A long, lean, black-
eyed boy, with a wave of black hair over his forehead, was pushing
his horse the other way along the Big Black and dropping down
through the dusk into the Middle Ages--both all but touching on
either side the outstretched hands of the wild little creature
left in the shadows of Lonesome Cove.
VII
Past the Big Pine, swerving with a smile his horse aside that he
might not obliterate the foot-print in the black earth, and down
the mountain, his brain busy with his big purpose, went John Hale,
by instinct, inheritance, blood and tradition--pioneer.
One of his forefathers had been with Washington on the Father's
first historic expedition into the wilds of Virginia. His great-
grandfather had accompanied Boone when that hunter first
penetrated the "Dark and Bloody Ground," had gone back to Virginia
and come again with a surveyor's chain and compass to help wrest
it from the red men, among whom there had been an immemorial
conflict for possession and a never-recognized claim of ownership.
That compass and that chain his grandfather had fallen heir to and
with that compass and chain his father had earned his livelihood
amid the wrecks of the Civil War.
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