“It is,” he assured her, “a stretch of unaltered mediævalism entirely surrounded by modernity—yet holding aloof. Though the country has spread to the Pacific and it lies within three hundred miles of Atlantic tidewater, it is still our one frontier where pioneers live under the conditions that obtained in the days of the Indian.”
“That seems difficult to grasp,” she demurred, and 72 he nodded his head, abstractedly sketching lines on the damask cloth with his oyster fork.
“When the nation was born,” he enlightened, “and the questing spirit of the overland voyagers asserted itself, the bulk of its human tide flowed west along the Wilderness Road. Through Cumberland Gap lay their one discovered gate in the wall that nature had built to the sky across their path. It was a wall more ancient than that of the Alps and between the ridges many of them were stranded.”
“How?” she demanded, arrested by the vibrant interest of his own voice, and he continued with a shrug of the shoulder.
“Many reasons. A pack mule fallen lame—a broken wagon-wheel; small things were enough in such times of hardship to make a family settle where it found itself balked. The more fortunate won through to ‘take the west with the axe and hold it with the rifle.’ Then came railroads and steamboats, going other ways, and the ridges were swallowed again by the wilderness. The stranded brethren remained stranded and they did not alter or progress. They remained self-willed, fiercely independent and dedicated to the creed ‘Leave us alone.’ Their life to-day is the life of two centuries ago.”
The girl lifted the brows that were dark enough to require no penciling.
“That was the speech of a dreamer and a poet, Jack, and I thought you the most practical of men. What calls you into a land of poverty? I didn’t know you ever ran on cold trails.” She spoke with a delicately shaded irony, as though for the materialism of his own 73 viewpoint, yet he knew that her interest in him would survive no failure of worldly attainment.
He did not repeat to her the story told him so long ago by Snowdon, the engineer, nor confide to her that ever since then his mind had harked back insistently to that topic and its possibilities. Now he only smiled with diplomatic suavity.
“Pearls,” he said, “don’t feed oysters into robustness. They make ’em most uncomfortable. The poverty-stricken illiterates in these hills, where I’m going, might starve for centuries over buried treasure—which some one else might find.”
The girl nodded.