Judith awakened that morning with the song of the first thrush sounding in her ears. Day was not yet come, but she knew instantly it was near dawn, so soon as she heard the keen, cool, unmatched thrush voice. Not elaborate the song like the bobolink, nor passionate like the nightingale, nor with the bravura of the oriole; but low or loud, its pure tones are always penetrating, piercing the heart of their hearer with exquisite sweetness.

The girl lay long in the dark listening, and it seemed to her half awakened consciousness that this voice in the April dawn was like Creed Bonbright. These notes, lucid, passionless, that yet always stirred her heart strangely, and the selfless personality, the high-purposed soul that spoke in him, they were akin. The crystal tones flowed on; Judith harkened, the ear of her spirit alert for a message. Yes, Creed was like that. And her feeling for him too, it partook of the same quality, a thing to climb toward rather than concede.

And then after all her tremulous hopes, her plannings, the dozen times she had taken a certain frock from its peg minutely inspecting and repairing it, that it might be ready for wear on the great occasion, the first meeting with Creed found Judith unprepared, happening in no wise as she would have chosen. She was at the milking lot, clad in the usual dull blue cotton gown in which the mountain woman works. She had filled her two pails and set them on the high bench by the fence while she turned the calves into the small pasture reserved for them and let old Red and Piedy out.

He approached across the fields from the direction of his own house, and naturally saw her before she observed him. It was early morning. The sky was blue and wide and high, with great shining piles of white cloud swimming lazily at the horizon, cutting sharply against its colour. Around the edges of the cow-lot peach trees were all in blossom and humming with bees, their rich, amethystine rose flung up against the gay April sky in a challenge of beauty and joy. The air was full of the promises of spring, keen, bracing, yet with an undercurrent of languorous warmth. There was a ragged fleece of bloom, sweet and alive with droning insects, over a plum thicket near the woods,—half-wild, brambly things, cousin on the one hand to the cultivated farm, and on the other to the free forest,—while beyond, through the openings of the timber, dogwood flamed white in the sun.

Judith came forward and greeted the newcomer, all unaware of the picture she made, tall and straight and pliant in her simple blue cotton, under the wonderful blue-and-white sky and the passionate purple pink of the blossoms, with the scant folds of her frock outlining the rounded young body, its sleeves rolled up on her fine arms, its neck folded away from the firm column of her throat, the frolic wind ruffling the dark locks above her shadowy eyes. There were strange gleams in those dark eyes; her red lips were tremulous whether she spoke or not. It was as though she had some urgent message for him which waited always behind her silence or her speech.

“I thought I’d come over and get acquainted with my neighbours,” Bonbright began in his impersonal fashion.

“Uncle Jep and the boys has gone across to the far place ploughing to-day,” said Judith. “They’s nobody at home but Jim Cal and his wife—and me.” She forebore to add the name of Huldah Spiller, though her angry eye descried that young woman ostentatiously hanging wash on a line back of the Jim Cal cabin.

“I won’t stop then this morning,” said Bonbright. “I’ll get along over to the far place. I wanted to have speech with your uncle. He was at Aunt Nancy’s the other day and we had some talk; he knows more about what I’m aiming at up here then I do. A man of his age and good sense can be a sight of help to me.”

“Uncle Jep will be proud to do anything he can,” said Judith softly. “Won’t you come in and set awhile?”

She dreaded that the invitation might hurry him away, and now made hasty use of the first diversion that offered. He had broken a blooming switch from the peach-tree beneath which he stood, and she reproached him fondly.

“Look at you. Now there won’t never be no peaches where them blossoms was.”

He twisted the twig in his fingers and smiled down at her, conscious of a singular and personal kindness between them, aware too, for the first time, that she was young, beautiful, and a woman; before, she had been merely an individual to him.

“My mother used to say that to me when I would break fruit blows,” he said meditatively. “But father always pruned his trees when they were in blossom—they can’t any of them bear a peach for every bloom.”

She shook her head as though giving up the argument, since it was after all a matter of sentiment. Her dark, rich-coloured beauty glowed its contrast to his cool, northern type.

At present neither spoke more than a few syllables of the spiritual language of the other, yet so powerful was the attraction between them that even Creed began to feel it, while Judith, the primitive woman, all given over to instinct, promptly laid about her for something to hold and interest him.

