Through the winter, then, Hale made occasional trips to Lonesome
Cove and bided his time. Often he met young Dave Tolliver there,
but the boy usually left when Hale came, and if Hale was already
there, he kept outside the house, until the engineer was gone.

Knowing nothing of the ethics of courtship in the mountains--how,
when two men meet at the same girl's house, "they makes the gal
say which one she likes best and t'other one gits"--Hale little
dreamed that the first time Dave stalked out of the room, he threw
his hat in the grass behind the big chimney and executed a war-
dance on it, cursing the blankety-blank "furriner" within from Dan
to Beersheba.

Indeed, he never suspected the fierce depths of the boy's jealousy
at all, and he would have laughed incredulously, if he had been
told how, time after time as he climbed the mountain homeward, the
boy's black eyes burned from the bushes on him, while his hand
twitched at his pistol-butt and his lips worked with noiseless
threats. For Dave had to keep his heart-burnings to himself or he
would have been laughed at through all the mountains, and not only
by his own family, but by June's; so he, too, bided his time.

In late February, old Buck Falin and old Dave Tolliver shot each
other down in the road and the Red Fox, who hated both and whom
each thought was his friend, dressed the wounds of both with equal
care. The temporary lull of peace that Bad Rufe's absence in the
West had brought about, gave way to a threatening storm then, and
then it was that old Judd gave his consent: when the roads got
better, June could go to the Gap to school. A month later the old
man sent word that he did not want June in the mountains while the