“An' I reckon,” the old man went on, “hit 'ud be better grace in you to stop sayin' things agin' him; fer if it hadn't been fer him, you'd be laid out by them Falins by this time.”
It was true, and Dave, silenced, was forced into another channel.
“I wonder,” he said presently, “how them Falins always know when I go over thar.”
“I've been studyin' about that myself,” said Devil Judd. Inside, the old step-mother had heard Dave's query.
“I seed the Red Fox this afternoon,” she quavered at the door.
“Whut was he doin' over hyeh?” asked Dave.
“Nothin',” she said, “jus' a-sneakin' aroun' the way he's al'ays a-doin'. Seemed like he was mighty pertickuler to find out when you was comin' back.”
“We're all Tollivers now all right,” said the Hon. Samuel Budd that night while he sat with Hale on the porch overlooking the mill-pond--and then he groaned a little.
“Them Falins have got kinsfolks to burn on the Virginia side and they'd fight me tooth and toenail for this a hundred years hence!”
He puffed his pipe, but Hale said nothing.
“Yes, sir,” he added cheerily, “we're in for a hell of a merry time NOW. The mountaineer hates as long as he remembers and--he never forgets.”
Hand in hand, Hale and June followed the footsteps of spring from the time June met him at the school-house gate for their first walk into the woods. Hale pointed to some boys playing marbles.
“That's the first sign,” he said, and with quick understanding June smiled.
The birdlike piping of hylas came from a marshy strip of woodland that ran through the centre of the town and a toad was croaking at the foot of Imboden Hill.
They crossed the swinging foot-bridge, which was a miracle to June, and took the foot-path along the clear stream of South Fork, under the laurel which June called “ivy,” and the rhododendron which was “laurel” in her speech, and Hale pointed out catkins greening on alders in one swampy place and willows just blushing into life along the banks of a little creek. A few yards aside from the path he found, under a patch of snow and dead leaves, the pink-and-white blossoms and the waxy green leaves of the trailing arbutus, that fragrant harbinger of the old Mother's awakening, and June breathed in from it the very breath of spring. Near by were turkey peas, which she had hunted and eaten many times.