“The young folks is a-goin’ to get up a play-party at our house sometime soon,” she hazarded. “I reckon you wouldn’t come to any such as that, would you?”

“I’d be proud to come,” returned Creed at once. But he spoiled it by adding, “I’ve got to get acquainted with people all over again, it’s so long since I lived here; and looks like I’m not a very good mixer.”

“Will you sure come?” inquired Judith insistently, as she saw him preparing to depart.

“I sure will.”

“You could stay over night in your own house then—ain’t you comin’ back, ever, to live there?”

“Why, yes, I reckon I might stay there over night, but it’s too far from the main road for a justice’s office.”

“Well, if you’re going to try to sleep in the house, it ort to be opened up and sunned a little; you better let me have the key now,” observed Judith, assuming airs of proprietorship over his inept masculinity.

Smiling, he got the key from his pocket and handed it to her. “Help yourself to anything you want for the party, or any other time,” he said in mountain fashion.

She looked down at that key with the pride of one to whom had been given the freedom of a city. Its possession enabled her to bear it with a fair degree of equanimity when Huldah Spiller, having “jest slung her clothes anyway onto that line,” as Judith phrased it to herself, came panting and laughing across the slope between the two houses and called a gay “Howdy!” to the visitor. The lively little red haired flirt professed greatly to desire news of certain persons in Hepzibah, and as Creed was departing sauntered unconcernedly beside him as far as the draw-bars, detaining him in conversation there as long as possible. She had an instinctive knowledge that Judith, looking on, was deeply disturbed.

Creed set his justice’s office about a hundred yards from Nancy Card’s cabin, on the main road that led through the two Turkey Track neighbourhoods out to Rainy Gap and the Far Cove settlement. The little shack was built of the raw yellow boards which the new saw-mill was ripping out of pine trees over on the shoulder of Big Turkey Track above Garyville. Most of the mountain dwellers still preferred log houses, and the lumber was sent down the mountain by means of a little gravity railway, whose car was warped up after each trip by a patient old mule working in a circular treadmill.

God knows with what high hopes the planks of that humble shanty were put in place, with what visions sill and window-frame were shaped and joined, Aunt Nancy going out and in at her household tasks calling good counsel over to him; Beezy, the irrepressible, adding shaving curls to her red frazzle; Little Buck, furnished with hammer and tacks, gravely assisting, pounding his fingers only part of the time. Hens were coming off. Old Nancy had a great time with notionate mothers hatching out broods under the floor or in the stable loft, and the plaintive cheep-cheep! of the “weedies” added its note to the chorus of sounds as the children followed them about, now and then catching up a ball of fluff to pet it, undeterred by indignant clucks from the parent.

As Creed whistled over his work, he saw a shadowy train coming down the road, the people whom he should help, his people, to whose darkness he should bring light and counsel. They knew so little, and needed so much. True, his own knowledge was not great; but it was all freely at their service. His heart swelled with good-will as he prepared to open his modest campaign of usefulness.

To come into leadership naturally a man should be the logical outgrowth of his class and time, and this Creed knew he was not. Yet he had pondered the matter deeply, and put it thus to himself: The peasant of Europe can only rise through stages of material prosperity to a point of development at which he craves intellectual attainment, or spiritual growth. But the mountaineer is always a thinker; he has even in his poverty a hearty contempt for luxury, for material gain at the expense of personality. With his disposition to philosophy, fostered by solitude and isolation, he readily overleaps those gradations, and would step at once from obscurity to the position of a man of culture were the means at hand.

“Bonbright,” remonstrated Jephthah Turrentine, in the first conversation the two held upon the subject, “Ye cain’t give people what they ain’t ready to take. Ef our folks wanted law and order, don’t you reckon they’d make the move to get it?”

“That’s it exactly, Mr. Turrentine,” responded Creed quickly. “They need to be taught what to want.”

“Oh, they do, do they?” inquired Jephthah with a humorous twitch of the lips. “Well, ef you’re a-goin’ to set up to teach, hadn’t you better have a school-house, place of a jestice’s office?”

“Maybe you’re right. I reckon you are—exactly right,” Creed assented thoughtfully. “I’d studied about that considerable. I reckon I’m a more suitable age for a schoolmaster than for a justice; and the children—but that would take a long time; and I wanted to give the help where it was worst needed.”

