“I’ll say good-by now,” he added, extending a hand, which wandered to the tangled crown of the little girl.
And so he turned and left her standing there, the child at her side, the wild forage of the mountains to be their sustenance no one might say yet how long. When the raftsmen came——
CHAPTER VII
THE FABRIC OF A VISION
THE mountaineer’s keen eye noted a change in the river along which his pathway led. There had been rain back in the hills, and now what the mountaineers call a “tide” was coming down, discoloring the stream. Passing more than one abandoned raft, its logs submerged in the sand, at length he stopped, having spied a pair of great logs of the yellow poplar, such as the raftsmen use as floaters for the hardwood logs they make up into their rafts. Himself an experienced river man, he saw now the means of hastening his progress.
With aid of a hardwood lever, he managed to get both his logs afloat in the deep pool at whose edge they lay. Waist deep he waded, binding his logs together with a length of grapevine, which he tore from a nearby tree. He found here and there some bits of boards, flotsam and jetsam of the stream, and on these, spread crosswise, he laid bits of brush, making a little mound midships of his craft. When presently he had found a twelve-foot pole for guiding oar, he had done his work in building himself a boat. He stepped aboard it with the confidence of the river man. He knew the stream would carry him three, four or five miles an hour, sometimes six miles, in its more rapid reaches. He advanced, bend after bend, through a beautiful panorama of flame-decked river banks now gilded by the failing sun. He heard sometimes the bells of wandering cattle, now and again the lowing of a cow, the neighing of a horse; and saw by the river banks many a home of a mountaineer who had settled here none might say when. But the eyes of David Joslin were not for these things.
It was sunset when the hurrying flood of the river brought him to the mouth of that other tributary in whose valley he himself had dwelt all these years. Here was the confluence of the two main forks of the Kentucky. He knew every house of the little village at the forks, every feature of the hills, which rose about the village on either side.
He swung straight past, on the bosom of the rising and augmented river, his craft swimming steadily enough under his accustomed guidance. He scarce saw the little houses, their smoke rising for the evening meal. It was something more which came to his gaze as he traveled here.