little log school-house where was a little group of her pupils who
had not known they were to have a holiday that day, and whose
faces turned awe-stricken when they saw the reason, and
sympathetic when Mavis gave them a kindly little smile. Up the
creek there and over the sloping green plain of the tree-tops hung
a cloud of smoke from the mines. A few moments more and they
emerged from an arched opening of trees. The lightning-rod of old
Jason's house gleamed high ahead, and on the sunny crest of a bare
little knoll above it were visible the tiny homes built over the
dead in the graveyard of the Hawns. And up there, above the
murmuring sweep of the river, and with many of his kin who had
died in a similar way, they laid "slick Steve" Hawn. The old
circuit rider preached a short funeral sermon, while Mavis and her
mother stood together, the woman dry-eyed, much to the wonder of
the clan, the girl weeping silently at last, and Jason behind
them--solemn, watchful, and with his secret working painfully in
his heart. He had forbade his mother to tell Mavis, and perhaps he
would never tell her himself; for it might be best for her never
to know that her father had raised the little mound under which
his father slept but a few yards away, and that in turn his hands,
perhaps, were lowering Steve Hawn into his grave.

From the graveyard all went to old Jason's house, for the old man
insisted that Martha Hawn must make her home with him until young
Jason came back to the mountains for good. Until then Mavis, too,
would stay there with Jason's mother, and with deep relief the boy
saw that the two women seemed drawn to each other closer than ever
now. In the early afternoon old Jason limped ahead of him to the
barn to show his stock, and for the first time Jason noticed how
feeble his grandfather was and how he had aged during his last