“Oh, well, ’tain’t a hangin’ matter,” old Jephthah smiled at the younger man’s solemn earnestness. “Ef this new fangled buildin’ o’ yours don’t get used for a jestice’s office we can turn it into a school-house; we need one powerful bad.”

The desultory, sardonic, deep-voiced, soft-footed, mountain carpenters who worked leisurely and fitfully with Creed were always mightily amused by the exactness of the “town feller’s” ideas.

“Why lordy! Lookee hyer Creed,” remonstrated Doss Provine, over a question of matching boards and battening joints, “ef you git yo’ pen so almighty tight as that you won’t git no fresh air. Man’s bound to have ventilation. Course you can leave the do’ open all the time like we-all do; but when yo’re a-holdin’ co’t and sech-like maybe you’ll want to shet the do’ sometimes—and then whar’ll ye git breath to breathe?”

“I reckon Creed knows his business,” put in the old man who was helping Doss, “but all these here glass winders is blame foolishness to me. Ef ye need light, open the do’. Ef somebody comes that you don’t want in, you can shet it and put up a bar. But saw the walls full o’ holes an’ set in glass winders, an’ any feller that’s got a mind to can pick ye off with a rifle ball as easy as not whilst ye set by the fire of a evenin’.”

He shook a reprehending head, hoary with the snows of years, and containing therefore, presumably, wisdom. He had learned the necessary points of life in his environment, and as always occurs, the younger generation seemed to him lavishly reckless.

It was only old Jephthah’s criticisms that Creed really minded.

“Uh-huh,” allowed Jephthah, settling his hands on his hips and surveying the yellow pine structure tolerantly; “mighty sightly for them that likes that kind o’ thing. But I hold with a good log house, becaze it’s apt to be square. These here town doin’s that looks like a man with a bile on his ear never did ketch me. Ef ye hew out good oak or pine timber ye won’t be willin’ to cut short lengths for to make such foolishness.”

Creed would often have explained to his critics that he did not expect to get into feuds and have neighbours pot-hunting him through his glass windows, that he needed the light from them to study or read, and that his little house was as square as any log hut ever constructed; but they lumped it all together and made an outsider of him—which hurt.

Word went abroad to the farthest confines of the Turkey Track neighbourhoods, carried by herders who took sheep, hogs, or cows up into the high-hung inner valleys of Yellow Old Bald, or the natural meadows of Big Turkey Track to turn them loose for the season, recited where one or two met out salting cattle, discussed by many a chip pile, where the willing axe rested on the unsplit block while the wielder heard how Creed Bonbright had done sot up a jestice’s office and made peace between the Shallidays and the Bushareses.

“But you know in reason hit ain’t a-goin’ to hold,” the old women at the hearthside would say, withdrawing their cob pipes to shake deprecating heads. “The Bushareses and Shallidays has been killin’ each other up sence my gran’pap was a little boy. They tell me the Injuns mixed into that there feud. I say Creed Bonbright! Nothin’ but a fool boy. He better l’arn something before he sets up to teach. He don’t know what he’s meddlin’ with.” All this with a pride in the vendetta as an ancient neighbourhood institution and monument.

The office of the new justice never became, as he had hoped it would, a lounging place for his passing neighbours. He had expected them to drop in to visit with him, when he might sow the good seed in season without appearing to seek an occasion for so doing. But they were shy of him—he saw that. They went on past the little yellow pine office, on their mules, or their sorry nags, or in shackling waggons behind oxen, to lounge at Nancy Card’s gate as of old, or sit upon her porch to swap news and listen to her caustic comments on neighbourhood happenings. And only an occasional glance over the shoulder, a backward nod of the head, or jerk of the thumb, told the young justice that he was present in their recollection.

But there was one element of the community which showed no disposition to hold aloof from the newcomer. About this time, by twos and threes—never one alone—the virgins of the mountain-top sought Nancy Card for flower seed, soft soap recipes, a charm to take off warts, or to learn exactly from her at what season a body had better divide the roots of day lilies.

