She turned from this to pleasanter and wilder prospects, close at hand,
as her path narrowed, and began to sing again in sheer joyousness of
spirit.

"Mr. Woodpecker laughed as a woodpecker will,
As Jim stood lookin' out of the door of the still,
'Mr. Jim,' he remarked, 'I have come for to ax
_Ef_ you'd give me a worm for my revenue tax'!"

The placid ox, plodding slowly down the trail, did not swerve when the
bushes parted suddenly at one side, as she finished this verse of her
song, but Madge Brierly looked about with a quick alertness. The sound
of the rustling leaves and crackling twigs might mean a friend's
approach, they might mean the coming of one of the very enemies whom the
song had hinted at so lightly, but against whom all the people of the
mountains keep perpetual watch, they might even mean a panther, hungry
after his short rations of the winter and recklessly determined on a
meal at any cost.

But it was Joe Lorey's face which greeted her as she abruptly turned to
see. His coon-skin cap, his jerkin and trousers of faded blue-jeans, his
high, rusty boots matched perfectly with his primitive environments. As
he appeared only the old-fashioned Winchester, which he carried cradled
in his crooked elbow, spoke of the Nineteenth century. His face, though
handsome in a crudely modelled way, had been weather-beaten into a
rough, semi-fierceness by the storms through which he had watched the
mountain-passes during the long winter for the raiders who were ever on
his trail. The slightly reddened lids of his dark, restless eyes, told
of long nights during which the rising fumes of moonshine whisky
stealthily brewing in his furtive still, cave-hidden, had made them