as well as head. They needed him; they were grateful, after their fashion, and though he raged at them for failing to follow his instructions for sanitation and hygiene, he continued to tend them faithfully. The mill workers were a sallow and bloodless lot, in the main, spiritless and indifferent, but the mountaineers gave him the keenest possible pleasure.

“Best stock in the country,” he stated often to Glen. “Just give ’em roads and schooling, and watch ’em come on!”

He took a shameless delight in their blood feuds; it was exactly his own idea of settling disputes, for he grew more testy and truculent with the years. Evenings, when he was not called out, Glen read[20] aloud to him from radical books and certain weeklies of daring and rather destructive opinions, and he got a satisfactory reaction for his vicarious rebellions. Actually, his radicalism was less than skin deep; he was, at heart, rather well content with his government’s behavior, and swarthy soap-box orators (there had been an influx of South European labor to the mills) roused him to heated combat, though the speakers might be voicing, more violently, the very same views as the weeklies.

[20]

But to the girl, her bright head bent over the pages, the burning words she read to him became the law and the gospel. The lonesomeness of a snubbed childhood and a proudly detached girlhood fed by these doctrines, grew into a curious creed which was one part Effie Darrow’s blighted dreams and two parts Glenwood Darrow’s determined scorn for things unattainable.

To the neighbors and the townspeople she was an accustomed sight—the doctor’s daughter, that red-headed Darrow girl who carried a chip on her shoulder and flocked alone, but strangers always stared at her as they had done since her babyhood.

At fourteen she was a startling figure, tall, thin with a healthy and proper young thinness, square-chinned, steady-eyed. Her skin was remarkable. It had set out to be the delicate, very thin sort which goes, ordinarily, with red hair—the blue-whiteness[21] of thriftily skimmed milk, prone to burn and peel and freckle unpleasantly, but her early removal to the warmer climate had darkened and thickened it. It was now a sort of golden olive which deeped at certain times and in certain lights to a positive amber. There was no further color in her cheeks and her mouth was red, straight, and unsmiling, but it was her hair which caught and held the eye.

[21]

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