to become a man instantly as to be treated by a girl as he had
been by Ruth. Had the most desperate danger then come in David's way,
he would have hailed and hazarded it with delight. But he could not
think of anything to overwhelm her with just at that moment, and so he
could only stride on in helpless, angry silence. Ruth flew after him as if
her thin white skirts had been strong, swift wings. She overtook him
before he had gone very far, and clung to him again more than ever like
some beautiful white spirit of the woods wreathed in mist, with her soft
blown garments and her softer blown hair. She merely wound herself
around him at first, breathless and panting. But as soon as she caught
her breath the coaxing, the laughing, and the crying came all together.
David kept from looking down as long as he could, but his pace
slackened and his arm again relaxed. Finally--taken off guard--he
glanced at the face so near his breast. The dusk could not dim its beauty
and only made it more lovely. No more resistance was possible for
him--or for any man or boy--who saw Ruth as she looked then. David's
big rough hand was now surrendered meekly enough to the quick clasp
of her little fingers, and--forgetting all the daring deeds that he meant to
do--he was led like any lamb up the hill to the open door of Cedar
House.

II
THE HOUSE OF CEDAR
So far as they knew, there was no tie of blood or relationship binding
them to the kind people of Cedar House. Yet it was the only home that
they could remember and very dear to them both.
It was a great square of rough, dark logs, and seemed now, seen
through the uncertain light, to stand in the centre of a shadowy hamlet,
so many smaller cabins were clustered around it. The custom of the
country was to add cabin after cabin as the family outgrew the original
log house. The instinct of safety, the love of kindred, and the longing
for society in the perilous loneliness of the wilderness held these first
Kentuckians very close together. So that as their own villages thus
grew around them and only their own dwelt near them, they naturally
became as clannish as their descendants have been ever since.
The cabin nearest Cedar House contained two rooms, and was used by
its master, Judge Knox, for his own bedroom and law office.