line which none dared to cross.

Later still, when he understood, the old man let them pass, but so
far nobody had surveyed his land, and now, instead of trying to
take, they were trying to purchase. From all points of the compass
the "furriners" were coming now, the rock-pecker's prophecy was
falling true, and at that moment the boy's hot words were having
an effect on every soul who had heard them. Old Jason's suspicions
were alive again; he was short of speech when his nephew, Arch
Hawn, brought up the sale of his lands, and Arch warned the
colonel to drop the subject for the night. The colonel's mind had
gone back to a beautiful woodland at home that he thought of
clearing off for tobacco--he would put that desecration off a
while. The stranger boy, too, was wondering vaguely at the fierce
arraignment he had heard; the stranger girl was curiously haunted
by memories of the queer little mountaineer, while Mavis now had a
new awe of her cousin that was but another rod with which he could
go on ruling her.

Jason's mother was standing in the door when he walked through the
yard gate. She went back into the cabin when she saw him coming,
and met him at the door with a switch in her hand. Very coolly the
lad caught it from her, broke it in two, threw it away, and
picking up a piggin went out without a word to milk, leaving her
aghast and outdone. When he came back, he asked like a man if
supper was ready, and as to a man she answered. For an hour he
pottered around the barn, and for a long while he sat on the porch
under the stars. And, as always at that hour, the same scene
obsessed his memory, when the last glance of his father's eye and
the last words of his father's tongue went not to his wife, but to