The Heart of the Hills | Page 2

down the path. Quickly he crouched behind
the fence, and the aged look came back into his face. He did not
approve of that man coming over there so often, kinsman though he
was, and through the palings he saw his mother's face drop quickly and
her hands moving uneasily in her lap. And when the mountaineer sat
down on the porch and took off his hat to wipe his forehead, he noticed
that his mother had on a newly bought store dress, and that the man's
hair was wet with something more than water. The thick locks had been
combed and were glistening with oil, and the boy knew these facts for
signs of courtship; and though he was contemptuous, they furnished the
excuse he sought and made escape easy. Noiselessly he wielded his hoe
for a few moments, scooped up a handful of soft dirt, meshed the
worms in it, and slipped the squirming mass into his pocket. Then he
crept stooping along the fence to the rear of the house, squeezed
himself between two broken palings, and sneaked on tiptoe to the back
porch. Gingerly he detached a cane fishing-pole from a bunch that
stood upright in a corner and was tiptoeing away, when with another
thought he stopped, turned back, and took down from the wall a bow
and arrow with a steel head around which was wound a long hempen
string. Cautiously then he crept back along the fence, slipped behind
the barn into the undergrowth and up a dark little ravine toward the
green top of the spur. Up there he turned from the path through the
thick bushes into an open space, walled by laurel-bushes, hooted three
times surprisingly like an owl, and lay contentedly down on a bed of
moss. Soon his ear caught the sound of light footsteps coming up the
spur on the other side, the bushes parted in a moment more, and a little
figure in purple homespun slipped through them, and with a flushed,
panting face and dancing eyes stood beside him.

The boy nodded his head sidewise toward his own home, and the girl
silently nodded hers up and down in answer. Her eyes caught sight of
the bow and arrow on the ground beside him and lighted eagerly, for
she knew then that the fishingpole was for her. Without a word they
slipped through the bushes and down the steep side of the spur to a
little branch which ran down into a creek that wound a tortuous way
into the Cumberland.

II
On the other side, too, a similar branch ran down into another creek
which looped around the long slanting side of the spur and emptied, too,
into the Cumberland. At the mouth of each creek the river made a great
bend, and in the sweep of each were rich bottom lands. A century
before, a Hawn had settled in one bottom, the lower one, and a
Honeycutt in the other. As each family multiplied, more land was
cleared up each creek by sons and grandsons until in each cove a clan
was formed. No one knew when and for what reason an individual
Hawn and a Honeycutt had first clashed, but the clash was of course
inevitable. Equally inevitable was it, too, that the two clans should take
the quarrel up, and for half a century the two families had, with
intermittent times of truce, been traditional enemies. The boy's father,
Jason Hawn, had married a Honeycutt in a time of peace, and, when the
war opened again, was regarded as a deserter, and had been forced to
move over the spur to the Honeycutt side. The girl's father, Steve Hawn,
a ne'erdo-well and the son of a ne'er-do-well, had for his inheritance
wild lands, steep, supposedly worthless, and near the head of the
Honeycutt cove. Little Jason's father, when he quarrelled with his kin,
could afford to buy only cheap land on the Honeycutt side, and thus the
homes of the two were close to the high heart of the mountain, and
separated only by the bristling crest of the spur. In time the boy's father
was slain from ambush, and it was a Hawn, the Honeycutts claimed,
who had made him pay the death price of treachery to his own kin. But
when peace came, this fact did not save the lad from taunt and
suspicion from the children of the Honeycutt tribe, and being a favorite
with his Grandfather Hawn down on the river, and harshly treated by

his Honeycutt mother, his life on the other side in the other cove was a
hard one; so his heart had gone back to his own people and, having no
companions, he had made a playmate of his little cousin, Mavis, over
the