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Updated: May 17, 2025
The man of whom he asked the question had not the least idea, nor had anyone about the railroad working. Most of the men had never heard of Layson, and the few who had become acquainted with him through chance meetings since he had been stopping in his cabin in the mountains, knew most indefinitely where the place was located.
The ladies were very worthy of attention, too. Miss Alathea Layson, the elder of the two, was slight, beautifully groomed despite the long and dirty trip on rough cars over the crude road-bed of a newly graded railway. A woman whose thirtieth birthday had been left behind some years before, she still had all the brightness and vivacity of the twenties in her carriage and her manner.
Impressed and touched by the sympathy in the horseman's tone and the interest in Miss Alathea's eyes, Madge told with even greater force and more effect than when she had related it to Layson the story of the tragedy which had robbed her at a blow of father and of mother, the black, dreadful tale of merciless assassination which had left her orphaned in the mountains.
If Queen Bess could not run and she could not, certainly, without a jockey the Dyer Brothers would not buy her, probably; and if she were not sold in time, then Layson would be quite unable to meet the assessment on his stock in the coal-mining company. She was by no means certain what this was, or what the reason for it, but she had heard talk of it and knew that it was very serious.
"What nonsense you do talk!" the girl exclaimed, but her heart sank with apprehension as the man stalked down the path. She did not pull the draw-bridge up, at once, but stood there, gazing after him, disturbed. Again he met Layson, still strolling slowly on the trail, busy with confusing thoughts, puffing at his pipe.
Her heart sank in her breast like lead. She knew perfectly whom Lorey meant. She knew as perfectly that Layson never had informed upon the moonshiner, but she also knew that Heaven itself could not, then, convince the man of that. "Who do you mean you'll git, Joe?" she faltered, hoping against hope that she was wrong in her suspicions. "You know well enough," he answered.
He assured himself as he stepped out into the crowded street that he was safe, whether or not the crime was ever fastened on Joe Lorey. Layson, after Holton left, looked around upon the party with a worried eye. "I can't take this matter up, yet," he declared. "Until the race is over I can think of nothing else. Colonel, I'll look after Ike, and then we'll be off to the track."
No tale of elf born from a cleft rock, touched by magic wand, ever more completely fascinated any big-eyed city child, than did the tales which Layson told her commonplace and ordinary to his mind: mere casual account of routine life about his family and friends down in the bluegrass, the enchanted region separated from them where they sat by a hundred miles or so of rugged hills and billowing forests.
Her eager questions especially drew from him with a greed insatiable account of all the gayeties of that mysterious existence. "And that aunt of yours Muss Aluth Aluth " "Miss Alathea Layson?" he inquired, and smiled. "Yes; what queer names the women have, down there! Is she pretty? Does she dress in silks and satins, too, like the girls that go to them big dances?" He laughed.
The girl's recital had been tense, dramatic, not because she had tried or thought to make it so she had never learned not to be genuine but because of the real and tragic drama in the tale she told, the matter-of-course way in which she told it. It made Layson shudder.
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