BIG LAUREL BIG LAUREL _By_ FREDERICK ORIN BARTLETT _Author of “One Year of Pierrot,” “Joan & Co.” “The Triflers,” etc._ [Illustration] BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge 1922 COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY FREDERICK ORIN BARTLETT ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THE RIVERSIDE PRESS CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. TO JOHN WALLACE A SOUTHERN GENTLEMAN AND AN AMERICAN SOLDIER UPON WHOSE MANUSCRIPT THIS STORY IS BASED BIG LAUREL BIG LAUREL CHAPTER I Where the narrow, rocky road from Big Laurel Cove taps the main highway down the valley, a limpid trout stream refuses to give up its right of way and forces a ford. Here, one afternoon in June, Bud Childers coming down from his shack on Green Mountain stopped to water his horse in the middle of the brook. Lank and lean, he sat easily astride the mare, gazing about indifferently in spite of his twenty-two years. In his inscrutable eyes there lurked something of that unchanging limpid blue which coats these North Carolina mountains. It was not easy to read in them anything except perhaps cruelty; an expression to which the long line of his thin jaw closing on bloodless lips, the high protruding cheek-bones clearly traced by his tautly drawn bronzed skin, doubtless contributed. The hot sun beating down upon his head caused him to raise his black dust-stained hat. A white crescent-shaped scar was then revealed slightly above his left ear clearly visible in his blue-black hair--souvenir of the day that the Enfield boys, stimulated by liquor, attempted, in an argument, to knife him. The Enfields have their souvenir in a marble slab in Mount Bethel churchyard. The memory of this episode was never so completely out of Bud’s mind but that the unexpected crackle of a twig sent his hand flashing back to the gun always within reach. It did at this moment as his quick ear caught the sound of movement in the cover of hemlocks and rhododendrons skirting the road at the bend beyond him. His face remained immobile. His eyes were leveled like a rifle barrel. His bony hand was alert. And all for a slight, flaxen-haired girl carrying under her arm a small sack of flour!