Another rock bounded off the sapling down the cliff.
"You should have seen the major," he resumed, "move on down that hill
whenever I pulled down on him with that old Colt. 'Goose-step it', I
think they call it. He was so little! His back so straight! And all
huffed up over the way he had to mind me."
I had watched the rocks as they went down the cliff and it seemed nearly
every one of them bounced off the same limb. I commented on the accuracy
of his eye.
"Aw! I wasn't throwing at that sapling, but at--that--leaf."
He straightened up and threw more carefully; and the leaf floated down
to the waters of the York spring.
Down by the spring I met the little mother bringing a tin bucket to the
stone milk-house which nature had built. Her slender, drooping figure,
capped by the sunbonnet she always wore, reached just to the shoulder of
her son, as he placed his arm protectingly about her.
I asked if she were not proud of that boy of hers.
"Yes," she answered, with pride in every line of her sweet though
wrinkled face, "I am proud of all of them--all of my eight boys!"
II
A "Long Hunter" Comes to the Valley
The "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf" is more than a fertile space
between two mountain ranges. It is a rectangular basin of verdure and
beauty in the glow of a Southern sun, around which seven mountains have
grown to their maturity.
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