They arrive at the foot of Salt Trace just as the lively tinkling of cowbells, as well as their own appetites, and the setting sun, suggests supper time; and their chafed buttocks, more used to a swivel chair than a saddle, pleaded for the comfort of an altered position. Simeon Saylor lives several hundred yards up the creek from where the Salt Trace Trail, the bridle path to Harlan, leaves the main road. His house is the usual stopping place for travelers. He has imposed the labor of their entertainment upon his women folks, not so much for profit as to hear the news and chit-chat of the outside world. The house is a structure of three large pens of logs with a dog trot (hallway) between. Two front the road, the third forms an ell at the rear and is flanked by a long porch. The whole is covered by a rough clapboard roof. Each pen has a sandstone chimney and each room a large, open fireplace. The ell is used as a kitchen, dining-room and storehouse combined. On the edge of the porch, almost within reach of the well sweep, a bench holds two tin wash basins; a cake of laundry soap reposes in the former coffin of a family of sardines and a roller towel, sterilized and dried by air and sunlight, hangs pendant from the eaves. The travelers as they rode up and stiffly dismounted noted the many chickens going to roost and the three cows occupying the road in front of the house. The barn was rather an imposing structure. These signs assured eggs, milk and butter for themselves and feed and comfortable quarters for their horses. After supper they sat out in the moonlight on a crooked, half uprooted elm overhanging the creek, until the world grew worshipfully still as it does twenty miles from a railroad; their quiet, contented thoughts undisturbed by the call of the whippoorwills in the near thickets and the hooting of a great owl far down the valley. Then they were joined by their host, a tall, rawboned, sallow, sandy-haired man with a long, thin face on which grew a straggly beard, which had never known shears or razor. He had come out to hear more news than he had been able to learn at supper, where table manners demanded that he should eat and get through with it. At the table the men ate saying little, while the old woman and her daughters served them, and in silence. His youngest boy, Caleb, came with him, an immodest little fellow; made so by his father, who it seemed spent most of his time boasting of the boy's accomplishments.