One of her visits happened upon a day when the place was enlivened by his daughter's approaching wedding. A distinguished house-party had assembled, among whom a city-bred young fellow had been attracted by her wild beauty. Safe from the eyes of his friends he followed her through the woodland pasture, and talked to her; and it had seemed a very natural thing. Mountain girls mature early, and she was a woman for all her tender years; a twelve and a half year old woman, partly savage, masquerading in the guise of a girl. He was dazzling to her and pleasing. But suddenly he kissed her and, infuriated, she flung the empty bucket in his face and fled. The gods may know where she learned the difference between right and wrong. In a passion of shame and bitter hatred, she hurled back at him every oath her father, in his most prolific moments, had ever used. It was a wondrous collection. Her only idea was to reach home and return with the rifle, and so insistent was this that she ran most of the twelve intervening miles. Reaching at last the cabin clearing, she panted up its steep side, through burnt stumps and sparsely growing corn, to the door; but there across the sill her father lay face down and motionless. He might have been drunk, and so at first she thought, until her approach revealed a little hole in the back of his head. She stared at him like an image of wood, then sank upon the floor, putting her lips close to his ear. "Pappy," she said, in a quick whisper, "Pappy, tell me who done hit! I know ye air daid--but can't ye tell me jest that?" Her first impulse was of revenge, but slowly the love--unmerited as it may have been--and the sense of loss, of loneliness, came over her like a great wave, and with her face on his still shoulder she wailed her wretched grief to the silent wilderness. When she looked up it was sundown. She realized that whoever had killed him might come back for her--might now, indeed, be "layin' out" for her; and yet she could not leave him unburied! Her hands grasped his shirt and she frantically tugged, bracing her heels against the roughly hewn log door-step, in a vague way hoping that she might drag him to a spot where the ground would be soft enough to dig. A few minutes of this fruitless effort compelled her to give it up. "Pappy, can't ye help me, jest a leetle?" she had whispered in despair. And then the tears would flow again.