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"Some o' the po' whites down in the gullies talk about it, but thar's mo' difference between the folks in the gullies an' on the Ridge th'n there is between the mount'ns an' the Blue Grass. They are different, an' they look different, too." "Bill Wilsh certainly does," agreed Hamilton, "but I thought at first it was because he was tired out with a long walk after a day's work."
Bill Wilsh listened in a dreamy way, and Hamilton wondered at his seeming carelessness. The old man read it twice, then, rising to his feet, the boy repeated it word for word and without so much as a nod to Hamilton, slouched off in a long, lazy stride that looked like loafing, but which, as Hamilton afterwards found out, covered the ground rapidly.
Early the next morning, Hamilton and the oldest of the two boys started on their fourteen-mile ride to the station, where the lad was to take an afternoon train for Washington. They had gone about three miles, when they came upon Bill Wilsh sitting on the stump of a tree by the roadside.
Examining it closely as he did so, the boy was astonished to note the fineness of the work, and he realized that it must have taken Bill Wilsh all the spare moments of a long winter to finish it. The work was all the more surprising, Hamilton thought, since it had been done just with a single tool, a common pocketknife, and was yet as fine and delicate as though carved with a set of costly tools.
He made up his mind to buy a set and send them to Bill Wilsh with the first pay that he got from his Census Bureau work.
That same evening, as it chanced, one of the younger Wilsh boys came up to the house on an errand from a neighbor, and Hamilton, remembering that the messenger's father had been a go-between in the feud story he had been hearing, noted the lad with interest. Indeed, his appearance was striking enough in itself, with his drooping form, his extreme paleness, and his look of exhaustion.
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