It was Sunday and a holiday for little Jason from toil in the rocky corn-field.  He was stirring busily before the break of dawn.  While the light was still gray, he had milked, cut wood for his mother, and eaten his breakfast of greasy bacon and corn-bread.  On that day it had been his habit for months to disappear early, come back for his dinner, slip quietly away again and return worn out and tired at milking-time.  Invariably for a long time his mother had asked: 

“Whut you been a-doin’, Jason?” And invariably his answer was: 

“Nothin’ much.”

But, by and by, as the long dark mountaineer, Steve Hawn, got in the daily habit of swinging over the ridge, she was glad to be free from the boy’s sullen watchfulness, and particularly that morning she was glad to see him start as usual up the path his own feet had worn through the steep field of corn, and disappear in the edge of the woods.  She would have a long day for courtship and for talk of plans which she was keeping secret from little Jason.  She was a Honeycutt and she had married one Hawn, and there had been much trouble.  Now she was going to marry another of the tribe, there would be more trouble, and Steve Hawn over the ridge meant to evade it by straightway putting forth from those hills.  Hurriedly she washed the dishes, tidied up her poor shack of a home, and within an hour she was seated in the porch, in her best dress, with her knitting in her lap and, even that early, lifting expectant and shining eyes now and then to the tree-crowned crest of the ridge.

Up little Jason went through breaking mist and flashing dew.  A wood-thrush sang, and he knew the song came from the bird of which little Mavis was the human counterpart.  Woodpeckers were hammering and, when a crested cock of the woods took billowy flight across a blue ravine, he knew him for a big cousin of the little red-heads, just as Mavis was a little cousin of his.  Once he had known birds only by sight, but now he knew every calling, twittering, winging soul of them by name.  Once he used to draw bead on one and all heartlessly and indiscriminately with his old rifle, but now only the whistle of a bob-white, the darting of a hawk, or the whir of a pheasant’s wings made him whirl the old weapon from his shoulder.  He knew flower, plant, bush, and weed, the bark and leaf of every tree, and even In winter he could pick them out in the gray etching of a mountain-side—­dog-wood, red-bud, “sarvice” berry, hickory, and walnut, the oaks—­white, black, and chestnut—­ the majestic poplar, prized by the outer world, and the black-gum that defied the lightning.  All this the dreamy stranger had taught him, and much more.  And nobody, native born to those hills, except his uncle Arch, knew as much about their hidden treasures as little Jason.  He had trailed after the man of science along the benches of the mountains where coal beds lie.  With him he had sought the roots of upturned trees and the beds of little creeks