“Oughta make a trip over in the Cove and see mine,” he ventured. “Seein’ yours wouldn’t do me no good,” she returned, a bit more tartly now that she was in sight of home. “Good-evenin’.” With that she began to mount the path. It followed a circuitous course through the giant rhododendrons growing on the hillside beneath the house. In June when they were in flower she looked down on an undulating sea of pink. She entered the house and closed the door sharply behind her. Bud Childers remained in the road until he heard that decisive slam and then turned and resumed his interrupted journey. It was not often that he went out of his way for valley folk; the round-faced folk with laughter in their eyes. It was more often they who changed their course for him. When he met them, it was he who kept the middle of the road. The life that made him lean had also given him muscles with the resiliency of highly tempered steel. The valley boys with whom he attended the Mission school for two terms had discovered this. At eleven, having learned to write his name Bud had gone back to the Cove; back to the house his grandfather had built as soon after the Civil War as the Confederate deserter hunters ceased to hunt him through the mountains. And here, joining his father, Bud had his own patch of corn, a newly cleared strip of mountain-side punctuated with half-burnt stumps and decaying chestnut-oaks, showing still the cut, a ring chopped around their bases, that had wounded them mortally and left them there to die. At fifteen he was logging, following the logs down into the valley to the sawmill and then making his way back to the Cove. A living was all he claimed of life, and this he could make without wandering far afield. His father’s death left him alone with his grandmother--his mother had given her life to bring him into the world--and this arrangement proved satisfactory enough. The old lady was not good for much except to cook, but she did that until two days before her death. When not at the stove she rocked back and forth mechanically in the doorway, a birch brush stained with snuff protruding from her withered lips. When she walked, her legs followed her uncertainly, barely moving the folds of the dirty gray calico which clothed her. Then one day she flickered out, leaving Bud alone. At first he did not mind being alone, for his farm and his cooking kept him busy enough during the day. But the evenings were long. Even the old grandmother crouching by the fireplace had made them shorter than they were now. She scolded and fussed a good deal, but she was always some one.