et it lie.

Meanwhile, rumours were brought in that the Falins were coming over from
Kentucky to wipe out the Guard, and so straight were they sometimes that
the Guard was kept perpetually on watch. Once while the members were at
target practice, the shout arose:

"The Kentuckians are coming! The Kentuckians are coming!" And, at double
quick, the Guard rushed back to find it a false alarm and to see men
laughing at them in the street. The truth was that, while the Falins
had a general hostility against the Guard, their particular enmity was
concentrated on John Hale, as he discovered when June was to take her
first trip home one Friday afternoon. Hale meant to carry her over,
but the morning they were to leave, old Judd Tolliver came to the Gap
himself. He did not want June to come home at that time, and he didn't
think it was safe over there for Hale just then. Some of the Falins had
been seen hanging around Lonesome Cove for the purpose, Judd believed,
of getting a shot at the man who had kept young Dave from falling into
their hands, and Hale saw that by that act he had, as Budd said,
arrayed himself with the Tollivers in the feud. In other words, he was
a Tolliver himself now, and as such the Falins meant to treat him.
Hale rebelled against the restriction, for he had started some work in
Lonesome Cove and was preparing a surprise over there for June, but old
Judd said:

"Just wait a while," and he said it so seriously that Hale for a while
took his advice.

So June stayed on at the Gap--with little disappointment, apparently,
that she could not visit home. And as spring passed and the summer
came on, the little girl budded and opened like a rose. To the pretty
school-teacher she was a source of endless interest and wonder, for
while the little girl was reticent and aloof, Miss Saunders felt herself
watched and studied in and out of school, and Hale often had to smile
at June's unconscious imitation of her teacher in speech, manners and
dress. And all the time her hero-worship of Hale went on, fed by
the talk of the boardinghouse, her fellow pupils and of the town at
large--and it fairly thrilled her to know that to the Falins he was now
a Tolliver himself.

Sometimes Hale would get her a saddle, and then June would usurp Miss
Anne's place on a horseback-ride up through the gap to see the first
blooms of the purple rhododendron on Bee Rock, or up to Morris's farm on
Powell's mountain, from which, with a glass,