When he left her in a great
low house that fronted on the majestic Hudson, June clung to him
with tears and of her own accord kissed him for the first time
since she had torn her little playhouse to pieces at the foot of
the beech down in the mountains far away. And Hale went back with
peace in his heart, but to trouble in the hills.
* * * * * * *
Not suddenly did the boom drop down there, not like a falling
star, but on the wings of hope--wings that ever fluttering upward,
yet sank inexorably and slowly closed. The first crash came over
the waters when certain big men over there went to pieces--men on
whose shoulders rested the colossal figure of progress that the
English were carving from the hills at Cumberland Gap. Still
nobody saw why a hurt to the Lion should make the Eagle sore and
so the American spirit at the other gaps and all up the Virginia
valleys that skirt the Cumberland held faithful and dauntless--for
a while. But in time as the huge steel plants grew noiseless, and
the flaming throats of the furnaces were throttled, a sympathetic
fire of dissolution spread slowly North and South and it was plain
only to the wise outsider as merely a matter of time until, all up
and down the Cumberland, the fox and the coon and the quail could
come back to their old homes on corner lots, marked each by a
pathetic little whitewashed post--a tombstone over the graves of a
myriad of buried human hopes.
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