Teck Jepson heard it for the first time one momentous August day. As he rode slowly along the circuitous ways of Broomsedge Cove he was conscious that he surveyed the scene with an interest which it had never before elicited. The porch of Eli Strobe’s cabin was vacant, but as he dismounted from his horse, and hitched him to the rack beside the door of the blacksmith’s shop, he glanced from time to time across the fields at the house. The hop and gourd vines hung motionless about it, for no wind stirred. Through their screen his sharp eyes descried a spinning-wheel—idle and motionless. No face at the tiny window, no flutter of a blue dress among the poultry in the door-yard. The place might have seemed deserted save for the tendril of smoke slowly curling out of the clay-and-stick chimney, and the dog of the “frequent visitor,” standing in the door, wagging his tail, which he had a call to do, Teck remembered, being “purty well treated.” He momentarily canvassed the dwellers on and about Chilhowee with a vague desire to identify the owner, but the dog in no respect resembled his master, and Teck’s musings were vain. Then he turned away, and sat down upon a log beside the blacksmith’s shop, and silently gazed at the blue mountains, against which, in an oblique line, the roof of Strobe’s cabin was drawn. There were half a dozen men lounging about the forge, for it was seldom that Clem Sanders was alone; and besides his special cronies, the mountain gossips were wont to congregate here. The forge was silent; the smith himself was leaning against the anvil, his brawny arms folded across his chest, his pipe between his teeth, his languid eyes fixed on the majestic mountains without, dome on dome and range on range, stretching far away into the distance; while below, the sunlit valley smiled, with only the shadow of a flying bird or an uncertain mist, vague and vagrant, to mar the sheen. He was a tall, bluff fellow, with reddish brown hair, straight dark eyebrows, and a broad low forehead. He had many wrinkles in the corners of his eyes; not from age, for he was only some twenty-four or five, but from persistent twinkling. They were brown eyes and bright ones, not large, but long and narrow. He had a square face and a flexible mouth with merry curves, the better revealed since he wore no beard. His checked homespun shirt was open at his throat; the sleeve was rolled up, showing his great hammer-arm; its muscles were a source of perpetual pride to its possessor. He took little part in the conversation, the twinkling wrinkles about his eyes expressing his interest when it waxed facetious. Eli Strobe was leaning back against the door in a rickety chair; two men who were sitting on the log moved slightly, to give Jepson more room. A tall, slim, jeans-clad young mountaineer, booted to the knee and accoutred with shot-pouch and powder-horn, and having long light hair showing a tendency to tousled ringlets, lay at length on the grass outside of the door.