The old mountaineer looked intently at the boy's excited face.

"I didn't," he said, "an' I don' rightly know that it's good for yo' to
be hearin' all these things. Yo' might hold it against Jake Howkle."

"That I wouldn't," protested Hamilton. "Jake isn't to blame for his
father's meanness."

"That's the right way to talk," the old soldier agreed. "Wa'al, if yo'
feel that way about it, I reckon thar's no harm in my tellin' yo' the
rest of it, now that I've got started. When the war was all over an' I
got back hyeh, I remembered what had happened, an' I sent word to Isaac
Howkle that I didn' trust him, an' after what he had done I was
reckonin' that he was waitin' his chance to get me, an' that he'd better
keep his own side o' the mountain."

"But, Uncle Eli," said the boy, "that didn't make a feud surely; that
was only a warning."

"I wasn't reckonin' to start a feud at all," said the old man
thoughtfully, "an' it really never was one. It was jes' a personal
difference between Isaac Howkle an' me. Thar was lots o' times that I
could have picked off either o' his two brothers, but I was jes'
guardin' myself against Isaac."

"But you said he got there first!" said the boy. "Did he shoot some one
in your family?"

"Wa'al, yes, he did," the mountaineer admitted "Yo' never knew the one.
He was my brother-in-law,--Ab's younges' sister's first husband. He had