IN OLD KENTUCKY

A Story of the Bluegrass and the Mountains Founded on Charles T. Dazey’s Play

by

Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey

Illustrations By Clarence Rowe

1910

[Illustration:  She saw the stranger break through the undergrowth about the pool.]

ILLUSTRATIONS.

She saw the stranger break through the undergrowth
about the pool. (Frontispiece)

A mighty leap had carried them beyond the blazing barrier.

“No man can cross this bridge, unless—­unless—­”

“Back! back!  I’m a-comin’ with Queen Bess!”

“I’m standin’ face to face with my own father’s murderer—­Lem Lindsay.”

CHAPTER I.

She was coming, singing, down the side of Nebo Mountain—­“Old Nebo”—­mounted on an ox.  Sun-kissed and rich her coloring; her flowing hair was like spun light; her arms, bare to the elbows and above, might have been the models to drive a sculptor to despair, as their muscles played like pulsing liquid beneath the tinted, velvet skin of wrists and forearms; her short skirt bared her shapely legs above the ankles half-way to the knees; her feet, never pinched by shoes and now quite bare, slender, graceful, patrician in their modelling, in strong contrast to the linsey-woolsey of her gown and rough surroundings, were as dainty as a dancing girl’s in ancient Athens.

The ox, less stolid than is common with his kind, doubtless because of ease of life, swung down the rocky path at a good gait, now and then swaying his head from side to side to nip the tender shoots of freshly leaving laurel.  She sang: 

  “Woodpecker pecked as a woodpecker will,
  Jim thought ’twas a knock on the door of the still,
  He grabbed up his gun, and he went for to see,
  The woodpecker laughed as he said:  ‘Jest me!’”

She laughed, now, not at the song, which was purely automatic, but in sheer joy of living on that wonderful June day in those marvellous Kentucky mountains.  Their loneliness did not depress her; indeed, to her, they were not lonely, but peopled by a host of lifelong friends who had greeted her at birth, and would, she had every reason to suppose, speed her when her end came.  Their majesty did not overwhelm her, although she felt it keenly, and respected it and loved it with a certain dear, familiar awe.  And everywhere about her was the Spring.  Laurel blossomed at the trail’s sides, filling the whole air with fragrance; the tardier blueberry bushes crowding low about it had begun to show the light green of their bursting buds; young ferns were pushing through the coverlet of last autumn’s leaves which had kept them snug against the winter’s cold, and were