"None so poor but that he has something to give!" he muttered. Chapter VI EVENTS ON DEER MOUNTAIN The sisters made all their expeditions on horseback, and, on the upward ride, the horses were commonly breathed on the zigzag of the road which abutted on the mine. Miss Smith, who was disposed to be offended by Durgan's quick change of residence, was dry and formal when he greeted them; but Bertha bent kind glances upon him, and always made time to chat. Her manner to men had the complete frankness and dignity which is more usually acquired by older women; and she always appeared to be on perfectly open terms with her sister. Her talk was always replete with interest in the passing events of Deer. For the first week that Durgan delved he supposed that there were no events on Deer Mountain. Bertha aided him to discover them. She had fraternized closely with her solitudes, not only by directing all things concerning the garden, fields, meadows, and live-stock of the little summit farm, but also by extending her love and sympathy to the whole mountain of Deer and to all the changes in the splendid panorama round about. "'Nothing happens!'" cried she, playfully, echoing Durgan. "Open your eyes, Master Miner, lest by burrowing you become a veritable mole! Can you only recognize the thrill of events when they are printed in a vulgar journal?" So Durgan's observation was stimulated. First, there were the events of the weather--what Bertha called the "scene-shifting." To-day the veil of blue air would be so thin that, in a radius of many miles, the depth of each gorge, the molding of each peak, was so clear that the covering forest would be revealed like a carpet of fern, each tree a distinct frond when the eye focussed upon it. The rocky precipices would declare each cave and crevice in sharply outlined shadow, and emerald forms far off would look so near that house and fence and wandering paths were seen. At such an hour the Cherokee ridges would stand like the great blue-crested waves of ocean, and the "Great Smokies" be like clouds, turquoise-tinted, on the northern horizon. The next day the azure mists that lay always on the Georgian plain would have crept, embracing the very spurs of Deer, hiding the modeling of even the adjacent mountains as with a luminous gauze. Then only a screen of mountainous outline could be seen, standing flat against emptiness, of uniform tint, colored like a blue-jay's wing. Again there was nothing but vapor to be seen, here towering black, here moving fringed with glory and lit within. May showers winged their silver way among the mist-clouds and cleft a passing chasm for the sun. Or again, following or preceding thunder, there would be an almost terrible clearness of the sun, and big cloud-shadows would flap from range to range like huge black bats with sharply outlined wings.