"I've got nothin' agin Dave. I always thought that she"--he did not call his brother's wife by name--"caused all this trouble. I've nothin' agin Dave." The girl turned. "Won't you, Dave?" "I'm waitin' to hear whut Becky says." Becky was listening, though her eyes were closed. Her brows knitted painfully. It was a hard compromise that she was asked to make i between mortal hate and a love that was more than mortal, but the Plea that has stood between them for nearly twenty centuries prevailed, and the girl knew that the end of the feud was nigh. Becky nodded. "Yes, I fergive her, an' I want 'em to shake hands." But not once did she turn her eyes to the woman whom she forgave, and the hand that the widow held gave back no answering pressure. The faces at the windows disappeared, and she motioned for the girl to take her weeping enemy away. She did not open her eyes when the girl came back, but her lips moved and the girl bent above her. "I know whar Jim is." From somewhere outside came Dave's cough, and the dying woman turned her head as though she were reminded of something she had quite forgotten. Then, straightway, she forgot again. The voice of the flood had deepened. A smile came to Becky's lips--a faint, terrible smile of triumph. The girl bent low and, with a startled face, shrank back. "_An' I'll--git--thar--first._" With that whisper went Becky's last breath, but the smile was there, even when her lips were cold. A CRISIS FOR THE GUARD The tutor was from New England, and he was precisely what passes, with Southerners, as typical. He was thin, he wore spectacles, he talked dreamy abstractions, and he looked clerical. Indeed, his ancestors had been clergymen for generations, and, by nature and principle, he was an apostle of peace and a non-combatant. He had just come to the Gap--a cleft in the Cumberland Mountains--to prepare two young Blue Grass Kentuckians for Harvard. The railroad was still thirty miles away, and he had travelled mule-back through mudholes, on which, as the joke ran, a traveller was supposed to leave his card before he entered and disappeared--that his successor might not unknowingly press him too hard. I do know that, in those mudholes, mules were sometimes drowned. The tutor's gray mule fell over a bank with him, and he would have gone back had he not feared what was behind more than anything that was possible ahead. He was mud-bespattered, sore, tired and dispirited when he reached the Gap, but still plucky and full of business. He wanted to see his pupils at once and arrange his schedule. They came in after supper, and I had to laugh when I saw his mild eyes open. The boys were only fifteen and seventeen, but each had around him a huge revolver and a belt of cartridges, which he unbuckled and laid on the table after shaking hands. The tutor's shining glasses were raised to me for light. I gave it: my brothers had just come in from a little police duty, I explained.