Old-fashioned roses begin blooming in the Cumberlands about the first of May, and when this time came round Nancy’s garden was a thing to marvel at. The spring flowers were past or nearly so, and the advent of the roses marked the floral beginning of summer. In the forest the dogwood petals now let go and fell silently one by one through the shadowed green. But over Nancy’s fence of weather-beaten, hand-rived palings tossed a snow of bloom so like that here they were not missed at all; and the mock orange adds to the dogwood’s simple beauty the soul of an exquisite odour. Small, heavily thorned roses, yellow as the daffodils they had succeeded, blushing Baltimore Belles, Seven Sisters all over the ricketty porch—one who loved such things might well have taken a day’s journey for sight of that dooryard in May.

“Well, I vow!” said the old woman one day peering through her window that gave on the road, “ef here don’t come Huldy Spiller and the two Lusks. Look like to me I have a heap of gal company of late. Creed, you’re a mighty learned somebody, cain’t you tell me the whys of it?”

Creed, sitting at a little table deep in some books and papers before him, heard no word of his friend’s teasing speech. It was Doss Provine, at the big fireplace heating a poker to burn a hole through his pulley-wheel, who turned toward his mother-in-law and grinned foolishly.

“I reckon I know the answer to that,” he observed. “The boys is all a warnin’ me that a widower is mo’ run after than a young feller. They tell me I’ll have to watch out.”

“I say watch out—you!” cried Nancy, wheeling upon him with a comically disproportionate fury. “Jest you let me ketch you settin’ up to any of the gals—you, a father with two he’pless chaps to look after, and nobody but an old woman like me, with one foot in the grave, to depend on!”

There was one girl however who, instead of multiplying her visits to the Card cabin with Creed’s advent, abruptly ceased them. Judith Barrier was an uncertain quantity to her masculine household; unreasonably elated or depressed, she led them the round of her moods, and they paid for the fact that Creed Bonbright did not come across the mountain top visiting, without being at all aware of where their guilt lay. After that interview at the milking lot one thought, one emotion was with her always. Always she was waiting for the next meeting with Creed. Through the day she heard his voice or his footstep in all the little sounds of the woods, the humble noises of the farm life; and at night there was the cedar tree.

Now the cedar tree had affairs of its own. When, with the egotism of her keen, passionate, desirous youth, the girl in the little chamber under the eves listened to its voice in April, it was talking in the soft air of the vernal night about the sap which rose in its veins, spicy, resinous, odoured with spring, carrying its wine of life into the farthest green tips, till all the little twigs were intoxicated with it, and beat and flung themselves in joy. And the tree’s deep note was a song of abiding trust. There was a nest building within its heart—so well hidden in that dense thicket that it was safe from the eye of any prowler. Hope and faith and a great devotion went to the building. And the tree, rich and happy in its own life, cherished generously that other life within its protecting arms. Its song was of the mating birds, the building birds, the mother joy and father joy that made the nest ready for the speckled eggs and the birdlings that should follow.

But to the listening girl the cedar tree was a harp that the winds struck—a voice that spoke in the night of love and Creed.

Finally one morning she saddled Selim and, with something in her pocket for Little Buck and Beezy, set out for Hepzibah—reckon they’s nothin’ so turrible strange in a body goin’ to the settlement when they’ out o’ both needles an’ bakin’ soda!

As she rode up Nancy herself called to her to ’light and come in, and finally went out to stand a moment and chat; but the girl smilingly shook her head.

“I got to be getting along, thank ye,” she said. “I can’t stop this mornin’. You-all must come and see us, Aunt Nancy.”

“Why, what’s Little Buck a-goin’ to do, with his own true love a-tearin’ past the house like this and refusin’ to stop and visit?” complained Nancy, secretly applauding the girl’s good sense and dignity.

“Where is my beau?” asked Judith. “I fetched him the first June apples off the tree.”

“Judy’s brought apples to her beau, and now he’s went off fishin’ with Doss and she’s got nobody to give ’em to,” old Nancy called as Creed stepped from the door of his office and started across to the cabin. “Don’t you want ’em, Creed?”

The tall, fair young fellow came up laughing.

“Aunt Nancy knows I love apples,” he said. “If you give me Little Buck’s share I’m afraid he’ll never see ’em.”

Judith reached in her pocket and brought out the shiny, small red globes and put them in his outstretched hand.

“I’ll bring Little Buck a play-pretty from the settlement,” she said softly. “He’ll keer a sight more for hit than for the apples. I wish I’d knowed you liked ’em—I’d brought you more. Why don’t you come over and see us and git all you want? We’ve got two trees of ’em.”