"Uncle Gabe's about right,I reckon,"he said,half aloud;and he raised it above his head to hurl it away,but checked it in mid-air.
For a moment he looked at the colorless liquid,then,with quick nervousness,pulled the cork of sassafras leaves,gulped down the pale moonshine,and dashed the bottle against the trunk of a beech.
The fiery stuff does its work in a hurry.He was thirsty when he reached the mouth of a brook that tumbled down the mountain along the pathway that would lead him home,and he stooped to drink where the water sparkled in a rift of dim light from overhead.Then he sat upright on a stone,with his wide hat-brim curved in a crescent over his forehead,his hands caught about his knees,and his eyes on the empty air.
He was scarcely over his surprise that the girl was young Lewallen's sister,and the discovery had wrought a curious change.
The piquant impulse of rivalry was gone,and something deeper was taking its place.He was confused and a good deal troubled,thinking it all over.He tried to make out what the girl meant by looking at him from the mountain-side,by waving her bonnet at him,and by coming to old Gabe's mill when she could have gone to her own.To be sure,she did not know then who he was,and she had stopped coming when she learned;but why had she crossed again that day?Perhaps she too was bantering him,and he was at once angry and drawn to her;for her mettlesome spirit touched his own love of daring,even when his humiliation was most bitter-when she told him he warred on women;when he held out to her the branch of peace and she swept it aside with a stroke of her oar.But Rome was little conscious of the weight of subtle facts like these.His unseeing eyes went back to her as she combed her hair.He saw the color in her cheeks,the quick light in her eyes,the naked,full throat once more,and the wavering forces of his unsteady brain centred in a stubborn resolution-to see it all again.He would make Isom stay at home,if need be,and he would take the boy's place at the mill.If she came there no more,he would cross the river again.Come peace or war,be she friend or enemy,he would see her.His thirst was fierce again,and,with this half-drunken determination in his heart,he stooped once more to drink from the cheerful little stream.As he rose,a loud curse smote the air.The river,pressed between two projecting cliffs,was narrow at that point,and the oath came across the water.An instant later a man led a lamed horse from behind a bowlder,and stooped to examine its leg.The dusk was thickening,but Rome knew the huge frame and gray beard of old Jasper Lewallen.The blood beat in a sudden tide at his temples,and,half by instinct,he knelt behind a rock,and,thrusting his rifle through a crevice,cocked it softly.
Again the curse of impatience came over the still water,and old Jasper rose and turned toward him.The glistening sight caught in the centre of his beard.That would take him in the throat;it might miss,and he let the sight fall till the bullet would cut the fringe of gray hair into the heart.Old Jasper,so people said,had killed his father in just this way;he had driven his uncle from the mountains;he was trying now to revive the feud.He was the father of young Jasper,who had threatened his life,and the father of the girl whose contempt had cut him to the quick twice that day.Again her taunt leaped through his heated brain,and his boast to the old miller followed it.His finger trembled at the trigger.
"No;by--,no!"he breathed between his teeth;and old Jasper passed on,unharmed.
