Two weeks after Jack Halloway had started on his alleged trip across
the Virginia boundary, Alexander also set out upon a journey.

She was going to Perry Center and meant to be there for some days,
since matters concerning the farm were to be discussed with her uncle.
This time the undertaking was less arduous than the trip from there
back to Shoulder-blade had been.

Now it was midsummer and the railroad washouts had been repaired, so
she had only to cross two mountain ridges and take the jerky little
train from a point ten miles distant to her destination.

Perry Center was a hub about which swung a limited perimeter of rich
farming lands. This fertile area was an oasis with steep desolation
hedging it in on all sides, but within its narrow confines men could
raise not only the corn which constituted the staple of their less
fortunate neighbors, but the richer crop of wheat as well.

Therefore the men about Perry Center were as sheiks among goat-herds.

When Alexander set out on her ten-mile walk hefting the pack that held
her necessaries for the trip, Jerry O'Keefe materialized grinning
amiably from a clump of laurel. It was characteristic of Jerry to so
appear from nowhere.

Now he nodded, and his eyes were brimming with that infectious smile of
his.

"I jest kinderly happened ter hev a day off, Alexander," he assured
her, "and I 'lowed hit wouldn't hurt none fer me ter come along es far
es ther railroad train with ye an' tote thet bundle."

She gave it over to him, and since the trail there was narrow and
thorn-hedged, she strode on ahead of him. Jerry was content, for
through the midsummer woods, still dewy with morning freshness, he
could follow no lovelier guide, and Jerry could be silent as well as
loquacious.

They had put two-thirds of the journey behind them, when Alexander
suggested, "Let's rest hyar a spell. Hit's a right good place ter
pause an' eat a snack."

They stood on a pinnacle where time-corroded shoulders of sandstone
broke eruptively through the soil. In a cluster of paw-paw trees there
was a carpet of moss spread over ancient boulders, and off behind them
stretched the nobility of forests unspoiled; of oak and ash and poplar
and the mighty plumes of the pine. The crimson flower of the trumpet
flower trailed everywhere, and a mighty vista was spread from
foreground to horizon where the ashy purple of the last ridge merged
with the sky.

But for Jerry the chief beauty was a