Within sight of the log cabin the girl lingered for a moment by the sassafras bushes near the spring.  Some deep craving for sympathy moved her to alien speech.  She turned upon him with an imperious, fierce tenderness in her eyes.

“You’ll never forgit me, Bud?  No matter what happens, you’ll—­you’ll not hate me?”

Her unusual emotion embarrassed and a little alarmed him.  “Oh, shucks!  They ain’t anything goin’ to happen, sis.  What’s ailin’ you?”

“But if anything does.  You’ll not hate me—­you’ll remember I allus thought a heap of you, Jimmie?” she insisted.

“Doggone it, if you’re still thinkin’ of that scalawag Dave Roush—­” He broke off, moved by some touch of prescient tragedy in her young face.  “‘Course I ain’t ever a-goin’ to forgit you none, sis.  Hit ain’t likely, is it?”

It was a comfort to him afterward to recall that he submitted to her impulsive caress without any visible irritability.

’Lindy busied herself preparing supper for her father and brother.  Ever since her mother died when the child was eleven she had been the family housekeeper.

At dusk Clay Clanton came in and stood his rifle in a corner of the room.  His daughter recognized ill-humor in the grim eyes of the old man.  He was of a tall, gaunt figure, strongly built, a notable fighter with his fists in the brawling days before he “got religion” at a camp meeting.  Now his Calvinism was of the sternest.  Dancing he held to be of the devil.  Card-playing was a sin.  If he still drank freely, his drinking was within bounds.  But he did not let his piety interfere with the feud.  Within the year, pillar of the church though he was, he had been carried home riddled with bullets.  Of the four men who had waylaid him two had been buried next day and a third had kept his bed for months.

He ate for a time in dour silence before he turned harshly on ’Lindy.

“You ain’t havin’ no truck with Dave Roush are you?  Not meetin’ up with him on the sly?” he demanded, his deep-set eyes full of menace under the heavy, grizzled brows.

“No, I ain’t,” retorted the girl, and her voice was sullen and defiant.

“See you don’t, lessen yo’ want me to tickle yore back with the bud again.  I don’t allow to put up with no foolishness.”  He turned in explanation to the boy.  “Brad Nickson seen him this side of the river to-day.  He says this ain’t the fustest time Roush has been seen hangin’ ’round the cove.”

The boy’s wooden face betrayed nothing.  He did not look at his sister.  But suspicions began to troop through his mind.  He thought again of the voices he had heard by the river and he remembered that it had become a habit of the girl to disappear for hours in the afternoon.

’Lindy went to her room early.  She nursed against her father not only resentment, but a strong feeling of injustice.  He would not let her attend the frolics of the neighborhood because of his scruples against dancing.  Yet she had heard him tell how he used to dance till daybreak when he was a young man.  What right had he to cut her off from the things that made life tolerable?