—Who climbed the blue Virginia hills   Against embattled ;
And planted there, in valleys fair,
  The lily and the rose;
Whose lives in many lands,
  Whose beauty stars the earth,
And lights the of happy homes
  With loveliness and worth.
—Francis O. Ticknor.
 
The study of maps and time-tables is a far more profitable business than appears. John Armitage a great store of knowledge as interpreted in such literature. He could tell you, without leaving his room, and probably without opening his trunk, the quickest way out of Tokio, or St. Petersburg, or Calcutta, or Cinch Tight, Montana, if you suddenly received a cablegram calling you to Vienna or Paris or Washington from one of those places.
 
Such being the case, it was that he should have started for a point in the Virginia hills by way of Boston, thence to Norfolk by coastwise steamer, and on to Lamar by lines of railroad whose schedules would have been the despair of unhardened travelers. He had expressed his trunks direct, and traveled with two suitcases and an umbrella. His journey, since his boat swung out into Massachusetts Bay, had been spent in gloomy , and two young women booked for Baltimore wrongly attributed his and to a grievous disappointment in love.
 
He had wanted time to think—to ponder his affairs—to devise some way out of his difficulties, and to the defeat of Chauvenet. Moreover, his relations to the Claibornes were in an ugly : Chauvenet had dealt him a telling blow in a quarter where he particularly wished to appear to advantage.
 
He jumped out of the day coach in which he had the last stage of his journey to Lamar, just at dawn, and found Oscar with two horses waiting.
 
"Good morning," said Oscar, .
 
"You are prompt, ," and Armitage shook hands with him.
 
As the train roared on through the valley, Armitage opened one of the suit-cases and took out a pair of leather leggings, which he on. Then Oscar tied the cases together with a rope and hung them across his saddle-bow.
 
"The place—what of it?" asked Armitage.
 
"There may be worse—I have not ."
 
Armitage laughed aloud.
 
"Is it as bad as that?"
 
The man was busy the saddle girths, and he answered Armitage's further questions with soldierlike brevity.
 
"You have been here—"
 
"Two weeks, sir."
 
"And nothing has happened? It is a good report."
 
"It is good for the soul to stand on mountains and look at the world. You will like that animal—yes? He is than a horse. Mine, you will notice, is a trifle heavier. I bought them at a stock farm in another valley, and rode them up to the place."
 
The train sent back loud echoes. A girl in a pink sun-bonnet rode up on a and carried off the mail . The station agent was busy inside at his telegraph instruments and paid no to the horsemen. Save for a few huts clustered on the hillside, there were no signs of human habitation in sight. The lights in a switch target showed yellow against the growing dawn.
 
"I am quite ready, sir," reported Oscar, his hat. "There is nothing here but the station; the settlement is farther on our way."
 
"Then let us be off," said Armitage, swinging into the saddle.
 
Oscar led the way in silence along a narrow road that clung close to the base of a great pine-covered hill. The morning was sharp and the horses stepped smartly, the breath of their showing white on the air. The far roar and whistle of the train came back more and more faintly, and when it had quite ceased Armitage sighed, pushed his soft felt hat from his face, and settled himself more firmly in his saddle. The keen air was as as wine, and he put his horse to the and rode ahead to shake up his blood.
 
"It is good," said the , as Armitage wheeled again into line with him.
 
"Yes, it is good," repeated Armitage.
 
A peace upon him that he had not known in many days. The light grew as the sun rose higher, blazing upon them like a target through deep in the mountains. The morning mists retreated before them to farther and peaks, and the beautiful gray-blue of the Virginia hills delighted Armitage's eyes. The region was very wild. Here and there from some mountaineer's cabin a light penciling of smoke stole upward. They once passed a boy driving a of . After several miles the road, that had hung midway of the rough hill, dipped down sharply, and they came out into another and broader valley, where there were tilled farms, and a little settlement, with a blacksmith shop and a country store, post-office and inn combined. The storekeeper stood in the door, smoking a cob pipe. Seeing Oscar, he went inside and brought out some letters and newspapers, which he delivered in silence.
 
"This is Lamar post-office," announced Oscar.
 
"There must be some mail here for me," said Armitage.
 
