E-text prepared by David Garcia, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Kentuckiana Digital Library (http://kdl.kyvl.org/) Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustration. See 33736-h.htm or 33736-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/33736/pg33736-images.html) or (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/33736/33736-h.zip) Images of the original pages are available through Kentuckiana Digital Library. See http://kdl.kyvl.org/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=kyetexts;cc=kyetexts;view=toc;idno=b92-177-30418494 THE TEMPERING by CHARLES NEVILLE BUCK Author of "The Call of the Cumberland," "The Battle Cry," etc., etc. Frontispiece by Ralph Pallen Coleman Garden City New York Doubleday, Page & Company 1920 Copyright, 1920, by Doubleday, Page & Company All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages including the Scandinavian Copyright, 1919, by The Ridgeway Company [Illustration: "'_I've never seen the evening star rise up over the Kaintuck Ridges that I haven't ... thought of it as your own star._'"] THE TEMPERING CHAPTER I "Nothin' don't nuver come ter pass hyarabouts!" The boy perched disconsolately on the rotting fence threw forth his lament aloud to the laurelled silences of the mountain sides and the emptiness of space. "Every doggone day's jest identical with all ther balance--save only thet hit's wuss!" He sat with his back turned on the only signs of human life within the circle of his vision; unless one called the twisting creek-bed at his front, which served that pocket of the Kentucky Cumberlands as a highway, a human manifestation. There behind him a log-cabin breathed smokily through its mud-daubed chimney; a pioneer habitation in every crude line and characteristic. On the door hung, drying, the odorous pelt of a "varmint." Against the wall leaned a rickety spinning wheel. To all that, which he hated, he kept his stiff back turned, but his ears had no defence against the cracked falsetto of an aged voice crooning a ballad that the pioneers had brought across the ridges from tide-water ... a ballad whose phrasing was quaintly redolent of antiquity. The boy kicked his broganned heels and snorted. His clothes were homespun and home sewed and his touselled shock of red-brown hair cropped out from under a coon skin cap. His given name was Boone and his life was as hobbled by pioneer restrictions as was that of the greater Boone--but with a difference. The overland argonauts who had set their feet and faces westward across these same mountains bore on their memories the stimulating image of all that they had left behind and carried before their eyes the alluring hope of what they were to find.