The doctor, panting, and glistening with sweat, and sharply impatient with her, suddenly barked: “Well, how clean’d _you_ be, without a bathtub or hot water, huh?” He had followed her gaze to the griminess of hands and feet. “He’s cold water clean, brook clean, at that. How much better’d _you_ be? Huh? Answer me that?” It was amazing how he championed the wild lad from the first hour of their knowledge of him. “I was thinking _that_,” said Glen flushing. “He’s tried to be clean, and his clothes----” “You go get some sheets and blankets and make up a bed here on the couch,” her father snapped. “I’ll get his clothes off and wash him. You throw a nightshirt of mine downstairs.” He had sensed, dimly, that too much intimacy with the inelegancies of the young mountaineer’s toilet would not enhance the golden legend, and she was not called in again until the patient was made ready for his bed. The girl made up the couch swiftly and capably and helped to carry him to it. “Bring a hot-water bag, and then heat up some soup,” the doctor directed. “He’ll come to for keeps any minute now, and I miss my guess if he’s eaten to-day.” When Glen came back with her bowl of steaming broth Luke Manders was, quite as her father had predicted, wholly conscious. He dragged himself up on the elbow on the uninjured side and fell upon the food with wolfish hunger. “Uh-huh,” Dr. Darrow wagged his head. “When’d you eat last, boy?” “Yes’dy mawning,” he said thickly, without lifting his head. The man handed the emptied bowl back to his daughter, and chuckled at the hungry pleading in the boy’s eyes. “That’ll hold you for a while, son. Can’t let you founder yourself. Now, then, how’d you pick up that lead, and what brought you here?” Glen, on her way to the kitchen, halted silently in the doorway to look and listen. The gaunt young face darkened and his words came hoarsely and jerkily. “Reckon hit were Olivers.” (The Olivers were hereditary foes of his house, the other side of the feud four generations long.) “And yet--” his eyes widened--“hit’s ontelling _how_.... Farley Oliver, he’s abed with a misery, and Jake’s down to the county seat, and Link has got his right arm broke, and Eddie, which is the least one, is purely too small....” He drew a quick breath and spent a moment in brooding silence. “My gran’mammy, she named hit to me when she were a-dying ... if I crossed her wish ... if I didn’t come down hyar to yo’all, she’d ha’nt me, day and night, night and day, twel I did!” “Well?” the doctor prodded him. To Glen, flattening herself against the kitchen door, hardly breathing in the tenseness of her interest, it seemed as if a chill and eerie wind stole into the room which had no kinship with the gale outside.