In his boyhood, and before the pressing demands of his profession had enslaved him, Donald had been an insatiate reader, and now he endeavored to recall to memory some of the stories which he had read about this strange people, whose dwelling place was within the limits of the busy, progressive East, yet who were surprisingly isolated from it by natural barriers, and still more so by traditions slow to perish. Pure of stock he knew them to be, for their unmixed blood had had its fountain source in the veins of some of America's best and earliest settlers; primitive in their ideals, strong in their simple purposes and passions, the products of, and perhaps even now factors in, blood feuds whose beginnings dated back generations. And, although he laughed at himself for his imaginings as he remembered that the twentieth century was ten years old, he found himself assigning both the men places in his memory picture. Big Jerry, slow of speech, patriarchal in looks and bearing, powerful in body, became, to his mind's eye, the venerable chieftain of a mountain clan. Judd, with his aquiline face, which was undoubtedly handsome in a dark, brooding way, beneath its uncombed shock of black hair which swept low over his forehead, sinewy with the strength, quickness and muck of the natural grace of a panther, was the typical outlaw of the hills. CHAPTER III AN INNOCENT SERPENT IN EDEN Donald turned his appraising gaze upon the child, and here the illusion yielded to another, quite different. Even her primitive dress, her unbound hair, her crude forms of speech and soft, drawling intonation--such as the throaty, unvarying pronunciation of "the" as though it were "ther," and "a" like "er"--which sounded so deliciously odd to his New England ears, could not erase from his mind the impression that she did not belong in the picture. To be sure he had, during his tramps, already seen many a wild mountain flower so delicately sweet that it seemed out of place amid its stern environment. But Rose affected him differently, although the difference was subtle, indefinable. In the company of the men he was conscious of the reserve which one of his type instinctively feels when first in the presence of people of another race or class. With her he was already wholly at his ease. Donald finally attributed this to the fact that she was, after all, merely a child--one of a class which is akin the world over, and which he understood better than any other.