The little Barbour cousins spent Thanksgiving week with the children. Pelham showed them all the treasured spots on the mountain. To them, even the walk up the hill was an adventure, as they explored the long sloping dummyline road, through stiff palisades of golden rod and Flora's paint-brush, the stalks silver-dusty from the nipping November winds, and ready to scatter at the tentative poking of a rotting stick, or the breath of a skimmed stone.
One wonderful picnic they had to Shadow Creek, before the relatives returned home. All drove over in a wagon to the deserted mill dam, Aunt Sarah, grumbling her good-humored threats to return to Jackson and leave "dis mountain foolishness," riding along to mind the children. Jimmy learned the first few swimming strokes in the cool, brownish pond; Pelham and the older girls had long been going in regularly with their father, and were fast becoming expert.
A baby came in April,—another boy, named Edward after Mary's father. This kept the mother from joining their rambles, so it was necessary for Pelham to devise the games without her resourceful assistance.
Here the boy's impelling imagination, added to his knowledge of fairy stories, came to his aid. All the myth-creating urge of the past moved in him. He peopled the varied crests and valleys with these volatile companions, visible only in the dusk out of the corner of a friendly eye. The V-shaped slope from the gap to the railroad was Dwarfland; Hollis was their prince. Crenshaw Hill, clear to the Locust Hedge, was Yellow Fairyland; a chum, Lane Cullom, a year older than Pelham, assumed leadership over these beings. Black-haired Nell, when she could be got to play, was the princess of the Black Fairies, whose haunts were in the outcrop before Hillcrest Cottage. Sue was anything needed to complete the story,—a mere mortal, the queen of the moon-fairies, or of the rock gnomes. Pelham, himself, in crimson outing flannel cloak, was the king and lord of the Red Fairies. They were the real spirits of the mountain, and of fire, and came in their red chariots down the flaming lanes of the sunset sky, to battle for their dispossessed heritage against all the forces of night and darkness.
The fights were not all bloodless. On one of these assaults, as he charged with brittly reed lances up the precipitous quartz quarry, he stumbled and drove a stiff bit of stubble into a nostril. It bled furiously, until his stained handkerchief was the hue of his crimson mantle. But even the three stitches which the doctor took were only an incident in the noble warfare.
The endless sieges, ambuscades, tourneys and adventures filled volumes—literally volumes; for Pelham wrote, on folded tablet paper, a history of the fairy occupation of the mountain, copiously illustrated with pencil and crayon. It was one of the regrets of his later years that this history had disappeared completely; even its details vanished from his memory.
Always he directed the sports. They varied with his invention; spear-tilting at barrel hoops around the circle of the daisy bed, bow and arrow warfare at Indian enemies hulking and skulking behind pokeberry bushes, cross-country running to Shadow Creek and back, when he became interested in this at the high school,—these were only a few of the games.
His name-giving had a curiously permanent effect. Dwarfland never lost the title he gave it, nor Billygoat Hill, where he and Lane surrounded a patriarchal billy and almost caught him.
When his father became busied with planning the subdivision of the mountain lands, to throw them upon the market, the imitative boy divided Crenshaw Hill into "Coaldale the Second." He borrowed, without permission, enough deeds and mortgages from the real-estate office to run his city for a year, and acted as seller, probate judge, and clearing gang. The streets, two feet wide, were carefully walled from the lots by the loose outcrop stones. There was a hotel, a court house, a furnace, and multiplying homes and stores.
Finally the sisters and brother lost interest, since only Pelham could untangle the intricacies of the allotments. It was all cleared away three years later by a real clearing gang, although this part of the hill continued to be called Coaldale Second.