She let down the top bar of the fence and vaulting over, ran to a stable and presently emerging with [Pg 62]a saddle on her arm, whistled the horse to her and saddled him. Then opening the gate, she mounted and cantered down the lane to meet the oncoming riders—a kindly-faced, middle-aged man, a younger one with dark features and coal-black hair, and two girls. Chisholm Lusk spurred in advance and lifted his hat. “I held up the judge, Shirley,” he said, “and made him bring me along. He tells me there’s a fox-hunt on to-morrow; may I come?” “Pshaw! Chilly,” said the judge. “I don’t believe you ever got up at five o’clock in your born days. You’ve learned bad habits abroad.” “You’ll see,” he answered. “If my man Friday doesn’t rout me out to-morrow, I’ll be up for murder.” They rode an hour, along stretches of sunny highways or on shaded bridle-paths where the horses’ hoofs fell muffled in brown pine-needles and drooping branches flicked their faces. Then, by a murky way gouged with brusk gullies, across shelving fields and “turn-rows” in a long d tour around Powhattan Mountain, a rough spur in the shape of an Indian’s head that wedged itself forbiddingly between the fields of springing corn and tobacco. They approached the Red Road again by a crazy bridge whose adze-hewn flooring was held in place by wild grape-vines and weighted down against cloudburst and freshet by heavy boulders till it [Pg 63]dipped its middle like an overloaded buckboard in the yellow waters of the sluggish stream beneath. On the farther side they pulled down to breathe their horses. Here the road was like a narrow ruler dividing a desert from a promised land. On one hand a guttered slope of marl and pebbles covered with a tatterdemalion forest—on the other acre upon acre of burnished grain. “Ah never saw such a frowsley-looking thing in mah life,” said Betty Page, in her soft South Carolinian drawl that was all vowels and liquids, “as that wild hill beside those fields. For all the world like a disgraceful tramp leering across the wall at a dandy.” Shirley applauded the simile, and the judge said, “This is a boundary. That hobo-landscape is part of the deserted Valiant estate. The hill hides the house.” She nodded. “Damory Court. It’s still vacant, Ah suppose.” “Yes, and likely to be. Valiant is dead long ago, but apparently there’s never been any attempt to let it. I suppose his son is so rich that one estate more or less doesn’t figure much to him.” “I got a letter this morning from Dorothy Randolph,” said Shirley. “The Valiant Corporation is being investigated, you know, and her uncle had taken her to one of the hearings, when John Valiant was in the chair. From her description, they are [Pg 64]making it sufficiently hot for that silver-spooned young man.” “I don’t reckon he cares,” said Lusk satirically. “Nothing matters with his set if you have enough money.”