The Trail of the Lonesome Pine | Page 3

securely as a lily on its stalk in
a morning breeze. Dropping his bridle rein he put one hand against it as
though on the shoulder of a friend.
"Old Man," he said, "You must be pretty lonesome up here, and I'm
glad to meet you."

For a while he sat against it--resting. He had no particular purpose that
day--no particular destination. His saddle-bags were across the cantle
of his cow-boy saddle. His fishing rod was tied under one flap. He was
young and his own master. Time was hanging heavy on his hands that
day and he loved the woods and the nooks and crannies of them where
his own kind rarely made its way. Beyond, the cove looked dark,
forbidding, mysterious, and what was beyond he did not know. So
down there he would go. As he bent his head forward to rise, his eye
caught the spot of sunlight, and he leaned over it with a smile. In the
black earth was a human foot- print--too small and slender for the foot
of a man, a boy or a woman. Beyond, the same prints were
visible--wider apart--and he smiled again. A girl had been there. She
was the crimson flash that he saw as he started up the steep and
mistook for a flaming bush of sumach. She had seen him coming and
she had fled. Still smiling, he rose to his feet.

III
On one side he had left the earth yellow with the coming noon, but it
was still morning as he went down on the other side. The laurel and
rhododendron still reeked with dew in the deep, ever-shaded ravine.
The ferns drenched his stirrups, as he brushed through them, and each
dripping tree-top broke the sunlight and let it drop in tent-like beams
through the shimmering undermist. A bird flashed here and there
through the green gloom, but there was no sound in the air but the
footfalls of his horse and the easy creaking of leather under him, the
drip of dew overhead and the running of water below. Now and then he
could see the same slender foot-prints in the rich loam and he saw them
in the sand where the first tiny brook tinkled across the path from a
gloomy ravine. There the little creature had taken a flying leap across it
and, beyond, he could see the prints no more. He little guessed that
while he halted to let his horse drink, the girl lay on a rock above him,
looking down. She was nearer home now and was less afraid; so she
had slipped from the trail and climbed above it there to watch him pass.
As he went on, she slid from her perch and with cat-footed quiet
followed him. When he reached the river she saw him pull in his horse

and eagerly bend forward, looking into a pool just below the crossing.
There was a bass down there in the clear water--a big one--and the man
whistled cheerily and dismounted, tying his horse to a sassafras bush
and unbuckling a tin bucket and a curious looking net from his saddle.
With the net in one hand and the bucket in the other, he turned back up
the creek and passed so close to where she had slipped aside into the
bushes that she came near shrieking, but his eyes were fixed on a pool
of the creek above and, to her wonder, he strolled straight into the water,
with his boots on, pushing the net in front of him.
He was a "raider" sure, she thought now, and he was looking for a
"moonshine" still, and the wild little thing in the bushes smiled
cunningly--there was no still up that creek--and as he had left his horse
below and his gun, she waited for him to come back, which he did, by
and by, dripping and soaked to his knees. Then she saw him untie the
queer "gun" on his saddle, pull it out of a case and--her eyes got big
with wonder--take it to pieces and make it into a long limber rod. In a
moment he had cast a minnow into the pool and waded out into the
water up to his hips. She had never seen so queer a fishing-pole--so
queer a fisherman. How could he get a fish out with that little switch,
she thought contemptuously? By and by something hummed queerly,
the man gave a slight jerk and a shining fish flopped two feet into the
air. It was surely very queer, for the man didn't put his rod over his
shoulder and walk ashore, as did the mountaineers, but stood still,
winding something with one hand, and again the fish would flash into
the air and then that humming would