But it was Joe Lorey's face which greeted her as she abruptly turned to see. His coon-skin cap, his jerkin and trousers of faded blue-jeans, his high, rusty boots matched perfectly with his primitive environments. As he appeared only the old-fashioned Winchester, which he carried cradled in his crooked elbow, spoke of the Nineteenth century. His face, though handsome in a crudely modelled way, had been weather-beaten into a rough, semi-fierceness by the storms through which he had watched the mountain-passes during the long winter for the raiders who were ever on his trail. The slightly reddened lids of his dark, restless eyes, told of long nights during which the rising fumes of moonshine whisky stealthily brewing in his furtive still, cave-hidden, had made them smart and sting. Even as, smilingly, he came up to the strangely mounted maid, there was on his face the strong trace of that hunted look which furtive consciousness of continual and unrelenting pursuit gives to the lawbreaker--even to the lawbreaker who believes the laws he breaks are wrong and to be violated without sin and righteously. "That you, Joe?" said the girl. "You skeered me." "Did I?" he replied, grinning broadly. "Didn't plan to." From far below there came the crash of bursting powder. Quick and lithe as a panther the man whirled, ready with his rifle. The girl laughed. "Nothin' but the railroad blastin' down there in the valley," she said with amusement. "Ain't you uset to that, yet?" "No," said he, "I ain't--an' never will be." His tone was definitely bitter. Never were the "sounds of progress more ungraciously received than there among the mountains by the folk who had, hedged in by their fastnesses, become almost a race apart, ignorant of the outside world's progressions and distrustful and suspicious of them. "Where you goin', Madge?" he asked, plodding on beside the lurching ox. "I ain't tellin'," she said briefly. "But you can go part ways--you can go fur as th' pasture bars." "Why can't I go as fur as you go?" "Because," said she, and laughed. "I reckon maybe that th' water's started to warm up down in the pool, ain't it?" she cried, and laughed again. "Oh!" said he, a bit abashed, and evidently understanding. They did not pursue the subject. "What you got there?" he inquired, a few moments later, as they were approaching the old pasture. He pointed to a package carefully wrapped in a clean apron, which she hugged beneath her arm. "Spellin' book," said Madge, as, just before the bars she slid down from her perch upon the ox. "I'm learnin'." His lip curled with the mountaineer's contempt for books and all they have to teach. "What you want to _learn_ for?" He had gently shouldered her aside as she had stooped to raise the bars back to position, and, with a certain crude gallantry, had done the task himself.