ne, an', besides, I guess it air plum wrong to kill,
even if there's blood scores to be settled up. I toted 'round a rifle
with me till last fall, but then I give it up. They won't git me--but
maybe you don't know what feuds are in the mountings, here."

He was looking at her with new interest. All his life he had heard much
about the dreadful mountain feuds. As the bogey-man is used in Eastern
nurseries, so are the mountaineers used in the nurseries of old Kentucky
and of Tennessee to frighten children with. Their family fights, not
less persistent or less deadly than the enmities between the warring
barons of the Rhine in middle ages, form a magnificent foundation for
dire tales.

"Yes," said he, "I know about the feuds, of course. But you--"

It did not seem possible to him, even after her frank statements, that
this bright and joyous creature could in any way be joined to such a
bloody history as he knew the histories of some of these long feuds to
be.

"It's been thirty years an' better," said the girl, "since the Brierlys
and Lindsays had some trouble about a claybank filly an' took to
shootin' one another--shootin' straight an' shootin' often an' to kill.
For years th' fight went on. They fired on sight, an' sometimes 'twas a
Lindsay went an' sometimes 'twas a Brierly. Bimeby there was just two
men left--my pappy an' Lem Lindsay.

"One day Lem sent word to my pappy to meet him without no weepons an'
shake han's an' make it up."

Her face took on a look of bitterness and hate which almost made her
hearer shiver, so foreign was it to the fresh, young brightness he had
watched till now.

"My daddy come, at th' ap'inted time," she went on slowly, "but dad--he
knowed Lem Lindsay, an' never for a minute trusted him. He ast a friend
of his, Ben Lorey, to be a hidden witness. Ben hid behind a rock to
watch. 'Twas right near here--just over thar." She pointed.

"Soon Lem, he come along, a-smilin' like a Judast, an', after some fine
speakin', as daddy offered him his hand, Lem whipped out a knife,
an'--an' struck it into my daddy's heart."

The girl's recital had been tense, dramatic, not because she had tried
or thought to make it so--she had never learned not to be genuine--but
because of the real and tragic drama in the tale she told, the
matter-of-course way in which she told it.

It made Layson shudder. What sort of people were these mountaineers who
went armed to friendly meetings and struck down the men