the little face in the
borrowed cradle, and walked out with as elated a step as though a queen
had been born to the tribe.

In the doorway he met Bud and Honey, returning with the spotted calico
poke clutched fast between them.

"I won't ask nothin' but a wearin' of em for my child," Laurella
Consadine, born Laurella Passmore, reiterated when the small garments
were laid out on the bed, and the baby was being dressed. "They're
mighty fine, Mavity, an' I'll take good keer of 'em and always bear in
mind that they're only borried."

"No," returned Mavity Bence, with unwonted firmness, as she put the
newcomer into the slip intended for her own son. "No, Laurelly, these
clothes ain't loaned to you. I give 'em to this child. I'm a widder, and
I never look to wed again, becaze Pap he has to have somebody to do for
him, an' he'd just about tear up the ground if I was to name sech a
thing. I'm mighty glad to give 'em to yo' little gal. I only wisht," she
said wistfully, "that hit was a boy. Ef hit was a boy, mebbe you'd give
hit the name that should 'a' went with the clothes. I was a-goin' to
call the baby John after hit's pappy."

Laurella Consadine lay quiescent for a moment, big black eyes studying
the smoky logs that raftered the roof. Then all at once she laughed,
with a flash of white teeth.

"I don't see why Johnnie ain't a mighty fine name for a gal," she said.
"I vow I'm a-goin' to name her Johnnie!"

And so this one of the tribe of borrowing Passmores wore her own
clothing from the first. No borrowed garment touched her. She rejected
the milk from the borrowed cow, fiercely; lustily she demanded--and
eventually received--her own legitimate, unborrowed sustenance.

Perhaps such a beginning had its own influence upon her future.

CHAPTER II

THE BIRTH OF AN AMBITION

All day the girl had walked steadily, her bare feet comforted by the
warm dust, shunning the pebbles, never finding sham stones in the way,
making friends with the path--that would always be Johnnie. From the
little high-hung valley in the remote fastnesses of the Unakas where she
was born, Johnnie Consadine was walking down to Cottonville, the factory
town on the outskirts of Watauga, to find work. Sometimes the road wound
a little upward for a quarter of a mile or so; but the general tendency
was persistently down.

In the gray dawn of Sunday morning she had stepped from the door of that
room where the three beds occupied three corners, a