e did not call
his brother's wife by name--"caused all this trouble. I've nothin' agin
Dave."

The girl turned. "Won't you, Dave?"

"I'm waitin' to hear whut Becky says."

Becky was listening, though her eyes were closed. Her brows knitted
painfully. It was a hard compromise that she was asked to make i between
mortal hate and a love that was more than mortal, but the Plea that has
stood between them for nearly twenty centuries prevailed, and the girl
knew that the end of the feud was nigh.

Becky nodded.

"Yes, I fergive her, an' I want 'em to shake hands."

But not once did she turn her eyes to the woman whom she forgave, and
the hand that the widow held gave back no answering pressure. The faces
at the windows disappeared, and she motioned for the girl to take her
weeping enemy away.

She did not open her eyes when the girl came back, but her lips moved
and the girl bent above her.

"I know whar Jim is."

From somewhere outside came Dave's cough, and the dying woman turned her
head as though she were reminded of something she had quite forgotten.
Then, straightway, she forgot again.

The voice of the flood had deepened. A smile came to Becky's lips--a
faint, terrible smile of triumph. The girl bent low and, with a
startled face, shrank back.

"_An' I'll--git--thar--first._"

With that whisper went Becky's last breath, but the smile was there,
even when her lips were cold.

A CRISIS FOR THE GUARD

The tutor was from New England, and he was precisely what passes, with
Southerners, as typical. He was thin, he wore spectacles, he talked
dreamy abstractions, and he looked clerical. Indeed, his ancestors had
been clergymen for generations, and, by nature and principle, he was an
apostle of peace and a non-combatant. He had just come to the Gap--a
cleft in the Cumberland Mountains--to prepare two young Blue Grass
Kentuckians for Harvard. The railroad was still thirty miles away, and
he had travelled mule-back through mudholes, on which, as the joke ran,
a traveller was supposed to leave his card before he entered and
disappeared--that his successor might not unknowingly press him too
hard. I do know that, in those mudholes, mules were sometimes drowned.
The tutor's gray mule fell over a bank with him, and he would have gone
back had he not feared what was behind more than anything that was
possible ahead. He was mud-bespattered, sore, tired and dispirited when
he reached the Gap, but still plucky