road, low forehead. He was
smiling, too, and she caught the flash of white teeth and even--since
the distance was short--the deep cleft of his firm chin.

Framed there at the window the girl caught her hands to her breast and
exclaimed in a stifled whisper, "Land o' Canaan! He's jest walked spang
outen them written pages--he's ther spittin' image of that man my dead
and gone great-great-great-gran'-mammy married."

It was at that instant that the young man looked up and for a moment
their eyes met. The stranger's words halted midway in their utterance
and his lips remained for a moment parted, then he recovered his
conversational balance and carried forward his talk with the gray-beard.

The girl drew back into the shadow, but she stood watching until he had
gone and the bend in the road hid him. Then she placed the receipt that
had brought her to the attic in the old manuscript, marking the place
where her reading had been interrupted, and after locking the trunk ran
lightly down the stairs.

"Gran'pap," she breathlessly demanded, "I seed ye a-talkin' with a
stranger out thar. Did ye find out who _is_ he?"

"He give ther name of Cal Maggard," answered the old man, casually, as
he crumbled leaf tobacco into his pipe. "He lows he's going ter dwell in
ther old Burrell Thornton house over on ther nigh spur of Defeated
Creek."

* * * * *

That night while the patriarch dozed in his hickory withed chair with
his pipe drooping from his wrinkled lips his granddaughter slipped
quietly out of the house and went over to the tree.

Out there magic was making under an early summer moon that clothed the
peaks in silvery softness and painted shadows of cobalt in the hollows.
The river flashed its response and crooned its lullaby, and like
children answering the maternal voice, the frogs gave chorus and the
whippoorwills called plaintively from the woods.

The branches of the great walnut were etched against a sky that would
have been bright with stars were it not that the moon paled them, and
she gazed up with a hand resting lightly on the broad-girthed bole of
the stalwart veteran. Often she had wondered why she loved this
particular tree so much. It had always seemed to her a companion, a
guardian, a personality, when its innumerable fellows in the forest
were--nothing but trees.

Now she knew. She had only failed to understand the language with which
it had spoken to her from childhood, a