“And yet your mind is that of a white girl—and a thoroughbred, too,” he silently asserted. “The tobacco and the blanket prove that. And you despise your mongrel people. You run away up here to your little secret ‘playhouse,’ and there you dream yourself to sleep, as you did yesterday. And there’s poetry in you, too. Let’s see, what was that you said—‘If all the dead men here should rise they’d shake the hills with their tramping!’”
His gaze grew absent, as through the smoke he visioned an army of musket-bearing pioneers, shaggy-haired and deerskin-clad, and of fierce-faced Indians carrying bow and tomahawk, marching along the ancient trails. They passed, those long-dead fighting men, and in their wake strode whiskered mountaineers of a later day, gripping shotgun and rifle, watching one another in distrust—the victims of bullet and buckshot hurled from the masking thickets of rhododendron, the men who had died at the hands of their neighbors. Crag and crevasse echoed to the tread of their ghostly feet, and the cliffs quivered in unison. Out through the Jaws of the Traps they swung into the eye of the rising sun. The caverns ceased to echo. The man found himself staring at a gray blanket and listening to the rasping clack of the katydids.
With a long sigh he arose and knocked out his pipe against his thigh.
“Oh, well,” he muttered. “The past is past, the present is here, and the future is rolling closer every minute. Poor little kid, with your dreams and your picture-words! I’m sorry for you. But all I can do is to cook some more grub for you and take you home. Then we’ll each have to gang our ain gait.”
He moved toward the dead fire, still stepping softly. But half-way across the rocky rubble he halted short, struck by a sudden memory.
“By thunder!” he exclaimed. “I wonder if——”
Back into his mind had come a fragment of a tale told months ago in New York by a chance acquaintance—a man from up-State.
“Yessir,” he heard the voice saying, “there’s queer things back in the hills—stories that’s never been told much. These fellers I’m thinkin’ about, now: they were the hardest crowd you’d ever want to meet. They were bad whites and bad Indians and bad niggers, all in this one gang and livin’ in back of a long mountain wall with only one way into it. Outlaws? Yessir, and worse’n that. Land pirates, I’d call ’em. Cut your throat and never even wipe off the knife afterward.
“Well, sir, they’d come out of this here hole-in-the-wall I’m tellin’ about, and they’d waylay folks drivin’ along the roads, the rich folks in coaches and so on. And they’d kill the men travelers and strip ’em clean. And they’d carry off the women and hold ’em for ransom. And if the ransom wasn’t paid the women never got out. They had to stay there and be the women of that gang. If they were extry good-lookin’ maybe they never got a chance to be ransomed. More’n one fine lady went into that hole in the hills and never was heard of again. Yessir. That’s right.
“Oh, yes, it was a long while ago. Good many years before our time. After the Revolution, maybe—it was pretty rough in lots of places round here then, and these fellers could fight off a whole army by guardin’ that gap of theirs. What ever become of ’em I don’t know. But the descendants of that gang and the women prisoners are livin’ there yet—outlaw white blood and high-toned white blood and nigger and Indian blood all mixed up together—and I’ve heard tell that some of ’em are handsome, especially the women. No, I never was in there myself——”