And yet that was nothing to his new trouble, for
his mind hung persistently to the stranger and to the way June had
behaved in the cabin in Lonesome Cove. Before he went to bed, he
slipped out to the old well behind the house and sat on the water-
trough in gloomy unrest, looking now and then at the stars that
hung over the Cove and over the Gap beyond, where the stranger was
bound. It would have pleased him a good deal could he have known
that the stranger was pushing his big black horse on his way,
under those stars, toward the outer world.
IX
It was court day at the county seat across the Kentucky line. Hale
had risen early, as everyone must if he would get his breakfast in
the mountains, even in the hotels in the county seats, and he sat
with his feet on the railing of the hotel porch which fronted the
main street of the town. He had had his heart-breaking failures
since the autumn before, but he was in good cheer now, for his
feverish enthusiasm had at last clutched a man who would take up
not only his options on the great Gap beyond Black Mountain but on
the cannel-coal lands of Devil Judd Tolliver as well.
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