The growth was smaller and sparser now and before long he came, on the hill’s very crest, to the edge of a ragged clearing. It held a squalid settlement, perhaps a score of dirt-daubed cabins little better than hovels, some of them mere mud-walled lean-tos, with sod roofs and window-panes of flour-sacking. Fences and outhouses there was none. Littered paths rambled aimlessly hither and thither from chip-strewn yards to starved patches of corn, under-cultivated and blighted. Over the whole place hung an indescribable atmosphere of disconsolate filth, of unredeemed squalor and vileness. Razor-backed hogs rooted everywhere, snapped at by a handful of lean and spiritless hounds. A slatternly woman lolled under a burlap awning beside one of the cabins from whose interior came the sound of men’s voices raised in a fierce quarrel. Undisturbed by the hideous din, a little girl of about three years was dragging by a string an old cigar-box in which was propped a rag-doll. She was barelegged and barearmed, her tiny limbs burned [Pg 253]a dark red by the sun, and she wore a single garment made from the leg of a patched pair of overalls. Her hair, bleached the color of corn-silk, fell over her face in elfin wildness. With one hand on the dog’s collar, hushing him to silence, Valiant, unseen, looked at the wretched place with a shiver. He had glimpsed many wretched purlieus in the slums of great cities, but this, in the open sunlight, with the clean woods about it and the sweet clear blue above, stood out with an unrelieved boldness and contrast that was doubly sinister and forbidding. He knew instantly that the tawdry corner was the community known as Hell’s-Half-Acre, the place to which Shirley had made her night ride to rescue Rickey Snyder. A quick glad realization of her courage rushed through him. On its heels came a feeling of shame that a spot like this could exist, a foul blot on such a landscape. It was on his own land! Its denizens held place by squatter sovereignty, but he was, nevertheless, their landlord. The thought bred a new sense of responsibility. Something should be done for them, too—for that baby, dragging its rag-doll in the cigar-box, poor little soul, abandoned to a life of besottedness, ignorance and evil! As he gazed, the uproar in the cabin reached a climax. A red-bearded figure in nondescript garments shot from the door and collapsed in a heap in the dirt. He got up with a dreadful oath—a [Pg 254]thrown jug grazing his temple as he did so—and shaking his fist behind him, staggered into a near-by lean-to. Valiant turned away with a feeling almost of nausea, and plunged back down the forest hillside, the shrill laughter of the woman under the strip of burlap echoing in his ears. [Pg 255] CHAPTER XXX THE GARDENERS