feud left," she said simply. She looked at Layson quickly, wondering if
he would be surprised that she should not have fought and also died.
"Girl cain't fight alone, much," she went on, in hurried explanation,
or, rather, quick excuse. "I might take a shot if I should git a chanst,
but I ain't had none, an', besides, I guess it air plum wrong to kill,
even if there's blood scores to be settled up. I toted 'round a rifle
with me till last fall, but then I give it up. They won't git me--but
maybe you don't know what feuds are in the mountings, here."

He was looking at her with new interest. All his life he had heard much
about the dreadful mountain feuds. As the bogey-man is used in Eastern
nurseries, so are the mountaineers used in the nurseries of old Kentucky
and of Tennessee to frighten children with. Their family fights, not
less persistent or less deadly than the enmities between the warring
barons of the Rhine in middle ages, form a magnificent foundation for
dire tales.

"Yes," said he, "I know about the feuds, of course. But you--"

It did not seem possible to him, even after her frank statements, that
this bright and joyous creature could in any way be joined to such a
bloody history as he knew the histories of some of these long feuds to
be.

"It's been thirty years an' better," said the girl, "since the Brierlys
and Lindsays had some trouble about a claybank filly an' took to
shootin' one another--shootin' straight an' shootin' often an' to kill.
For years th' fight went on. They fired on sight, an' sometimes 'twas a
Lindsay went an' sometimes 'twas a Brierly. Bimeby there was just two
men left--my pappy an' Lem Lindsay.