"Ye'll not brek yer wordy honor?" she insisted. He put the gun back and came and sat down by her again. Just then Milly opened the door and entered the room carrying her coarse sun-bonnet in her hand. The exercise of fetching the ox down from his browsing place on the mountain side had put a bright color in her cheeks, and the wind had been tossing her pale, straw-gold hair so that it hung in elfish tangles about her neck and shoulders. She scarcely glanced at her father and mother. "I hitched 'im out ther'," she said, referring to the ox, and passing on into the kitchen, went by that round-about way into Reynolds' room. She was very sly, but they heard her moving about, and knew she was once more re-arranging his things. They looked at each other with something of that hopeless, dazed expression often observed in the eyes of the lower animals when hurt to death. Milly had left the outer door open and the cool mountain air poured in, rustling vaguely such loose articles as its current could stir. Little more was said between the man and his wife, for there seemed nothing to say. A cloud had settled over their compressed, barren lives. Nothing in their natures was ready or flexible. They stared at fate, as they stared at each other, with the hopelessness of utter bewilderment. Days went by, days of that languid, cloudless weather which comes to those mountains in early February, and the little household of the cabin went through the dry, spiritless round of duties, as if some spell had fallen upon them. True there was no marked visible change in their way of life; that was impossible. The limitations of human action nowhere else are set with such rigid immutability as they are, and perhaps always will be, in those cramped, unfertile, almost barren mountain regions of the South. No advance, no retrogression (save where here and there a railroad brings its little whisky centers), all is stagnant, dull, dry, hopeless poverty. Illiteracy, sterility, and that stubborn conservatism which is born of them, rest like an atmosphere around those poor people. They move and breathe and are stolidly content. When a month had passed and Reynolds had not come, Milly, who had been kept in ignorance of the true state of affairs, began to show stronger signs of disappointment. She was restless and anxious, wandering about the house or leaning upon the gate, silent, sad-eyed, expectant and hopeless by turns, a source of deep trouble to her parents. Now and then White attempted to cheer her up, but the words seemed to come dead and meaningless from his dry lips when he would say: "He air a havin' a outdacious good time down ther', he air, an' he don't like ter quit off yet. Jest ye wait a day er two an' 'en ye'll see 'm a comin' up yer, Milly, a comin' up yer----" his voice would most usually fail him, but he would go on: "Yes, he air comin' back purty soon, when he hev hed all the shootin' he ken git."