“'Tain't nothin',” she choked out, and she turned hurriedly ahead of him down the path. Startled, Hale had dropped the crimson flower to his feet. He saw it and he let it lie.
Meanwhile, rumours were brought in that the Falins were coming over from Kentucky to wipe out the Guard, and so straight were they sometimes that the Guard was kept perpetually on watch. Once while the members were at target practice, the shout arose:
“The Kentuckians are coming! The Kentuckians are coming!” And, at double quick, the Guard rushed back to find it a false alarm and to see men laughing at them in the street. The truth was that, while the Falins had a general hostility against the Guard, their particular enmity was concentrated on John Hale, as he discovered when June was to take her first trip home one Friday afternoon. Hale meant to carry her over, but the morning they were to leave, old Judd Tolliver came to the Gap himself. He did not want June to come home at that time, and he didn't think it was safe over there for Hale just then. Some of the Falins had been seen hanging around Lonesome Cove for the purpose, Judd believed, of getting a shot at the man who had kept young Dave from falling into their hands, and Hale saw that by that act he had, as Budd said, arrayed himself with the Tollivers in the feud. In other words, he was a Tolliver himself now, and as such the Falins meant to treat him. Hale rebelled against the restriction, for he had started some work in Lonesome Cove and was preparing a surprise over there for June, but old Judd said:
“Just wait a while,” and he said it so seriously that Hale for a while took his advice.
So June stayed on at the Gap—with little disappointment, apparently, that she could not visit home. And as spring passed and the summer came on, the little girl budded and opened like a rose. To the pretty school-teacher she was a source of endless interest and wonder, for while the little girl was reticent and aloof, Miss Saunders felt herself watched and studied in and out of school, and Hale often had to smile at June's unconscious imitation of her teacher in speech, manners and dress. And all the time her hero-worship of Hale went on, fed by the talk of the boardinghouse, her fellow pupils and of the town at large—and it fairly thrilled her to know that to the Falins he was now a Tolliver himself.
Sometimes Hale would get her a saddle, and then June would usurp Miss Anne's place on a horseback-ride up through the gap to see the first blooms of the purple rhododendron on Bee Rock, or up to Morris's farm on Powell's mountain, from which, with a glass, they could see the Lonesome Pine. And all the time she worked at her studies tirelessly—and when she was done with her lessons, she read the fairy books that Hale got for her—read them until “Paul and Virginia” fell into her hands, and then there were no more fairy stories for little June. Often, late at night, Hale, from the porch of his cottage, could see the light of her lamp sending its beam across the dark water of the mill-pond, and finally he got worried by the paleness of her face and sent her to the doctor. She went unwillingly, and when she came back she reported placidly that “organatically she was all right, the doctor said,” but Hale was glad that vacation would soon come. At the beginning of the last week of school he brought a little present for her from New York—a slender necklace of gold with a little reddish stone-pendant that was the shape of a cross. Hale pulled the trinket from his pocket as they were walking down the river-bank at sunset and the little girl quivered like an aspen-leaf in a sudden puff of wind.
“Hit's a fairy-stone,” she cried excitedly.
“Why, where on earth did you—”
“Why, sister Sally told me about 'em. She said folks found 'em somewhere over here in Virginny, an' all her life she was a-wishin' fer one an' she never could git it”—her eyes filled—“seems like ever'thing she wanted is a-comin' to me.”
“Do you know the story of it, too?” asked Hale.