know what our mutual hope has been, and I
think its fulfilment is not so far away! Tonight when I sipped my
claret at dinner I drank a silent toast, 'To my girl and your boy.'"

While Mrs. Masters was writing that note, her daughter was sitting at
another desk in the same room, and her letter was addressed to a
post-office back of Cedar Mountain.

When Boone received that second missive, he turned the envelope over in
his hand and gazed at it for a long while. Even then he did not open it
until he sat alone in a place where the forests were silent, save for
the call of a blue-jay and the diligent rapping of a "cock of the woods"
who was sapping and mining for grubs.

The boy held between thumb and forefinger an envelope of a sort he had
never seen before, of thin outer paper over a dark coloured lining. In
one corner was a stamp of the French Republic, and there in writing that
had crossed the sea was his name and address.

"She found time to write to me," he said rapturously to himself, and
then dropping intentionally and whimsically into his old, childhood
speech he added, nodding his head sagely to a pert squirrel that frisked
its tail near by, "She's done writ me a letter cl'ar from t'other
world."

* * * * *

It was that same summer, when Anne had gone to Europe, that Boone came
back from college, very serious and taciturn, and McCalloway was prompt
to guess the reason.

"You went down to Louisville, didn't you?" he inquired, as the two sat
by the doorstep on the day of the boy's return, and Boone nodded.

The man did not nag him with questions. His seasoned wisdom contented
itself with smoking on in silence, and after a little the lad jerked his
head.

"I reckon you know what took me there--sir."

The final word came in afterthought. No mountaineer says "sir," by
habit.

A part of that stubborn independence which is at once the virtue and the
fault of the race balks at even such small measure of implied
deference, but Boone had noticed that "down below," where courtesy
flowers into graciousness, the form of address was general.

McCalloway responded slowly.

"Yes, I can guess your errand there. How is he?"

The boy's eyes gazed off across the slopes through contracted lids, and
his voice came in deliberate but repressed tenseness.

"I hunted up Colonel Wallifarro's office and he went over there with
me.... I reckon, except for that, they wouldn't have let me see h