you’ll be old and gaunt and broken-spirited.” [39]He flipped the ash from the top of his pipe-bowl and puffed on. [39] “And yet your mind is that of a white girl—and a thoroughbred, too,” he silently asserted. “The tobacco and the blanket prove that. And you despise your mongrel people. You run away up here to your little secret ‘playhouse,’ and there you dream yourself to sleep, as you did yesterday. And there’s poetry in you, too. Let’s see, what was that you said—‘If all the dead men here should rise they’d shake the hills with their tramping!’” His gaze grew absent, as through the smoke he visioned an army of musket-bearing pioneers, shaggy-haired and deerskin-clad, and of fierce-faced Indians carrying bow and tomahawk, marching along the ancient trails. They passed, those long-dead fighting men, and in their wake strode whiskered mountaineers of a later day, gripping shotgun and rifle, watching one another in distrust—the victims of bullet and buckshot hurled from the masking thickets of rhododendron, the men who had died at the hands of their neighbors. Crag and crevasse echoed to the tread of their ghostly feet, and the cliffs quivered in unison. Out through the Jaws of the Traps they swung into the eye of the rising sun. The caverns ceased to echo. The man found himself staring at a gray blanket and listening to the rasping clack of the katydids. With a long sigh he arose and knocked out his pipe against his thigh. “Oh, well,” he muttered. “The past is past, the present is here, and the future is rolling closer every[40] minute. Poor little kid, with your dreams and your picture-words! I’m sorry for you. But all I can do is to cook some more grub for you and take you home. Then we’ll each have to gang our ain gait.” [40] He moved toward the dead fire, still stepping softly. But half-way across the rocky rubble he halted short, struck by a sudden memory. “By thunder!” he exclaimed. “I wonder if——” Back into his mind had come a fragment of a tale told months ago in New York by a chance acquaintance—a man from up-State. “Yessir,” he heard the voice saying, “there’s queer things back in the hills—stories that’s never been told much. These fellers I’m thinkin’ about, now: they were the hardest crowd you’d ever want to meet. They were bad whites and bad Indians and bad
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