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Only the old man vouchsafed him the least notice.... "Set thar!" he growled, indicating a stool. Bob found on the board that abundance and variety which always so much surprises the stranger to a Sierra mountaineer's cabin. Besides the usual bacon, beans, and bread, there were dishes of canned string-beans and corn, potatoes, boiled beef, tomatoes and pressed glass dishes of preserves.
But before the boy could release himself he was grabbed and pulled up over his adversary by the latter's left hand, his right still being pinioned under his own body. Yet the mountaineer's move had not been entirely without results favorable to his captive. "I'll kill you for this!" snarled the man, fuming with rage.
Perraudin announced his idea to the greatest scientist in his little world Jean de Charpentier, director of the mines at Bex, a skilled geologist who had been a fellow-pupil of Von Buch and Von Humboldt under Werner at the Freiberg School of Mines. Charpentier laughed at the mountaineer's grotesque idea, and thought no more about it.
"Ki-yi!" yelled the cowboys as a short arm blow, delivered through the mountaineer's windmill movements, reached his jaw and sent him sprawling. Tad had not been able to put the force into it that he wanted to, else the battle might have ended then and there. Bob came back. This time he uttered no taunts. The blow hurt him.
Nevertheless, it was impossible, on either of these obvious bases, to account for the fact of something withheld in the stranger's manner, some secret exultant knowledge of the phenomenon which baffled the mountaineer's speculation.
"What you got there?" he inquired, a few moments later, as they were approaching the old pasture. He pointed to a package carefully wrapped in a clean apron, which she hugged beneath her arm. "Spellin' book," said Madge, as, just before the bars she slid down from her perch upon the ox. "I'm learnin'." His lip curled with the mountaineer's contempt for books and all they have to teach.
But the keen mountaineer's eye of Sam Folwell had picked him out. There was a sudden spring, a ripple in the stream of passers-by and the sound of Sam's voice crying: "Howdy, Cal! I'm durned glad to see ye." And in the angles of Broadway, Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third Street the Cumberland feudists shook hands. Ravenel Ravenel, the traveller, artist and poet, threw his magazine to the floor.
She learned surprising secrets of makeshift cookery; she learned the Indian's lesson of a very little fire; she learned the mountaineer's economy of matches and like precious articles.
A fortnight later the quail and whip-poor-wills, near the thicket where the wounded mountaineer's mare now stood, had been startled by the rat-tat of hammers and the song of saws; and that September she found herself, at nearly twenty-one, in possession of a well equipped schoolhouse, whose fame spread far during this, its first year of existence.
Their hearts were thumping like hammers, and the old mountaineer's voice came husky and choking when he spoke. "It wasn't far from here!" he panted. Scarcely had he uttered the words when he sped on again.
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