The Call of the Cumberlands

He was not, strictly speaking, a man. His age was perhaps twenty. He

sat loose-jointed and indolent on the top rail of the fence, his hands

hanging over his knees: his hoe forgotten. His feet were bare, and his

jeans breeches were supported by a single suspender strap. Pushed well

to the back of his head was a battered straw hat, of the sort rurally

known as the "ten-cent jimmy." Under its broken brim, a long lock of

black hair fell across his forehead. So much of his appearance was

typical of the Kentucky mountaineer. His face was strongly individual,

and belonged to no type. Black brows and lashes gave a distinctiveness

to gray eyes so clear as to be luminous. A high and splendidly molded

forehead and a squarely blocked chin were free of that degeneracy which

marks the wasting of an in-bred people. The nose was straight, and the

mouth firm yet mobile. It was the face of the instinctive philosopher,

tanned to a hickory brown. In a stature of medium size, there was still

a hint of power and catamount alertness. If his attitude was at the

moment indolent, it was such indolence as drowses between bursts of

white-hot activity; a fighting man's aversion to manual labor which,

like the hounds, harked back to other generations. Near-by, propped

against the rails, rested a repeating rifle, though the people would

have told you that the truce in the "South-Hollman war" had been

unbroken for two years, and that no clansman need in these halcyon days

go armed afield.