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Johnnie turned and regarded him curiously.  It was characteristic of the mountain girl, and of her people, that she had not on first meeting stared, village fashion, at his brave attire; and she seemed now concerned only with the man himself.

“I reckon you’ll get it,” she said meditatively.  “I reckon you will.  Sometimes I think we always get just what we deserve in this here world, and that the only safe way is to try to deserve something good.  I hope I didn’t say too much for Uncle Pros; but he’s so easy and say-nothin’ himself, that I just couldn’t bear to hear you laughin’ at him and not answer you.”

“I declare, you’re plenty funny!” Buckheath burst put boisterously.  “No, I ain’t mad at you.  I kind o’ like you for stickin’ up for the old man.  You and me’ll get along, I reckon.”

As they moved forward, the man and the girl fell into more general chat, the feeling of irritation at Johnnie’s beauty, her superior air, growing rather than diminishing in the young fellow’s mind.  How dare Pros Passmore’s grandniece carry a bright head so high, and flash such glances of liquid fire at her questioner?  Shade looked sidewise sometimes at his companion as he asked the news of their mutual friends, and she answered.  Yet when he got, along with her mild responses, one of those glances, he was himself strangely subdued by it, and fain to prop his leaning prejudices by contrasting her scant print gown, her slat sunbonnet, and cowhide shoes with the apparel of the humblest in the village which they were approaching.

CHAPTER III

A PEAK IN DARIEN

So walking, and so desultorily talking, they came out on a noble white highway that wound for miles along the bluffy edge of the upland overlooking the valley upon the one side, fronted by handsome residences on the other.

It was Johnnie’s first view of a big valley, a river, or a city.  She had seen the shoestring creek bottoms between the endless mountains among which she was born and bred, the high-hung, cup-like depressions of their inner fastnesses; she was used to the cool, clear, boulder-checked mountain creeks that fight their way down those steeps like an armed man beating off assailants at every turn; she had been taken a number of times to Bledsoe, the tiny settlement at the foot of Unaka Old Bald, where there were two stores, a blacksmith shop, the post-office and the church.

Below her, now beginning to glow in the evening light, opened out one of the finest valleys of the southern Appalachees.  Lapped in it, far off, shrouded with rosy mist which she did not identify as transmuted coal smoke, a city lay, fretted with spires, already sparkling with electric lights, set like a glittering boss of jewels in the broad curve of a shining river.

Directly down the steep at their feet was the cotton-mill town, a suburb clustered about a half-dozen great factories, whose long rows of lighted windows defined their black bulk.  There was a stream here, too; a small, sluggish thing that flowed from tank to tank among the factories, spanned by numerous handrails, bridged in one place for the wagon-road to cross.  Mills, valley, town, distant rimming mountains, river and creek, glowed and pulsed, dissolved and relimned themselves in the uprolling glory of sunset.