Birds flew over, bound for the North, each with his instinctive goal; some almost at their journey's end, others with many a long ethereal mile before them. Some of them sojourned for a few days, following the ploughman as he overturned the mellow earth. Others let this high land be the end of their wanderings, and settled here to the duty of love-making and the pleasures of domestic life. The azalea flamed in yellow and orange and scarlet glory, a note of savage color on spring's soft palette. The delicate clusters of the laurel, and, later, of the rhododendron, crowned the stems of the parent bush, as sometimes a fair girl springs from a rough and ugly father. The germ grew strong within its warm seed-prison, and sent inquiring leaflets into the upper world; and the adventurers never returned, but sent back demands for food and drink, as colonists to a new land rely upon the mother-country for sustenance and support. On the steep mountain-sides, and in the coves that dimple the lower slopes; on the flat lands of the plateau, and in the meadows along the French Broad, the slender shafts of the corn-leaves were pushing upward with what success their position fostered. By mid-June the crop in the bottom-land was knee-high, while that nourished by the field over which Sydney had stumbled on the top of Buck Mountain was only half as tall. Bud Yarebrough and Pink Pressley were hoeing among stalks half-way between these heights on the upland slopes of the Baron's farm, whose cultivable land they had hired for the season. Stripped to their shirts, whose open throats showed each a triangle of sunburned skin, they worked rapidly down the adjoining furrows, one keeping a hoe's length behind the other, that their tools might not interfere. Conversation was more pithy than voluble. "Damn hot," ejaculated Pink, stopping to hitch up his trousers, and then to spit on his hands before resuming his hoe. "Mos' dinner time," returned Bud, looking up at the sun, and then over his shoulder towards the spring-betraying group of trees to which Melissa was accustomed to bring his dinner when he was working here. "They's some feller tyin' his horse in front of the cabin. Who is hit?" Pink leaned on his hoe and squinted across the blazing field to the grove that sheltered von Rittenheim's house. "Bob Morgan, Ah reckon. Looks like his horse." "Come to get somethin' fo' Mr. Baron. O-oh, Bob!" Bob looked around his horse's nose, and held up his hand in token of understanding. He unlocked the cabin and disappeared within, coming out again with a bundle, which he tied on to the saddle, and then led his animal towards the trees at the spring. The two laborers tossed down their hoes and moved to the same haven. "What time is hit, Bob?" Morgan looked at his watch. "Five past twelve, Pink. Working hard?" "Yep. Tol'able big crop." He sat down at the foot of a tree and opened his dinner-pail.