ar, an'
ain't been in 'em since, so far as anybody knows."

Her brows drew down upon her eyes. Her sweet mouth hardened. "He'd
better _never_ come!" she added, grimly.

After a moment's pause she went on, slowly: "So, now, here we be--Joe
Lorey, Ben's son, an' me. My mother died, you see, not very many years
after Lindsay'd killed my daddy. Seein' of it done, that way, had been
too much for her. I reckon seein' it would have killed me, too, if I'd
been more'n a baby, but I wasn't, an' lived through it. Ben's lived
here, workin' his little mounting farm, an'--an'--"

She hesitated, evidently ill at ease, strangely stammering over an
apparently simple and unimportant statement of the condition of her
fellow orphan. She changed color slightly. Layson, watching her, decided
that the son of the one victim must be the sweetheart of the daughter of
the other, and would have smiled had not the very thought, to his
surprise, annoyed him unaccountably. Whether that was what had caused
her stammering, he could not quite decide, although he gave the matter
an absurd amount of thought. She went on quickly:

"He's lived here, workin' of his little mounting farm an'--an'--an'
doin' jobs aroun', an' such, an' I've lived here, a-workin' mine, a
little, but not much. After my mother died there was some folks down in
th' valley took keer of me for a while, but then they moved away, an' I
was old enough to want things bad, an' what I wanted was to come back
here, where I could see th' place where mother an' my daddy had both
loved me an' been happy. I've got some land down in th' valley--fifty
acres o' fine pasture--but I never cared to live down there. Th' rent I
get for that land makes me rich--I ain't never wanted for a single thing
but just th' love an' carin' that my daddy an' my mother would 'a' give
me if that wicked man hadn't killed 'em both. For he _did_ kill my
mother, just as much as he killed daddy. She died o' that an' that
alone."

Again she fell into a silence for a time, looking out at the tremendous
prospect spread before them, quite unseeing.

"Oh," she went on, at length, her face again darkened by a frown, her
small hands clenched, every muscle of her lithe young body drawn as taut
as a wild animal's before a spring. "I sometimes feel as if I'd like to
do as other mountain women have been known to do when killin' of that
sort has blackened all their lives--I sometimes feel as if I'd like to
take a rifle in my el