At last, she came to a point where a clearing rose on the mountainside
above her. The forest blanket was stripped off to make way for a fenced-
in and crazily tilting field of young corn. High up and beyond, close
to the bald shoulders of sandstone which threw themselves against the
sky, was the figure of a man. As the girl halted at the foot of the
field, at last panting from her exertions, he was sitting on the rail
fence, looking absently down on the outstretched panorama below him. It
is doubtful whether his dreaming eyes were as conscious of what he saw
as of other things which his imagination saw beyond the haze of the
last far rim. Against the fence rested his abandoned hoe, and about him
a number of lean hounds scratched and dozed in the sun. Samson South
had little need of hounds; but, in another century, his people, turning
their backs on Virginia affluence to invite the hardships of pioneer
life, had brought with them certain of the cavaliers' instincts. A
hundred years in the stagnant back-waters of the world had brought to
their descendants a lapse into illiteracy and semi-squalor, but through
it all had fought that thin, insistent flame of instinct. Such a
survival was the boy's clinging to his hounds. Once, they had
symbolized the spirit of the nobility; the gentleman's fondness for his
sport with horse and dog and gun. Samson South did not know the origin
of his fondness for this remnant of a pack. He did not know that in the
long ago his forefathers had fought on red fields with Bruce and the
Stuarts. He only knew that through his crudities something indefinable,
yet compelling, was at war with his life, filling him with great and
shapeless longings. He at once loved and resented these ramparts of
stone that hemmed in his hermit race and world.

He was not, strictly speaking, a man. His age was perhaps twenty. He
sat loose-jointed and indolent on the top rail of the fence, his hands