The Heart of the Hills | Page 9

gate.
"Whar you two been?" he called sharply.
"I went fishin'," said the boy unperturbed, "an' tuk Mavis with me."
"You air gittin' a leetle too peart, boy. I don't want that gal a- runnin'
around in the woods all day."
Jason met his angry eyes with a new spirit.
"I reckon you hain't been hyeh long."
The shot went home and the mountaineer glared helpless for an answer.
"Come on in hyeh an' git supper," he called harshly to the girl, and as
the boy went back up the spur, he could hear the scolding going on
below, with no answer from Mavis, and he made up his mind to put an
end to that some day himself. He knew what was waiting for him on
the other side of the spur, and when he reached the top, he sat down for
a moment on a long-fallen, moss-grown log. Above him beetled the top
of his world. His great blue misty hills washed their turbulent waves to
the yellow shore of the dropping sun. Those waves of forests primeval
were his, and the green spray of them was tossed into cloudland to
catch the blessed rain. In every little fold of them drops were trickling
down now to water the earth and give back the sea its own. The
dreamy-eyed man of science had told him that. And it was unchanged,

all unchanged since wild beasts were the only tenants, since wild
Indians slipped through the wilderness aisles, since the half-wild white
man, hot on the chase, planted his feet in the footsteps of both and
inexorably pushed them on. The boy's first Kentucky ancestor had been
one of those who had stopped in the hills. His rifle had fed him and his
family; his axe had put a roof over their heads, and the loom and
spinning-wheel had clothed their bodies. Day by day they had fought
back the wilderness, had husbanded the soil, and as far as his eagle eye
could reach, that first Hawn had claimed mountain, river, and tree for
his own, and there was none to dispute the claim for the passing of half
a century. Now those who had passed on were coming back again--the
first trespasser long, long ago with a yellow document that he called a
"blanket- patent" and which was all but the bringer's funeral shroud, for
the old hunter started at once for his gun and the stranger with his
patent took to flight. Years later a band of young men with chain and
compass had appeared in the hills and disappeared as suddenly, and
later still another band, running a line for a railroad up the river, found
old Jason at the foot of a certain oak with his rifle in the hollow of his
arm and marking a dead- line which none dared to cross.
Later still, when he understood, the old man let them pass, but so far
nobody had surveyed his land, and now, instead of trying to take, they
were trying to purchase. From all points of the compass the "furriners"
were coming now, the rock-pecker's prophecy was falling true, and at
that moment the boy's hot words were having an effect on every soul
who had heard them. Old Jason's suspicions were alive again; he was
short of speech when his nephew, Arch Hawn, brought up the sale of
his lands, and Arch warned the colonel to drop the subject for the night.
The colonel's mind had gone back to a beautiful woodland at home that
he thought of clearing off for tobacco--he would put that desecration
off a while. The stranger boy, too, was wondering vaguely at the fierce
arraignment he had heard; the stranger girl was curiously haunted by
memories of the queer little mountaineer, while Mavis now had a new
awe of her cousin that was but another rod with which he could go on
ruling her.
Jason's mother was standing in the door when he walked through the

yard gate. She went back into the cabin when she saw him coming, and
met him at the door with a switch in her hand. Very coolly the lad
caught it from her, broke it in two, threw it away, and picking up a
piggin went out without a word to milk, leaving her aghast and outdone.
When he came back, he asked like a man if supper was ready, and as to
a man she answered. For an hour he pottered around the barn, and for a
long while he sat on the porch under the stars. And, as always at that
hour, the same scene obsessed his memory, when the last glance of his
father's eye and the last words of his father's tongue went not to his
wife, but to