nd yet he would rather leave weeds and
ashes than, like Martha, have some day to know that his home was in the
hands of a stranger. When he thought of the girl he grew calmer; his own
sorrows gave way to the thought of hers; and half from habit he raised
his face to look across the river. Two eagles swept from a dark ravine
under the shelf of rock where he had fought young Jasper, and made for
a sun-lighted peak on the other shore. From them his gaze fell to Wolf's
Head and to the cabin beneath, and a name passed his lips in a whisper.

Then he took the path to the river, and he found the canoe where old
Gabe had hidden it. Before the young moon rose he pushed into the stream
and drifted with the current. At the mouth of the creek that ran over
old Gabe's water-wheel he turned the prow to the Lewallen shore.

"Not yit! Not yit!" he said.

XV

THAT night Rome passed in the woods, with his rifle, in a bed of
leaves. Before daybreak he had built a fire in a deep ravine to cook his
breakfast, and had scattered the embers that the smoke should give no
sign. The sun was high when he crept cautiously in sight of the Lewallen
cabin. It was much like his own home on the other shore, except that the
house, closed and desolate, was standing, and the bees were busy. At the
corner of the kitchen a rusty axe was sticking in a half-cut piece of
timber, and on the porch was a heap of kindling and fire wood-the last
work old Jasper and his son had ever done. In the Lewallens' garden,
also, two graves were fresh; and the spirit of neglect and ruin overhung
the place.

All the morning he waited in the edge of the laurel, peering down the
path, watching the clouds race with their shadows over the mountains, or
pacing to and fro in his covert of leaves and flowers. He began to fear
at last that she was not coming, that she was ill, and once he started
down the mountain toward Steve Brayton's cabin. The swift descent
brought him to his senses, and he stopped half-way, and climbed back
again to his hiding-place. What he was doing, what he meant to do, he
hardly knew. Mid-day passed; the sun fell toward the mountains, and once
more came the fierce impulse to see her, even though he must stalk into
the Brayton cabin. Again, half-crazed, he started impetuously through
the brush, and shrank back, and stood quiet. A little noise down the
path had reached his ear. In a moment he could hear slow foot-falls, and
the figure of the girl part