The old man struck a match and held it to his pipe and then as he turned to leave the room Maggard halted him.

“I kain’t suffer ye ter go away without I tells ye suthin’,” he said, “an’ I fears me sorely when ye hears hit ye’re right like ter withhold yore blessin’ atter all.”

The patriarch wheeled and stood listening, and Dorothy, too, caught her breath anxiously as the young man confessed.

For a time old Caleb stood stonily immovable while the story, which the girl had already heard, had its second telling. But as the narration progressed the gray-haired mountaineer bent interestedly forward, and by the time it had drawn to its close his eyes were no longer wrathful but soberly and judicially thoughtful.

He ran his fingers through his gray hair, and incredulously demanded, “Who did ye say yore grandsire was?”

“His name was Caleb Thornton he went ter Virginny sixty ya’rs back.”

“Caleb Thornton!” Through the mists of many years the old man was tracking back along barefoot trails of boyhood.

“Caleb Thornton! Him an’ me hunted an’ fished tergither and worked tergither when we wasn’t nothin’ but small shavers. We was like twin brethren an’ folks called us Good Caleb an’ Bad Caleb. I was ther bad one!” The old lips parted in a smile that was tenderly reminiscent.

“Why boy, thet makes ye blood-kin of mine ... hit makes yore business my business ... an’ yore trouble my trouble. I’m ther head of ther house now an’ ye’re related ter me.”

“I hain’t clost kin,” objected Cal, quickly. “Not too clost ter wed with Dorothy.”

“Ey God, no, boy, ye hain’t but only a distant cousin but a hundred an’ fifty y’ars back our foreparent war ther same man. An’ ef ye’ve got ther same heart an’ the same blood in ye thet them old-timers hed, mebby ye kin carry on my work better than any Rowlett an’ stand fer peace and law!” Here spoke the might of family pride and mountain loyalty to blood.

“Then ye kin give us yore blessin’ atter all despite ther charge thet hangs over me?”

“My blessin’? Why, boy, hit’s like a dead son hed done come back ter life an’ false charges don’t damn no man!”

The aged face had again become suffused with such a glow as might have mantled the brow of a prophet who had laboured long and preached fierily for his belief, until the hoar-frost of time had whitened his head. It was as if when the hour approached for him to lay down his scrip and staff he had recognized the strength and possible ardour of a young disciple to come after him.

But after a little that emotional wave, which had unconsciously straightened his bent shoulders and brought his head erect, subsided into the realization of less inspiriting facts.

“Atter all,” he said, thoughtfully, “I’ve got ter hev speech with old Jim Rowlett afore this matter gits published abroad. He’s done held ther same notions I have about Dorothy an’ Bas an’ I owes hit ter him ter make a clean breast of what’s come ter pass.”

The wounded man in the chair was gazing off through the window, and he was deeply disturbed. He stood sworn to kill or be killed by the man whom these two custodians of peace or war had elected in advance as a clan head and a link uniting the factions. If he himself were now required to assume the mantle of leadership, it was hard to see how that quarrel could be limited to a private scope.

“When I come over hyar,” he said, steadily and deliberately, “I sought ter live peaceable an’ quiet. I didn’t aim, an’ I don’t seek now, ter hold place as head of no feud-faction.”

“Nuther did I seek ter do hit.” The old man’s voice was again the rapt and fiery utterance of the zealot. “Thar wasn’t nuthin’ I wouldn’t of chose fust but when a man’s duty calls ter him, ef he’s a true man in God’s eyes, he hain’t got no rather in the matter which ner whether. He’s beholden ter obey! Besides ” the note of fanatical exaltation diminished into a more placid evenness “besides, I’ve done told ye I only sought ter hev ye lead toward peace an’ quiet not ter mix in no warfarin’.”

So a message went along the waterways to the house where old Jim Rowlett dwelt, and old Jim, to whose ears troubling rumours had already come stealing, mounted his “ridin’-critter” and responded forthwith and in person.

He came, trustful as ever of his old partner, in the task of shepherding wild flocks, yet resentful of the girl’s rumoured rebellion against what was to have been, in effect, a marriage of state.

Before starting he had talked long and earnestly with his kinsman, Bas Rowlett, and as a result he saw in Bas a martyr nobly bearing his chastening, and in the stranger a man unknown and tinged with a suspicious mystery.

Jim Rowlett listened in silent politeness to the announcement of the betrothal and presently he rose after a brief, unbending visit.

“Caleb,” he said, “through a long lifetime me an’ you hev been endurin’ friends. We aims ter go on bein’, an albeit I’d done sot my hopes on things thet hain’t destined ter come ter pass, I wishes these young folks joy.”

That interview was in the nature of a public announcement, and on the same day at Jake Crabbott’s store the conclave discussed it. It was rumoured that the two old champions of peace had differed, though not yet in open rupture, and that the stranger, whose character was untested, was being groomed to stand as titular leader of the Thorntons and the Harpers. Many Rowlett and Doane faces darkened with foreboding.

“What does Bas say?” questioned some, and the answer was always the same: “Bas hain’t a-talkin’ none.”

But Sim Squires, who was generally accredited with a dislike of Bas Rowlett, was circulating among those Harpers and Thorntons who bore a wilder repute than did old Caleb, and as he talked with them he was stressing the note of resentment that an unknown man from the hated state of Virginia should presume to occupy so responsible a position when others of their own blood and native-born were being overlooked.

One afternoon the girl and her lover sat together in the room where she had nursed him as the western ridges turned to ashy lilac against a sky where the sun was setting in a fanfare of delicate gorgeousness.

That evening hush that early summer knows, between the day’s full-throated orchestration and the night song of whippoorwills, held the world in a bated stillness, and the walnut tree stood as unstirring as some age-crowned priest with arms outstretched in evening prayer.

Hand in hand the two sat in the open window. They had been talking of those little things that are such great things to lovers, but over them a silence had fallen through which their hearts talked on without sound.

Slowly the sunset grew brilliant then the foregrounds gave up their detail in a soft veiling of purple dusk, and the tree between the house and the road became a dark ghost-shape, etched in the unmoving majesty of spread and stature.

“Hit hain’t jest a tree,” whispered the girl with an awe-touched voice, “hit’s human but hit’s bigger an’ wiser an’ stronger then a human body.”

The man nodded his head for so it seemed to him, a woodsman to whom trees in their general sense were common things. In this great growth he felt a quality and a presence. Its moods were as varied as those of life itself as it stood triumphing over decades of vicissitude, blight, and storm.

“I wonder ef hit knows,” said the girl, abruptly, “who hit war thet shot ye, Cal?”

The man shook his head and smiled.

“Mebby hit don’t jedgmatically know,” he made answer, seeking as he had often sought before to divert her thoughts from that question and its secret answer: “But so long es hit stands guard over us, I reckon no enemy won’t skeercely succeed.”