ime I had fairly got into the saddle. Then we started again in a
long, swinging trot, El Mahdi leading, the Cardinal next, and behind him
the Bay Eagle. The road trailed along the high ridge beside the tall
shell-bark hickories, now the granary of the grey squirrel, and the
sumach bushes where the catbirds quarrelled, and the dry old poplars
away in the blue sky, where the woodpecker and the great Indian hen
hammered like carpenters.

The sun was slipping through his door, and from far below us came a
trail of blue smoke and a smell of wood ashes where some driver's wife
had started a fire, prepared her skillet, and moved out her scrubbed
table,--signs that the supper was on its way, streaked bacon, potatoes,
sliced and yellow, and the blackest coffee in the world. Now and then on
the hillside, in some little clearing, the fodder stood in loose,
bulging shocks bound with green withes, while some old man or half-grown
lad plied his husking-peg in the corn spread out before him, working
with the swiftness and the dexterity of a machine, ripping the husk with
one stroke of the wooden peg bound to his middle finger, and snapping
the ear at its socket, and tossing it into the air, where it gleamed
like a piece of gold.

Below was the great, blue cattle land, rising in higher and higher hills
to the foot of the mountains. The road swept around the nose of the
ridge and plunged into the woods, winding in and out as it crawled down
into the grass hills. The flat curve at the summit of the ridge was
bare, and, looking down, one could see each twist of the road where it
crept out on the bone of the hill to make its turn back into the woods.

As I passed over the brow of the ridge, I heard Jud call, and, turning
my head, saw that both he and Ump were on the ground, looking down at
the road below. Jud stood with his broad shoulders bent forward, and Ump
squatted, peering down under the palm of his hand. I rode back just in
time to catch the flash of wheels sweeping into the wood from one of the
bare turns of the road. Yet even in that swift glimpse, I thought I knew
who was below, and so I did not ask, but waited until they should come
into the open space again farther down. I sat with the bridle rein loose
on El Mahdi's neck and my hands resting idly on the horn of the saddle.
I think I must have been smiling, for when Ump looked up at me, his
wizened face was so serious that I burst out into a loud laugh.

"Well," I said, "it'