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He bestowed one more proud, fond look upon the little face in the borrowed cradle, and walked out with as elated a step as though a queen had been born to the tribe.

In the doorway he met Bud and Honey, returning with the spotted calico poke clutched fast between them.

“I won’t ask nothin’ but a wearin’ of em for my child,” Laurella Consadine, born Laurella Passmore, reiterated when the small garments were laid out on the bed, and the baby was being dressed.  “They’re mighty fine, Mavity, an’ I’ll take good keer of ’em and always bear in mind that they’re only borried.”

“No,” returned Mavity Bence, with unwonted firmness, as she put the newcomer into the slip intended for her own son.  “No, Laurelly, these clothes ain’t loaned to you.  I give ’em to this child.  I’m a widder, and I never look to wed again, becaze Pap he has to have somebody to do for him, an’ he’d just about tear up the ground if I was to name sech a thing.  I’m mighty glad to give ’em to yo’ little gal.  I only wisht,” she said wistfully, “that hit was a boy.  Ef hit was a boy, mebbe you’d give hit the name that should ‘a’ went with the clothes.  I was a-goin’ to call the baby John after hit’s pappy.”

Laurella Consadine lay quiescent for a moment, big black eyes studying the smoky logs that raftered the roof.  Then all at once she laughed, with a flash of white teeth.

“I don’t see why Johnnie ain’t a mighty fine name for a gal,” she said.  “I vow I’m a-goin’ to name her Johnnie!”

And so this one of the tribe of borrowing Passmores wore her own clothing from the first.  No borrowed garment touched her.  She rejected the milk from the borrowed cow, fiercely; lustily she demanded—­and eventually received—­her own legitimate, unborrowed sustenance.

Perhaps such a beginning had its own influence upon her future.

CHAPTER II

THE BIRTH OF AN AMBITION

All day the girl had walked steadily, her bare feet comforted by the warm dust, shunning the pebbles, never finding sham stones in the way, making friends with the path—­that would always be Johnnie.  From the little high-hung valley in the remote fastnesses of the Unakas where she was born, Johnnie Consadine was walking down to Cottonville, the factory town on the outskirts of Watauga, to find work.  Sometimes the road wound a little upward for a quarter of a mile or so; but the general tendency was persistently down.

In the gray dawn of Sunday morning she had stepped from the door of that room where the three beds occupied three corners, and a rude table was rigged in the fourth.  It might almost seem that the same hounds were quarrelling under the floor that had scrambled there eighteen years before when she was born.  At first the way was entirely familiar to her.  It passed few habitations, and of those the dwellers were not yet abroad, since it was scarce day.  As time went on she got to the little settlement at the foot of the first mountain, and had to explain to everybody her destination and ambition.  Beyond this, she stopped occasionally for direction, she met more people; yet she was still in the heart of the mountains when noon found her, and she crept up a wayside bank and sat down alone to eat her bite of corn pone.