on a chain. The shy windings of the mountain road knew nothing more modern than the doctor's vehicle drawn by White Rosy, nothing more exciting than the little companies of armed, silent men who tramped over it by night, or crossed it stealthily by day; but along the pike coaches and motor cars pounded and rolled, and a generation or so earlier an army had swung northward over it in pride and hope and eagerness, to drift southward again, a few days later, with only pride left. If, after that, the part of the old road that led from the plain up to the higher valley seemed to lie in a torpor, as if stunned by the agony of that retreat, none the less it remained one of the strong warp threads in Fate's fabric. 

 Yet Destiny chooses her own disguises. A sick baby had kept John Ogilvie on a sleepless vigil in the backwoods for the past fifty hours; and it was not the view from the crossroads, nor the doctor's habit of drawing rein to look out upon it for a moment or two, that made old Rosy stop there on this spring afternoon. It was nothing more than a particularly luscious patch of green by the roadside, and the consciousness of her long climb having earned such a reward. Rosy was an animal of experience and judgment, well accustomed to the ways of her master, knowing as well as he the houses where he stopped, capable of taking him home unguided from anywhere, as she would take him home this afternoon in her own good time. She had come thus far unguided; for when the sick child's even breathing told the success of his efforts, John Ogilvie had almost stumbled out of the cabin and into his buggy, to fall asleep before he could do more than say, 

 "Home, old lady!" 

 So Rosy had ambled homeward, knowing every turn of the road, while the tired man slept on. 

 The open place where the roads crossed was a famous "look-out."  Following its own level, the eye of an observer first beheld the tops of other mountains at all points of the horizon save one; at this season the great masses were all misty green, except for occasional patches of the dark of pines, or the white gleam of dogwood, or rusty cleared spaces of pastures; the highroad, on its way to the nearer valley, at first dropped too abruptly to be seen, but reappeared later as a pale white filament gleaming here and there through the trees or winding past farmhouses or fields tenderly green with young wheat. Through the gap where the mountains broke apart a great plain stretched, a plain once drenched with the life of men, now gleaming in the rays of a sun already sunk too low to reach over the nearer 

 Prev. P 2/171 next