And so this one of the tribe of borrowing Passmores wore her own
clothing from the first. No borrowed garment touched her. She rejected
the milk from the borrowed cow, fiercely; lustily she demanded--and
eventually received--her own legitimate, unborrowed sustenance.

Perhaps such a beginning had its own influence upon her future.



CHAPTER II

THE BIRTH OF AN AMBITION

All day the girl had walked steadily, her bare feet comforted by the
warm dust, shunning the pebbles, never finding sham stones in the way,
making friends with the path--that would always be Johnnie. From the
little high-hung valley in the remote fastnesses of the Unakas where she
was born, Johnnie Consadine was walking down to Cottonville, the factory
town on the outskirts of Watauga, to find work. Sometimes the road wound
a little upward for a quarter of a mile or so; but the general tendency
was persistently down.

In the gray dawn of Sunday morning she had stepped from the door of that
room where the three beds occupied three corners, and a rude table was
rigged in the fourth. It might almost seem that the same hounds were
quarrelling under the floor that had scrambled there eighteen years
before when she was born. At first the way was entirely familiar to her.
It passed few habitations, and of those the dwellers were not yet
abroad, since it was scarce day. As time went on she got to the little
settlement at the foot of the first mountain, and had to explain to