they had come from Eastern Virginia, and the original Tolliver had
been a slave-owner. The very name was, undoubtedly, a corruption of
Tagliaferro. So, when the Widow Crane began to build a brick house for
her boarders that winter, and the foundations of a school-house were
laid at the Gap, Hale began to plead with old Judd to allow June to go
over to the Gap and go to school, but the old man was firm in refusal:

"He couldn't git along without her," he said; "he was afeerd he'd
lose her, an' he reckoned June was a-larnin' enough without goin' to
school--she was a-studyin' them leetle books o' hers so hard." But as
his confidence in Hale grew and as Hale stated his intention to take an
option on the old man's coal lands, he could see that Devil Judd, though
his answer never varied, was considering the question seriously.

Through the winter, then, Hale made occasional trips to Lonesome Cove
and bided his time. Often he met young Dave Tolliver there, but the
boy usually left when Hale came, and if Hale was already there, he kept
outside the house, until the engineer was gone.

Knowing nothing of the ethics of courtship in the mountains--how, when
two men meet at the same girl's house, "they makes the gal say which one
she likes best and t'other one gits"--Hale little dreamed that the first
time Dave stalked out of the room, he threw his hat in the grass
behind the big chimney and executed a war-dance on it, cursing the
blankety-blank "furriner" within from Dan to Beersheba.

Indeed, he never suspected the fierce depths of the boy's jealousy at
all, and he would have laughed incredulously, if he had been told how,
time after time as he climbed the mountain homeward, the boy's black
eyes burned from the bushes on him, while his hand twitched at his
pistol-butt and his lips worked with noiseless threats. For Dave had
to keep his heart-burnings to himself or he would have been laughed
at through all the mountains, and not only by his own family, but by
June's; so he, too, bided his time.

In late February, old Buck Falin and old Dave Tolliver shot each other
down in the road and the Red Fox, who hated both and whom each thought
was his friend, dressed the wounds of both with equal care. The
temporary lull of peace that Bad Rufe's absence in the West had brought
about, gave way to a threatening storm then, and then it was that old
Judd gave his consent: when the roads got better, June could go to the
Gap to school. A mont