2 THE CALL OF THE CUMBERLANDS



to whose summit a man standing in his saddle could
scarcely reach his fingertips, towered above the stream,
with a gnarled scrub oak clinging tenaciously to its
apex. Loftily on both sides climbed the mountains
cloaked in laurel and timber.
  Suddenly the leafage was thrust aside from above by a
cautious hand, and a shy, half-wild girl appeared in the
opening. For an instant she halted, with her brown
fingers holding back the brushwood, and raised her face
as though listening. Across the slope drifted the call
of the partridge, and with perfect imitation she whis-
tled back an answer. It would have seemed appropriate
to anyone who had seen her that she should talk bird
language to the birds. She was herself as much a wood
creature as they, and very young. That she was
beautiful was not strange. The women of the moun-
tains have a morning-glory bloom-until hardship and
drudgery have taken toll of their youth-and she could
not have been more than sixteen.
  It was June, and the hills, which would be bleakly
forbidding barriers in winter, were now as blithely
young as though they had never known the scourging
of sleet or the blight of wind. The world was abloom,
and the girl, too, was in her early June, and sentiently
alive with the strength of its full pulse-tide. She was
slim and lithely resilient of step. Her listening atti-
tude was as eloquent of pausing elasticity as that of
the gray squirrel. Her breathing was soft, though she
had come down a steep mountainside, and as fragrant
as the breath of the elder bushes that dashed the banks
with white sprays of blossom. She brought with her
to the greens and grays and browns of the woodland's