for a
moment quite bewildered, he ran from side to side of their rapidly
narrowing space of safety, endeavoring to find a weak spot in the wall
of flames through which they might escape, but failing everywhere. For a
moment she thought that he had lost his head, and thus proved all too
true those tales which she had heard of "foreigners." It was almost as
one race gazing at another suffering ordeal in test, that she observed
his every movement, each detail of his facial play. While they had sat
there on the log, intent upon their work above her spelling-book, she
had wondered if the harsh, uncharitable mountain judgment of the
"foreigners" had not been too merciless. Now she felt that she began to
see its justification. The man, undoubtedly, she thought, showed an
unmanly panic.

"No use tryin' to get out that-a-way," she said calmly. "You'd better--"

Even as she spoke, and before her words could possibly have influenced
him, she saw a change come over him. The signs of fear, which had so
displeased her, faded from his actions and his facial play. Placed in
unusual, unexpected circumstances, for a second he had been bewildered,
but, as soon as opportunity had come for gathering of wits, he found
composure, coolness, nerve. She did not even finish out her sentence.
Instead, her thoughts turned to that acme of breeding, nerve, endurance
and high spirit dear to all Kentuckians, the race horse. "He's found his
feet!" she thought.

The man impressed her, now, even more than when, with courtesy, such as
she had never known, tact which had maintained her comfort when she
might have felt humiliated, learning which to her seemed marvellous, he
had offered her the key to learning's mysteries upon the log. She saw
that he had quickly won a mighty victory over self. She thought of tales
which she had heard by mountain fireplaces about "bad men," who, when
they first had heard a bullet's song, had dodged and whitened, only to
recover quickly and be nerved to peril evermore thereafter. Her doubt of
Layson fell away completely. Instead of thinking of him as of one whose
manhood is inferior to that of the rough mountaineers she knew, perforce
she saw in him superiorities. There was not the least sign of
bragadocio, of counterfeit, about his new-found calm. It was, she
recognized at once, entirely genuine. "Rattled for a minute," she
thought, wisely, again amending her first judgment, "but cooler, now,
than cucumbers."

She looked