"I know whar Jim is."
From somewhere outside came Dave's cough, and the dying woman turned her
head as though she were reminded of something she had quite forgotten.
Then, straightway, she forgot again.
The voice of the flood had deepened. A smile came to Becky's lips--a
faint, terrible smile of triumph. The girl bent low and, with a
startled face, shrank back.
"_An' I'll--git--thar--first._"
With that whisper went Becky's last breath, but the smile was there,
even when her lips were cold.
A CRISIS FOR THE GUARD
The tutor was from New England, and he was precisely what passes, with
Southerners, as typical. He was thin, he wore spectacles, he talked
dreamy abstractions, and he looked clerical. Indeed, his ancestors had
been clergymen for generations, and, by nature and principle, he was an
apostle of peace and a non-combatant. He had just come to the Gap--a
cleft in the Cumberland Mountains--to prepare two young Blue Grass
Kentuckians for Harvard. The railroad was still thirty miles away, and
he had travelled mule-back through mudholes, on which, as the joke ran,
a traveller was supposed to leave his card before he entered and
disappeared--that his successor might not unknowingly press him too
hard.
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