Bunch's mill, and Rome himself rode down Thunderstruck Knob
through the mist and dew of the early morning. The sun was
coming up over Virginia, and through a dip in Black Mountain the
foot-hills beyond washed in blue waves against its white disk. A
little way down the mountain, the rays shot through the gap upon
him, and, lancing the mist into tatters, and lighting the dew-drops,
set the birds singing. Rome rode, heedless of it all, under primeval
oak and poplar, and along rain-clear brooks and happy waterfalls,
shut in by laurel and rhododendron, and singing past mossy stones
and lacelike ferns that brushed his stirrup. On the brow of every
cliff he would stop to look over the trees and the river to the other
shore, where the gray line of a path ran aslant Wolf's Head, and
was lost in woods above and below.

At the river he rode up-stream, looking still across it. Old Gabe
Bunch halloed to him from the doorway of the mill, as he splashed
through the creek, and Isom's thin face peered through a breach in
the logs. At the ford beyond, he checked his horse with a short
oath of pleased surprise. Across the water, a scarlet dress was
moving slowly past a brown field of corn. The figure was
bonneted, but he knew the girl's walk and the poise of her head
that far away. Just who she was, however, he did not know, and he
sat irresolute. He had seen her first a month since, paddling along
the other shore, erect, and with bonnet off and hair down; she had
taken the Lewallen path up the mountain. Afterward, he saw her
going at a gallop on young Jasper's gray horse, bareheaded again,
and with her hair loose to the wind, and he knew she was one of
his enemies. He thought her the girl people said young Jasper was
going to marry, and he had watched her the more closely. From
the canoe she seemed never to notice him; but he guessed, from