"Oh, why?" exclaimed Isabel; "why keep up the enmity and hatred? Why not let it die out forever?" Fult was gazing straight ahead with drawn brows at a spot in the road. "It hain't possible," he said, in a low voice. "But I can't talk about hit--never could, not even to my best friend, Charlie Lee. The onliest way is for me to keep hit all pinned right down inside me." Suddenly he put out a hand, seized Isabel's bridle, and turned both the nags sharply aside into the creek. "Right there, in the road," he said, in a choked voice, "is where they kilt my paw--come on him unexpected from them spruce-pines. I allus turn out of the road here." "Oh, horrible!" exclaimed Isabel. "Oh, what you must have suffered! Can you forgive me for speaking lightly as I did about the war? For speaking of it at all? I can hardly forgive myself!" Her blue eyes gazed insistently into his dark ones. He was silent a moment. Then he said, gently: "Hit's all right." Then, in a still lower, deeper voice: "If there was anybody I could talk to about hit, hit would be you." The color sprang into Isabel's face as she replied: "Oh, I'm only a stranger; I couldn't expect you to." Ten minutes later, he said: "All the land this side of Troublesome, for a mile or more, was my paw's, and my part, four or five hundred acres, lays along here, from the creek to the top of the ridge. My house, hit's just out of sight up yander. Me and Charlie and t'other boys stays down here a lot in crap time, and this summer they aim to help me get out a lot of timber--yellow poplar. See them tall trees that lifts their heads so high above t'others, along the ridge and all down the sides? There's a sight of 'em. And them hills are full of coal, too, five or six veins of hit." When they arrived at Aunt Ailsie's, Isabel was much taken with the ancient log house--the great fireplace, with its pots, spiders, and kettles; the loom, the reel, and the spinning-wheels and "kivers." But Aunt Ailsie would not let her spend much time looking. She set them down to a half-past-ten o'clock dinner, in order, as she said, that they might have a "full evening" before them. By eleven-thirty the three were starting up the mountain in the rear of the house. Cornfields extended halfway up, and were so steep and crumbly that Isabel had to be pulled up much of the way by Fult. He and Aunt Ailsie took the ascent like goats, but had to stop frequently for Isabel to recover her breath.