Smiles | Page 9

and acted on the words without giving the matter a
thought, but it seemed to him that the girl's pleased, "Thank ye, sir,"

was a bit embarrassed, and that the men regarded him with blank
surprise. Not for a minute did it dawn upon him that his act had not
been according to the code of the mountains.
They were all seated at last, but yet another surprise was in store for the
visitor, for Rose folded her hands, bent her head until the curls veiled
the glowing face, and began a simple blessing. Big Jerry sat bolt
upright with his eyes screwed up ludicrously, and, although Judd bent
his head the merest fraction, it was with obvious embarrassment, and
his flashing optics kept sending suspicious glances at the "furriner" as
though to discover if he were laughing at them all. In fact, nothing was
further from Donald's mind. It had been long since he had partaken of a
meal at which grace was said, but the simple, homely words touched a
chord of memory and made it vibrate to a note which brought both pain
and pleasure.
The host's stentorian "Amen" was the signal for attack, and for a time
the business of satisfying the demands of healthy hunger was
paramount to all things else. It was no feast of wit and wisdom, but of
something, for the time being, more desirable, and the application of
the other three gave Donald an opportunity to study covertly the
unusual group of which he had so unexpectedly become a part.
Although he was essentially a man of action, his brusqueness of
manner was, in part at least, a pose which had become unconscious,
and, deep within his heart, in a chamber carefully locked from the gaze
of his fellow men, dwelt Romance and Imagination--the spirit gifts of a
mother, whose death, five years before, had brought him his first black
grief. Had this visioning power been lacking in him he could never
have accomplished the modern miracles which he had already wrought
many times in constructive and restorative surgery. Now, the spirit of
imagery in his soul was stirred by something in the romantic unreality
of his surroundings--the rude, yet interesting room which served all
family purposes save that of slumber; the mellow radiance from a crude
lamp and the ever-changing light of the open fire; the long, wavering
shadows within the cabin; and, without, the banshee wailing of the
storm wind around the eaves, the occasional crash of thunder, the

creaking of limbs and fitful dashes of rain. He found himself leaning
back in his chair and mentally attempting to dissect and study not the
bodies, but the personalities, of the three who were the representatives
of a type, in manners and customs at least, new to him.
In his boyhood, and before the pressing demands of his profession had
enslaved him, Donald had been an insatiate reader, and now he
endeavored to recall to memory some of the stories which he had read
about this strange people, whose dwelling place was within the limits
of the busy, progressive East, yet who were surprisingly isolated from
it by natural barriers, and still more so by traditions slow to perish. Pure
of stock he knew them to be, for their unmixed blood had had its
fountain source in the veins of some of America's best and earliest
settlers; primitive in their ideals, strong in their simple purposes and
passions, the products of, and perhaps even now factors in, blood feuds
whose beginnings dated back generations. And, although he laughed at
himself for his imaginings as he remembered that the twentieth century
was ten years old, he found himself assigning both the men places in
his memory picture.
Big Jerry, slow of speech, patriarchal in looks and bearing, powerful in
body, became, to his mind's eye, the venerable chieftain of a mountain
clan. Judd, with his aquiline face, which was undoubtedly handsome in
a dark, brooding way, beneath its uncombed shock of black hair which
swept low over his forehead, sinewy with the strength, quickness and
muck of the natural grace of a panther, was the typical outlaw of the
hills.
CHAPTER III
AN INNOCENT SERPENT IN EDEN
Donald turned his appraising gaze upon the child, and here the illusion
yielded to another, quite different.
Even her primitive dress, her unbound hair, her crude forms of speech
and soft, drawling intonation--such as the throaty, unvarying
pronunciation of "the" as though it were "ther," and "a" like

"er"--which sounded so deliciously odd to his New England ears, could
not erase from his mind the impression that she did not belong in the
picture. To be sure he had, during his tramps, already seen many a wild
mountain flower so delicately sweet that it seemed out of