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The same evening he descried two or three of the earl of Cumberlands ships, whereof one Mr Norton was captain, which had descried the carak and pursued in the track she was following for the islands, but no way could be made by either party, as it was almost a dead calm.
A change was observable in this degenerate son of the Cumberlands since many there had confronted him face to face. Physically he was improved. Enough time had elapsed since his sudden dropping of old habits, for him to have risen above its first effects and to have acquired that tone of personal dignity which follows a successful issue to any moral conflict.
He is the husband of Grace Harlowe Gray, who leads our party of Riders. He has gone over to the Cumberlands on business." "Whut business?" "He is to make a survey for the government." Lieutenant Wingate had let slip something that he should not have done.
"Amply sufficient for you, Hippy. But what about the rest of the party?" grinned Tom Gray. "As I was about to say," resumed Grace, "we shall be up with you in a few weeks. How long do you reckon it will take you to finish your government contract to survey that tract in the Cumberlands?" "Possibly four weeks. Not longer." "Call it three weeks three weeks from to-day.
But this incident had occurred eight years ago, when she was scarcely thirteen. Until then she had literally grown up like a weed or a wild rose a half-savage little creature of the Cumberlands, loving passionately, hating blindly, doing all things with the full intensity of a vivid, whole-souled temperament.
Whatever the reason, some of the best Anglo-Saxon stock had been stranded in the Cumberlands, staying there literally and figuratively while the world advanced. Perhaps her strain was purer than the Colonel's! Few mountaineers made alien marriages, for the very sufficient reason that they seldom roamed even though this had meant stagnation in their own environment. Still, the strain was pure!
So true is this that they call all outsiders "furriners." It matters not whether your descent be from Puritan or Cavalier, whether you come from Boston or Chicago, Savannah or New Orleans, in the mountains you are a "furriner." A traveler, puzzled and scandalized at this, asked a native of the Cumberlands what he would call a "Dutchman or a Dago."
Again there was no doubt that the mare had been born in a yellow-pine shack in the Cumberlands, on an old homestead made familiar to millions in both continents by the picture papers known as Blue Mounds, and owned by a Quaker farmer who was himself the great-grandson of a pioneer Friend, who in the last years of the eighteenth century had crossed the mountains with his family and flocks, like Abraham of old, and had won for himself this clearing from the primeval forest, driving farther west its ancient denizens.
To the northward were Cade's Cove and the vale of Tuckaleechee, with Chilhowee in the near distance, and the Appalachian Valley stretching beyond our ramparts to where the far Cumberlands marked an ever-blue horizon. What matter that the plenteous roughs about us were branded with rude or opprobrious names?
The stag horns over the fireplace and the flintlock gun that lay across their prongs spoke of days long past, before the deer and bear had been "dogged to death" in the Cumberlands. There were a few pewter pieces, too and these the visitor knew were found only in houses that went back to revolutionary days.
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