course—ten years from now—and the hill savage tamed—but not too much!

[29]

He was silent, dramatizing the situation to himself, and the girl did not speak. How much was she impressed? He wondered.

“And the old woman was great, too,” said the doctor, out of a long meditation. “Like an old tribal priestess! They tell me, for a fact, she’s a hundred and three! Can’t write her name, never seen a town or a railroad train, but she wants her ‘son’s son’s son fotched on!’ Well, we’ll look out for him, won’t we?”

“I guess he can look out for himself,” said Glen, soberly. “I expect he’d kill any one who looked crosswise at him.”

“Oh, he’ll key down when he gets away from that feud stuff! It’s out of date, now, even in the mountains. The Manders family is the last to carry on, I understand. He’s got a head on him, that boy; he’ll learn—learn fast!”

She had never seen him so alertly interested. It became an obsession with him in the weeks which followed; they took toilsome trips far out of their way to find Luke Manders, and they made little progress[30] in confidence or friendship, but this merely added a fillip to their determination. It became a sort of golden legend with them, gilding their dull days. “Well, Glen, I saw him!”

[30]

“Oh, did you, Dad?” (One of the rare times when she had not been with him.) “What did he say?”

“I don’t use such language in the presence of ladies,” her father grinned enjoyingly. “Oh, yes—he yelled back at me—‘Where’s the red-head?’ His poor old granny’s pretty discouraged, but I tell her she needn’t be. Wild things are slow to tame.”

Glen told Miss Ada Tenafee about him, but the delicate teacher who kindled pinkly to romance and adventure on the printed page shook her head disparagingly. “I’m sure it’s very kind of your father, but I believe he’ll have his trouble for his pains, dear. I have heard my own dear father say and my Cousin Amos Tenafee as well, that the mountaineers were a lawless lot.” Miss Ada had two oracles, her father, who had been the mildly black sheep of a fine old family, and Amos Tenafee, the silver-headed, gallant old chief of the Tenafee clan. Hector Tenafee had married beneath the Tenafees, perhaps, but decidedly above himself—a pretty, amiable, capable girl whose father ran the livery stable which furnished him with mounts, and who 

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