Oscar handed him several long envelopes—they bore the name of the Bronx Loan and Trust Company, whose office in New York was his permanent address, and he opened and read a number of letters and cablegrams that had been forwarded. Their contents evidently gave him satisfaction, for he whistled cheerfully as he thrust them into his pocket.
 
"You keep in touch with the world, do you, Oscar? It is ."
 
"I take a Washington paper—it relieves the monotony, and I can see where the are moving, and whether my old captain is yet out of the hospital, and what happened to my in his court-martial about the pay accounts. One must observe the world—yes? At the post-office back there"—he jerked his head to indicate—"it is against the law to sell whisky in a post-office, so that storekeeper with the red nose and small yellow eyes keeps it in a brown in the back room."
 
"To be sure," laughed Armitage. "I hope it is a good article."
 
"It is vile," replied Oscar. "His brother makes it up in the hills, and it is as strong as wood lye."
 
"Moonshine! I have heard of it. We must have some for rainy days."
 
It was a new world to John Armitage, and his heart was as light as the morning air as he followed Oscar along the ruddy mountain road. He was in Virginia, and somewhere on this soil, perhaps in some valley like the one through which he rode, Shirley Claiborne had gazed upon blue distances, with rising against ridge, and dark pine-covered slopes like these he saw for the first time. He had left his affairs in Washington in a sorry ; but he faced the new day with a buoyant spirit, and did not trouble himself to look very far ahead. He had a definite business before him; his cablegrams were on that point. The fact that he was, in a sense, a did not trouble him in the least. He had no intention of allowing Jules Chauvenet's assassins to kill him, or of being locked up in a Washington jail as the false von Kissel. If he admitted that he was not John Armitage, it would be difficult to prove that he was anybody else—a fact touching human which Jules Chauvenet probably knew well.
 
On the whole he was satisfied that he had followed the wisest course thus far. The broad of the morning hills communicated to his spirit a growing . He began singing in German a that recited the sorrows of a pale prisoner in a dark tower on the Rhine, whence her true rescued her, after many and fearsome adventures. On the last stave he ceased , and an of wonder broke from him.
 
They had been riding along a narrow trail that afforded, as Oscar said, a short cut across a long timbered ridge that lay between them and Armitage's property. The path was rough and steep, and the low-hanging pine and heavy underbrush increased the difficulties of . Straining to the top, a new valley, hidden until now, was disclosed in long and beautiful .
 
Armitage dropped the upon the neck of his panting horse.
 
"It is a fine valley—yes?" asked Oscar.
 
"It is a possession of the noblest gods!" replied Armitage. "There is a white building with away over there—is it the house of the ?"
 
"It is not, sir," answered Oscar, who English with a kind of dogged precision, giving equal value to all words. "It is a vast hotel where the rich spend much money. That place at the foot of the hills—do you see?—it is there they play a foolish game with sticks and little balls—"
 
"Golf? Is it possible!"
 
"There is no doubt of it, sir. I have seen the fools myself—men and women. The place is called Storm Valley."
 
Armitage slapped his sharply, so that his horse started.
 
"Yes; you are probably right, Oscar, I have heard of the place. And those houses that lie beyond there in the valley belong to gentlemen of taste and leisure who drink the waters and ride horses and play the foolish game you describe with little white balls."
 
"I could not tell it better," responded Oscar, who had dismounted, like a good trooper, to rest his horse.
 
"And our place—is it below there?" demanded Armitage.
 
"It is not, sir. It lies to the west. But a man may come here when he is lonesome, and look at the people and the gentlemen's houses. At night it is a pleasure to see the lights, and sometimes, when the wind is right, there is music of bands."
 
"Poor Oscar!" laughed Armitage.
 
His mood had not often in his life been so high.
 
On his flight from Washington and southward down the Atlantic , the thought that Shirley Claiborne and her family must now believe him an scoundrel had and pain in his heart; but at least he would soon be near her—even now she might be somewhere below in the lovely valley, and he drew off his hat and stared down upon what was and ground.
 
"Let us go," he said presently.
 
Oscar , in hand.
 
"You will find it easier to walk," he said, and, leading their horses, they their steps for several hundred yards along the ridge, then mounted and proceeded slowly down again until they came to a mountain road. Presently a high wire fence followed at their right, where the descent was sharply arrested, and they came to a barred wooden gate, and beside it a small cabin, evidently designed f............