“Take yourself another helping,” said Bex’s mother.
“I couldn’t,” Ballard’s eyes rolled as he patted his stomach. “And I got to be going. I came away from the mill just to bring Bex home. Now I must go back.”
The mill, Johnny thought with a start. Oh yes, that mysterious mill. Perhaps Donald Day will show me its secrets.
A glorious golden moon hung like a Japanese lantern over the jagged ridge that is Stone Mountain when Johnny on the evening of that same day wended his way toward Cousin Bill’s home.
Although Johnny travelled over a trail that, winding along the mountainside, went up and down like a roller coaster, he did not look down upon rocks and ridges but upon a broad and fertile field, level as a floor. There are many such farms to be found in the narrow valleys of the Cumberland. This particular farm belonged to Colonel Crider. The Colonel, Johnny had been told, was rich. Smart racing horses, sometimes taken to the Kentucky Derby, contentedly grazed in his rich pastures. He had a daughter. Just about sixteen years old, Johnny guessed she was. Johnny had seen her only once and that at a distance, yet even at that distance, there was something about the dancing rhythm of her movement, the tilt of her head that had suggested a spirit of light gayety no one could despise.
Johnny was not at this moment thinking of Jensie Crider. His thoughts were gloomy ones. Truth was, he was engaged in one of those mental battles that come to every boy, a fight between his own desires and what he believes to be duty.
“I promised the coach I’d find him a real half-back and I haven’t done it,” he groaned. “But up there on Pounding Mill Creek there’s a pool where the biggest old black bass is lurking. I’ve seen him twice. I almost had him once. Now I’ve got just the right bait—”
At that moment his eye was caught and held by something moving down there in the Colonel’s back pasture.
“It’s Nicodemus,” he thought. “But what’s got into him? He’s scooting across his pen like mad. Just as if he was after something. And—and he is! Or—or something’s after him!”
He came to this decision with a sudden mental jolt. Nicodemus was the Colonel’s favorite ram. Very highly pedigreed and quite old. Nicodemus, until a short time before when a stout pen with a high board fence had been built for him, was the terror of the community. Three times he had broken loose. Each time he had left fear and destruction behind him.