faint, terrible smile of triumph. The girl bent low and, with a
startled face, shrank back.

"_An' I'll--git--thar--first._"

With that whisper went Becky's last breath, but the smile was there,
even when her lips were cold.




A CRISIS FOR THE GUARD


The tutor was from New England, and he was precisely what passes, with
Southerners, as typical. He was thin, he wore spectacles, he talked
dreamy abstractions, and he looked clerical. Indeed, his ancestors had
been clergymen for generations, and, by nature and principle, he was an
apostle of peace and a non-combatant. He had just come to the Gap--a
cleft in the Cumberland Mountains--to prepare two young Blue Grass
Kentuckians for Harvard. The railroad was still thirty miles away, and
he had travelled mule-back through mudholes, on which, as the joke ran,
a traveller was supposed to leave his card before he entered and
disappeared--that his successor might not unknowingly press him too
hard. I do know that, in those mudholes, mules were sometimes drowned.
The tutor's gray mule fell over a bank with him, and he would have gone
back had he not feared what was behind more than anything that was
possible ahead. He was mud-bespattered, sore, tired and dispirited when
he reached the Gap, but still plucky and full of business. He wanted to
see his pupils at once and arrange his schedule. They came in after