down the river as well, and nobody ever knew what a Saturday might
bring forth between his people and them. So he would not risk
riding through that bend by the light of day.

All the long way up spur after spur and along ridge after ridge,
all along the still, tree-crested top of the Big Black, he had
been thinking of the man--the "furriner" whom he had seen at his
uncle's cabin in Lonesome Cove. He was thinking of him still, as
he sat there waiting for darkness to come, and the two vertical
little lines in his forehead, that had hardly relaxed once during
his climb, got deeper and deeper, as his brain puzzled into the
problem that was worrying it: who the stranger was, what his
business was over in the Cove and his business with the Red Fox
with whom the boy had seen him talking.

He had heard of the coming of the "furriners" on the Virginia
side. He had seen some of them, he was suspicious of all of them,
he disliked them all--but this man he hated straightway. He hated
his boots and his clothes; the way he sat and talked, as though he
owned the earth, and the lad snorted contemptuously under his
breath:

"He called pants 'trousers.'" It was a fearful indictment, and he
snorted again: "Trousers!"

The "furriner" might be a spy or a revenue officer, but deep down
in the boy's heart the suspicion had been working that he had gone
over there to see his little cousin--the girl whom, boy that he
was, he had marked, when she was even more of a child than she was
now, for his own. His people understood it as did her father, and,