"Uh-huh," agreed Lance without apparently noting what her words were. "I never in my life did see as fine huckleberries as grows down in that little holler," he pursued. "We'll go in huckleberry time."
"And maybe I can put some up," said Callista, the practical, beginning to take interest in the scheme.
"Shore," was Lance's prompt assent. "I can put up fruit myself—157 I'll help you."
He laughed as he said it; those changeful hazel eyes of his glowed, and he dropped an arm around her in that caressing fashion not common in the mountains, and which ever touched Callista's cooler nature like a finger of fire, so that now, almost against her will, she smiled back at him, and returned his kiss fondly. Yet she thought he took the situation too lightly. It was not he that would suffer. He was used to living hard and going without. She would be willing to do the same for his sake; but she wanted to have him know it—to have him speak of it and praise her for it.
The season wore on with thinning boughs and a thickening carpet beneath. The grass was gone. Men riding after valley stock, sent up to fatten on the highlands, searched the mountains all day with dogs and resonant calls. They stopped outside Callista's fence to make careful inquiries concerning the welfare or whereabouts of shoats and heifers.
"Yes, and they've run so much stock up here this year," Lance said resentfully when she mentioned it to him, "that there ain't scarcely an acorn or a blade of grass left to help out our'n through the winter. I'm afraid I'm goin' to have to let Dan Bayliss down in the Settlement take Sate and Sin in his livery 158 stable for their keep. The time's about over for haulin'. I can't afford to have them come up to spring all ga'nted and poorly."
Days born in rose drifts, buried themselves in gold; groundhogs and all wild creatures of the woods were happy with a plentitude of fare; partridges were calling, "wifey—wifey!" under wayside bushes; the last leaves had their own song of renunuciation as they let go the boughs and floated softly down to join their companions on the earth. One evening, gray and white cirri swirled as if dashed in by a great, careless brush, and the next morning, a dawn strewn with flamingo feathers foretold a rainy time. All that day the weather thickened slowly, the sky became deeply overspread. At first this minor-color key was a relief, a rest, after the blaze of foliage and sun. A rain set in at nightfall, and a wind sprang up in whooping gusts; and on every hearth in the Turkey Tracks a blaze leaped gloriously, roaring in the chimney's throat, licking lovingly around the kettle. These fires are the courage of the mountain soldier and hunter. Only Callista, warming her feet by the blaze in the chimney Lance had built, thought apprehensively of the time when she should have no horse to ride, so that when she went to meeting, or to her own home, she must foot it through the mud.
It was an austere region's brief season of plenty. Not yet cold enough to kill hogs, all crops were garnered and stored; 159 there was new sorghum, there were new sweet potatoes, plenty of whippoor-will peas—but Callista's cupboard was getting very bare indeed. She looked with dismay toward the months ahead of her.
It was in this mood that she welcomed one morning the sight of Ellen Hands and Little Liza going past on the road below.
"Howdy," called Ellen, as the bride showed a disposition to come down and talk to them. Each woman carried a big, heavy basket woven of white oak splints. Little Liza held up hers and shook it. "We're on our way to pick peas," she shouted. "Don't you want to come and go 'long? Bring yo' basket. They' mighty good eating when they' fresh this-a-way."