For had Bad Rufe Tolliver, while he whispered at the gate,
known the part the quiet young man silently seated in the porch
would play in his life, he would have shot him where he sat: and
could the Red Fox have known the part his sleeping guest was to
play in his, the old man would have knifed him where he lay.
X
Hale opened his eyes next morning on the little old woman in
black, moving ghost-like through the dim interior to the kitchen.
A wood-thrush was singing when he stepped out on the porch and its
cool notes had the liquid freshness of the morning. Breakfast
over, he concluded to leave the yellow mule with the Red Fox to be
taken back to the county town, and to walk down the mountain, but
before he got away the landlord's son turned up with his own
horse, still lame, but well enough to limp along without doing
himself harm. So, leading the black horse, Hale started down.
The sun was rising over still seas of white mist and wave after
wave of blue Virginia hills. In the shadows below, it smote the
mists into tatters; leaf and bush glittered as though after a
heavy rain, and down Hale went under a trembling dew-drenched
world and along a tumbling series of water-falls that flashed
through tall ferns, blossoming laurel and shining leaves of
rhododendron.
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