door and Joel whistled to Jack and
called him, but Jack though he liked nothing better than to drive sheep
lay still, looking at Chad.

"Go 'long, Jack," said Chad, and Jack sprang up and was off, though he
stopped again and looked back, and Chad had to tell him again to go on.
In a moment dog, men, and sheep were moving in a cloud of dust around a
bend in the road and little Melissa was at the gate.

"Take good keer of 'Lissy," said the mother from the porch, kindly; and
Chad, curiously touched all at once by the trust shown him, stalked
ahead like a little savage, while Melissa with her basket followed
silently behind. The boy never thought of taking the basket himself:
that is not the way of men with women in the hills and not once did he
look around or speak on the way up the river and past the blacksmith's
shop and the grist-mill just beyond the mouth of Kingdom Come; but when
they arrived at the log school-house it was his turn to be shy and he
hung back to let Melissa go in first. Within, there was no floor but
the bare earth, no window but the cracks between the logs, and no desks
but the flat sides of slabs, held up by wobbling pegs. On one side were
girls in linsey and homespun: some thin, undersized, underfed, and with
weak, dispirited eyes and yellow tousled hair; others, round-faced,
round-eyed, dark, and sturdy; most of them large-waisted and
round-shouldered--especially the older ones--from work in the fields;
but, now and then, one like Melissa, the daughter of a valley farmer,
erect, agile, spirited, intelligent. On the other side were the boys,
in physical characteristics the same and suggesting the same social
divisions: at the top the farmer--now and then a slave-holder and
perhaps of gentle blood--who had dropped by the way on the westward
march of civilization and had cleared some rich river bottom and a
neighboring summit of the mountains, where he sent his sheep and cattle
to graze; where a creek opened into this valley some free-settler,
whose grandfather had fought at King's Mountain--usually of
Scotch-Irish descent, often English, but sometimes German or sometimes
even Huguenot--would have his rude home of logs; under him, and in
wretched cabins at the head of the creek or on the washed spur of the
mountain above, or in some "deadenin"' still higher up and swept by
mists and low-trailing clouds, the poor white trash--worthless
descendants of the servile and sometimes criminal class who might