Long into the night, the stranger walked the floor of his little room under the roof, his face drawn and white, whispering half aloud things that would have startled his unsuspecting host.  “My boy—­my boy—­mine!  To do such a thing as that!  Howard—­Howard.  O Christ! that I should live to be glad that you are dead!  And that picture!  His masterpiece, the picture that made his fame, the picture he would never part with, and that we could never find!  I see it all now!  Just God, what a thing to carry on one’s soul!”

Once he paused to stand at the window, looking down upon the valley.  The moon had climbed high above the mountain, but beneath the flood of silver light the shadows lay dark and deep in Mutton Hollow.  Then as he stood there, from out the shadowy gloom, came the wild, weird song they had heard the evening before.  The man the window groaned.  The song sank to a low, moaning wail, and he seemed to hear again the wind in the pine above the grave of the murdered girl.  She was calling, calling—­would he come back?  Back from the grave, could he come?  The words of the giant mountaineer seemed burned into the father’s brain; Hell couldn’t hold him against such as that.”

Then the man with the proud face, the face of a scholar and poet, drew back from the window, shaking with a fear he could not control.  He crept into a corner and crouched upon the floor.  With wide eyes, he stared into the dark.  He prayed.

And this is how it came about that the stranger, who followed the Old Trail along the higher sunlit ground, followed, also, the other trail down into the valley where the gloomy shadows are; there to live at the ranch near the haunted cabin—­the shepherd of Mutton Hollow.

CHAPTER VII.

What is love?

Sammy Lane rode very slowly on her way home from the Matthews place that morning after the stranger had arrived.  She started out at her usual reckless gait, but that was because she knew that Young Matt was watching her.

Once in the timber, the brown pony was pulled to a walk, and by the time they came out into the open again, the little horse, unrebuked by his mistress, was snatching mouthfuls of grass as he strolled along the trail.  Sammy was thinking; thinking very seriously.  Aunt Mollie’s parting question had stirred the girl deeply.

Sammy had seen few people who did not belong to the backwoods.  The strangers she had met were hunters or cattlemen, and these had all been, in dress and manner, not unlike the natives themselves.  This man, who had come so unexpectedly out of the mists the night before, was unlike anyone the young woman had ever known.  Like Jed Holland, she felt somehow as if he were a superior being.  The Matthews family were different in many ways from those born and raised in the hills.  And Sammy’s father, too, was different.  But this stranger—­it was quite as though he belonged to another world.