"I sha'n't have nobody to make flies fer now," she said dully. "I jest hain't a-goin' arter the trout fer fun no more till ye comes back."
Zeke would have answered, but he checked the words at his lips, lest the trembling of his voice might betray a feeling deemed inconsistent with manliness. They went forward in silence, a-quiver with desire each of the other, yet mute with the forced repression of custom. Now, too, the sorrow of the parting so close at hand, colored their mood more and more, so that the golden glamour first dimmed and then changed into a sinister pall which overhung all the loveliness of the morning. At a turn in the path, where it topped a rise, before descending a long slope to the highway, Zeke came to a standstill. The girl paused obediently beside him. He fumbled in a pocket awkwardly, and drew forth a tiny square of coffee-colored stone, roughly lined, which he held out toward his companion. The tracery of the crystal formed a Maltese cross. The girl expressed no surprise. She accepted the token with a grave nod as he dropped it into her palm, and she remained gazing down at it with eyes hidden under the heavy white lids and long, curving lashes of shadowy brown.
Zeke spoke, very earnestly: "Hit's fer good luck, Tiny--fer good luck to he'p ye while we're apart. Mebby, hit 'll git in hits work by softenin' the hardness o' yer gran'pap's heart agin me."
In truth, the concentration of his thought on the fragment of stone had been enough of itself to give a talisman occult potence. That concentration of desire for the girl's well-being was not merely of this moment. It had been with him constantly during long hours of tedious clambering yesterday, when he followed the channel of Garden Creek through its tortuous course among the ravines of the Blue Ridge, through the narrow defile of the Devil's Garden, sunless, strewn with rubble of boulders, with a chaos of shattered rock masses--débris, superstition said, of cataclysm--of the Crucifixion, when the mountain crests tore themselves asunder, and cast their pinnacles into the abyss for rage and grief. The searcher had climbed on and on, until he reached the nook sacred to the crystals. For concerning these, also, the superstition had its say, and told that the little pieces of stone, with the cross marked on each, were, in fact, the miraculously preserved tears shed by the fairies of these fastnesses in the dread hour of the Saviour's anguish. The lover had sought long for a crystal that should be perfect. Now that it lay within the girl's hand, he was content of his toil. Surely, whatever the truth concerning its origin, it was a holy thing, for the emblem it bore. It would serve to shield her against aught evil that might threaten--even the grandfather's enmity against him, which set a barrier between them and happiness. The crystal would abide with her in sign of his love's endurance, strong to save her and to cherish her against any ill. He sighed with relief, when she raised the crystal, and dropped it within her bosom.