The
growth of three days' beard was on his face. He wore a gray
woollen shirt, and a blue handkerchief--none too clean--was
loosely tied about his sun-scorched column of a throat; he was
spotted with mud from his waist to the soles of his rough riding
boots and his hands were rough and grimy. But his eye was bright
and keen and his heart thumped eagerly. Again it was the middle of
June and the town was a naked island in a sea of leaves whose
breakers literally had run mountain high and stopped for all time
motionless. Purple lights thick as mist veiled Powell's Mountain.
Below, the valley was still flooded with yellow sunlight which lay
along the mountain sides and was streaked here and there with the
long shadow of a deep ravine. The beech trunks on Imboden Hill
gleamed in it like white bodies scantily draped with green, and
the yawning Gap held the yellow light as a bowl holds wine. He had
long ago come to look upon the hills merely as storehouses for
iron and coal, put there for his special purpose, but now the long
submerged sense of the beauty of it all stirred within him again,
for June was the incarnate spirit of it all and June was coming
back to those mountains and--to him.
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