nd
fluttered a white handkerchief as the last car went on.

"Now!" exulted the voice. "I'll put on my goggles and cap and we'll show
them what running is.

'It's they'll take the high road and we'll take the low,
And we'll be in Watauga befo-o-ore them!'"

Even as he spoke he adjusted his costume, and Johnnie saw the car shoot
forward like a living creature eager on the trail. She sighed as she
looked after them.

Feet--of what use were feet to follow such a flight as that?

CHAPTER V

THE MOCCASIN FLOWER

Johnnie was used to hardship and early rising, but in an intermittent
fashion; for the Passmores and Consadines were a haggard lot that came
to no lure but their own pleasure. They might--and often did--go hungry,
ill-clad, ill-housed; they might sometimes--in order to keep soul and
body together--have to labour desperately at rude tasks unsuited to
them; but these times were exceptions, and between such seasons, down to
the least of the tribe, they had always followed the Vision, pursuing
the flying skirts of whatever ideal was in their shapely heads. The
little cabin in the gash of the hills owned for domain a rocky ravine
that was the standing jest of the mountain-side.

"Sure, hit's good land--fine land," the mountaineers would comment with
their inveterate, dry, lazy humour. "Nothing on earth to hender a man
from raisin' a crap off 'n it--ef he could once git the leathers on a
good stout, willin' pa'r o' hawks or buzzards, an' a plough hitched to
'em." And Johnnie could remember the other children teasing her and
saying that her folks had to load a gun with seed corn and shoot it into
the sky to reach their fields. Yet, the unmended roof covered much joy
and good feeling. They were light feet that trod the unsecured
puncheons. The Passmores were tender of each other's eccentricities,
admiring of each other's virtues. A wolf race nourished on the knees of
purple kings, how should they ever come down to wearing any man's
collar, to slink at heel and retrieve for him?

One would have said that to the daughter of such the close cotton-mill
room with its inhuman clamour, its fetid air, its long hours of
enforced, monotonous, mechanical toil, would be prison with the torture
added. But Johnnie looked forward to her present enterprise as a soldier
going into a new country to conquer it. She was buoyantly certain, and
determinedly delighted with everything. When, the next morning after her
arrival, Ma