Cleveland County herald., 1920-10-21
CHAPTER I-continued.


 world. I'll not go back to it now"
 But, mother, if we just keep on this way, -you'll'-he hesitated at the next word; finally let it fall-"die."
 "Die!' she seemed to fondle the word. "A small thing-to die"
 She sat musing as if she found melancholy comfort in the thought.
 But 1 shan't die" she continued, with a nasty glance up at his face. %'My cough is worse today because my medicine is gone"
 The young man started.
 Your elecampane gone!"
 "I took the last of it yesterday"
 Mother '
 He went to the cook stove and lifted the saucer from a small jar in which the roots were usually steeped. It was empty and dry. There was great ten derness in his voice as he came back and bent over her chair.
 "You shall have your elecampane tea" he said, Eff the roots are to be found in the Flatwoods; and you shall sleep tonight in the old cabin up there under the cool trees.''
 A ripple of pleased expectation, of half-awakened interest, broke the drear surface of the weary face-like faint glow back of a curtain that never raises.
 He refilled the cup with cool water, rummaged spade out of the locker under the forward deck, and was just on the point Of leaping to the bank when he heard her speaking He poked his head back inside the cur tains, and she repeated what she had just said:
 Isn't the Flatwoods where the Wild Man lives? Seems to me once heard that there is such man in these woods"
 He felt carelessly along the rusty bit of the spade with his thumb.
 II believe this is the woods"
 Maybe he's-I mean-hes not dan gerous?"
 Dangerous! 4 gray ghost of man with a pitiful face. They say he goes through the woods as still as smoke, and leaves as little trail"
 A minute later he had leaped ashore climbed the bluffs and plunged into the deep woods.
 The root of the elecampane was much esteemed as remedy for coughs, but it was by no means abun- dant. No one knew this fact better than the Pearhunter.
 The small stream that feeds the wa terfall at Fallen Rock is known as Wolf run. Following up along it's course the Pearlhunter presently came to tiny thread of water that joined 1t from the west-probably the outlet of some small pond tucked away among the hills. It is along the open margins of swamps and ponds, and never in the thick woods, that the elecampane grows. Believing from the warmth and dullness of its water that the tiny stream came from pond rather than from a spring, the Pearlhunter fol- lowed it.
 It had grown so small that the Pearlhunter began to fear it would disappear altogether, when there came a break in the forest line just ahead. A scramble through a dense fringe of hazel, and there it lay--a little pond in the midst of a narrow glade in a pocket of the hills, delicate inlay in the forest.
 The man glanced at the sun; turned and hurriedly looked about for the elecampane. Along the east edge of the glade, not far out from the fringe of hazel, he found it-a clump of some dozen stalks, three or four of them ready to bloom. The rusty spade | was soon at their roots-probably the first ground ever broken on the mar gin of that pond. Three plants he digged, cut their stems close to the ground, shook the dirt from their clus- ters of fleshy roots, and hurried down the tiny outlet back to Wolf run.
 It was upon the gravelly margin of | a pool that the Pearhunter stopped to wash the eleeampane roots and cut them loose from the clusters in which he had been carrying them. He had finished the task and was storing | them away in the pockets of his blouse | when the song of thrush from some ] where up the stream gradually worked | itself across his consciousness.
 The song puzzled him. There were | notes-certan little foreign flights: a | deeper witchery-that he could not have believed possible to thrush's throat The Pearlhunter had a nice | ear for the sounds of the woods. He stole cautiously up the bank. The | sound when he had drawI quite near. l