The child at her skirt, an elfin youngster, had much of her mother’s darkness of hair and eyes, her mother’s wide mouth of white, even teeth, a thing unusual thereabouts. She now stood staring straight at the stranger, motionless and silent.
“Ye’re Min, I reckon,” began David Joslin. “Yore mammy—she told me to find ye an’ tell ye to go on home now, that it’s nearly time fer breakfast.”
“Who air ye, stranger?” asked the young woman. “Which way ye bound?”
“My name is David Joslin,” he replied. “I live, or useter live, over on the Bull Skin, near the mouth of Coal Creek.”
“What’s yore business? Air ye lookin’ fer logs?”
She stood staring at him, uncertain, silent, awkward. David Joslin returned her gaze with his own frank, gray eyes. “Ye’ve lived jest the way ye could,” said he. “Ye needn’t tell me nothin’. I know about the raftsmen. I’ve been a raftsman myself. I’ve been Outside many times. I run down the other fork, don’t ye see? I’m yore own sort of people. I hain’t no better’n ye, God knows.
“I’ve got to be goin’ now,” he added. “I hope to see ye agin some time in here. I’m jest a-goin’ Outside fer a little while, ontel I can learn to read an’ write.”
“I reckon ye don’t know all about us—my mammy and me,” she began, a slow flush now upon her face. This was a different sort of man—a preacher, perhaps?
“Oh, yes, I do. I know all I need to know or want to know. I know ye nuvver had no chancet.”
“I’ll say good-by now,” he added, extending a hand, which wandered to the tangled crown of the little girl.
And so he turned and left her standing there, the child at her side, the wild forage of the mountains to be their sustenance no one might say yet how long. When the raftsmen came——
THE mountaineer’s keen eye noted a change in the river along which his pathway led. There had been rain back in the hills, and now what the mountaineers call a “tide” was coming down, discoloring the stream. Passing more than one abandoned raft, its logs submerged in the sand, at length he stopped, having spied a pair of great logs of the yellow poplar, such as the raftsmen use as floaters for the hardwood logs they make up into their rafts. Himself an experienced river man, he saw now the means of hastening his progress.