The Heart of the Hills | Page 6

cloud and a mist of heavy rain was sweeping up

the river. It was coming fast, and the boy sprang through the bushes
and, followed by Mavis, flew down the road. The storm caught them,
and in a few moments the stranger boy and girl looking through the
front door at the sweeping gusts, saw two drenched and bedraggled
figures slip shyly through the front gate and around the corner to the
back of the house.

III
The two little strangers sat in cane-bottomed chairs before the open
door, still looking about them with curious eyes at the strings of things
hanging from the smoke-browned rafters--beans, red pepper-pods, and
twists of homegrown tobacco, the girl's eyes taking in the old
spinning-wheel in the corner, the piles of brilliantly figured quilts
between the foot-boards of the two beds ranged along one side of the
room, and the boy's, catching eagerly the butt of a big revolver
projecting from the mantel-piece, a Winchester standing in one corner,
a long, old-fashioned squirrel rifle athwart a pair of buck antlers over
the front door, and a bunch of cane fishing-poles aslant the wall of the
back porch. Presently a slim, drenched figure slipped quietly in, then
another, and Mavis stood on one side of the fire-place and little Jason
on the other. The two girls exchanged a swift glance and Mavis's eyes
fell; abashed, she knotted her hands shyly behind her and with the
hollow of one bare foot rubbed the slender arch of the other. The
stranger boy looked up at Jason with a pleasant glance of recognition,
got for his courtesy a sullen glare that travelled from his broad white
collar down to his stockinged legs, and his face flushed; he would have
trouble with that mountain boy. Before the fire old Jason Hawn stood,
and through a smoke cloud from his corn-cob pipe looked kindly at his
two little guests.
"So that's yo' boy an' gal?"
"That's my son Gray," said Colonel Pendleton.
"And that's my cousin Marjorie," said the lad, and Mavis looked

quickly to little Jason for recognition of this similar relationship and
got no answering glance, for little did he care at that moment of
hostility how those two were akin.
"She's my cousin, too," laughed the colonel, "but she always calls me
uncle."
Old Jason turned to him.
"Well, we're a purty rough people down here, but you're welcome to all
we got."
"I've found that out," laughed Colonel Pendleton pleasantly,
"everywhere."
"I wish you both could stay a long time with us," said the old man to
the little strangers. "Jason here would take Gray fishin' an' huntin', an'
Mavis would git on my old mare an' you two could jus' go flyin' up an'
down the road. You could have a mighty good time if hit wasn't too
rough fer ye."
"Oh, no," said the boy politely, and the girl said:
"I'd just love to."
The Blue-grass man's attention was caught by the names.
"Jason," he repeated; "why, Jason was a mighty hunter, and Mavis--
that means 'the songthrush.' How in the world did they get those
names?"
"Well, my granddaddy was a powerful b'arhunter in his day," said the
old man, "an' I heerd as how a school-teacher nicknamed him Jason, an'
that name come down to me an' him. I've heerd o' Mavis as long as I
can rickellect. Hit was my grandmammy's name."
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