Always Hale took some children's book for June when he went to Lonesome Cove, and she rarely failed to know it almost by heart when he went again. She was so intelligent that he began to wonder if, in her case, at least, another of the Hon. Sam's theories might not be true--that the mountaineers were of the same class as the other westward-sweeping emigrants of more than a century before, that they had simply lain dormant in the hills and--a century counting for nothing in the matter of inheritance--that their possibilities were little changed, and that the children of that day would, if given the chance, wipe out the handicap of a century in one generation and take their place abreast with children of the outside world. The Tollivers were of good blood; they had come from Eastern Virginia, and the original Tolliver had been a slave-owner. The very name was, undoubtedly, a corruption of Tagliaferro. So, when the Widow Crane began to build a brick house for her boarders that winter, and the foundations of a school-house were laid at the Gap, Hale began to plead with old Judd to allow June to go over to the Gap and go to school, but the old man was firm in refusal: “He couldn't git along without her,” he said; “he was afeerd he'd lose her, an' he reckoned June was a-larnin' enough without goin' to school--she was a-studyin' them leetle books o' hers so hard.” But as his confidence in Hale grew and as Hale stated his intention to take an option on the old man's coal lands, he could see that Devil Judd, though his answer never varied, was considering the question seriously. Through the winter, then, Hale made occasional trips to Lonesome Cove and bided his time. Often he met young Dave Tolliver there, but the boy usually left when Hale came, and if Hale was already there, he kept outside the house, until the engineer was gone. Knowing nothing of the ethics of courtship in the mountains--how, when two men meet at the same girl's house, “they makes the gal say which one she likes best and t'other one gits”--Hale little dreamed that the first time Dave stalked out of the room, he threw his hat in the grass behind the big chimney and executed a war-dance on it, cursing the blankety-blank “furriner” within from Dan to Beersheba. Indeed, he never suspected the fierce depths of the boy's jealousy at all, and he would have laughed incredulously, if he had been told how, time after time as he climbed the mountain homeward, the boy's black eyes burned from the bushes on him, while his hand twitched at his pistol-butt and his lips worked with noiseless threats. For Dave had to keep his heart-burnings to himself or he would have been laughed at through all the mountains, and not only by his own family, but by June's; so he, too, bided his time.