At home in the mountains, Henry Falkins would have been more wary, but here in the bluegrass he had laid aside all thoughts of danger, as he had laid aside his high-laced boots and corduroys. He was standing at the other side of life's gamut. Enmity, for him, did not exist. The universe was filled, he believed at that moment, to the boundary of the last sentinel star with love. The night breathed it. He was breathing it, the girl's eyes were just then raised to meet his, brimming with a light that set his pulses bounding.
"Back there in the hills," he said, "there is a place high up the mountainside that looks down on such a night as this over an ocean of silver mists in the valley. I have often gone there alone and listened to the nightingale talking about you. After this," he added joyously, "all nights will be moonlight and starlight for me, dear, if--" But there he broke off and became silent.
Newt Spooner advanced one knee a few inches, and steadied his position. He drew the vine back a little further with his left hand, and slowly thrust his right into his coat pocket. When it came back, it held the pistol, and this Newt placed at his back, that the soft click of its cocking might be muffled by his intervening body.
The stars were as bright and the moon as serene that night back in the broken ramparts of the mountains as here in the lowlands. No hint of brewing tragedy disturbed the majesty of the summits that raised their crests into the cobalt, or marred the silvery flood that bathed the valleys.
Where the college buildings nestled in a tidy village near the waters of Fist-fight Creek, the picture was a nocturne that must have brought joy to the heart of a painter whose soul responds to the beautiful.
Already, in the dormitories, most of the children were asleep, but one girl, who was half child and half woman, crept noiselessly down the stairs of the building where she had her room, and made her way to the creek-bank.
She had spent a longer time over her studies than had her fellow pupils, because in her serious little breast burned a hunger for that education which might open new ways and make for her a life beyond the imprisonment of her environment.
In years, Minerva Rawlins was a child, but the life of her people brings early maturity and into her little brain had recently been creeping the restlessness of new things--and of womanhood. To-night, the plaintive call of the whippoorwills from the deep shadows of the timber was a call to be under open skies, where the thoughts that assailed her might not feel cramped within walls. There were many things of which she must think--and it happened that the subject uppermost in her mind was Henry Falkins.