It was noon before he returned with a staunch touring car ready for the trip. He opened the little steamer trunk which he had always kept locked and took from it a small leather bag. He placed it on the floor, and, in spite of careful handling, the ring of metal inside could be distinctly heard.

"What on earth have you got in that queer black bag?" she asked in surprise.

"Oh, just a lot o' junk from the shop. I thought I might tinker with it at odd times. I don't want to leave it here. It's got one of my new models in it."

He carried the bag in his hand, refusing to allow the porter who came for the suit-case to touch it.

He threw the suit-case in the bottom of the tonneau. The bag he stowed carefully under the cushions of the rear seat. The moment he placed his hand on the wheel of the machine, he was at his best. Every trace of the street gamin fell from him. Again he was the eagle-eyed master of time and space. The machine answered his touch with more than human obedience. He knew how to humor its mood. He conserved its power for a hill with unerring accuracy and threw it over the grades with rarely a pause to change his speeds. He could turn the sharp curves with such swift, easy grace that he scarcely caused Mary's body to swerve an inch.

He could sense a rough place in the road and glide over it with velvet touch.

A tire blew out, five miles up the stream from Asheville, and the easy, business-like deliberation with which he removed the old and adjusted the new, was a revelation to Mary of a new phase of his character.

He never once grunted, or swore, or lost his poise, or manifested the slightest impatience. He set about his task coolly, carefully, skillfully, and finished it quickly and silently.

His long silences at last began to worry her. An invisible barrier had reared itself between them. The impression was purely mental--but it was none the less real and distressing.

There was a look of aloof absorption about him she had never seen before. At first she attributed it to the dread of meeting his kinsfolk for the first time, his fear of what they might be like or what they might think of him.

He answered her questions cheerfully but mechanically. Sometimes he stared at her in a cold, impersonal way and gave no answer, as if her questions were an impertinence and she were not of sufficient importance to waste his breath on.

Unable at last to endure the strain, she burst out impatiently:

"What on earth's the matter with you, Jim?"

"Why?" he asked softly.

"You haven't spoken to me in half an hour, and I've asked you two questions."

"Just studying about something, Kiddo, something big. I'll tell you sometime, maybe--not now."

Slowly a great fear began to shape itself in her heart. The real man behind those slumbering eyes she had never known. Who was he?

CHAPTER XIV. UNWELCOME GUESTS

While she was yet puzzling over the strange mood of absorbed brooding into which Jim had fallen, his face suddenly lighted, and he changed with such rapidity that her uneasiness was doubled.

They had reached the stretches of deep forest at the foot of the Black Mountain ranges. The Swannanoa had become a silver thread of laughing, foaming spray and deep, still pools beneath the rocks. The fields were few and small. The little clearings made scarcely an impression in the towering virgin forests.

"Great guns, Kiddo!" he exclaimed, "this is some country! By George, I had no idea there was such a place so close to New York!"

She looked at him with uneasy surprise. What could be in his mind? The solemn gorge through which they were passing gave no entrancing views of clouds or sky or towering peaks. Its wooded cliffs hung ominously overhead in threatening shadows. The scene had depressed her after the vast sunlit spaces of sky, of shining valleys and cloud-capped, sapphire peaks on which they had turned their backs.

"You like this, Jim?" she asked.

"It's great--great!"

"I thought that waterfall we just passed was very beautiful."

"I didn't see it. But this is something like it. You're clean out of the world here--and there ain't a railroad in twenty miles!"

The deeper the shadows of tree and threatening crag, the higher Jim's strange spirit seemed to rise.

She watched him with increasing fear. How little she knew the real man!

Could it be possible that this lonely, unlettered boy of the streets of lower New York, starved and stunted in childhood, had within him the soul of a great poet? How else could she explain the sudden rapture over the threatening silences and shadows of these mountain gorges which had depressed her? And yet his utter indifference to the glories of beautiful waters, his blindness at noon before the most wonderful panorama of mountains and skies on which she had ever gazed, contradicted the theory of the poetic soul. A poet must see beauty where she had seen it--and a thousand wonders her eyes had not found.

His elation was uncanny. What could it mean?

He was driving now with a skill that was remarkable, a curious smile playing about his drooping, Oriental eyelids. A wave of fierce resentment swept her heart. She was a mere plaything in this man's life.

The real man she had never seen. What was he thinking about? What grim secret lay behind the mysterious smile that flickered about the corners of those eyes? He was not thinking of her. The mood was new and cold and cynical, for all the laughter he might put in it.

She asked herself the question of his past, his people, his real life-history. The only answer was his baffling, mysterious smile.

A frown suddenly clouded his face.

"Hello! Ye're running right into a man's yard!"

Mary lifted her head with quick surprise.

"Why yes, it's the stopping place for the parties that climb Mount Mitchell. I remember it. We stayed all night here, left our rig, and started next morning at sunrise on horseback to climb the trail."

"Pretty near the jumping-off place, then," he remarked. "We'll ask the way to Cat-tail Peak."

He stopped the car in front of the low-pitched, weather-stained frame house and blew the horn.

A mountain woman with three open-eyed, silent children came slowly to meet them.

She smiled pleasantly, and without embarrassment spoke in a pleasant drawl:

"Won't you 'light and look at your saddle?"

The expression caught Jim's fancy, and he broke into a roar of laughter.

The woman blushed and laughed with him. She couldn't understand what was the matter with the man. Why should he explode over the simple greeting in which she had expressed her pleasure at their arrival?

Anyhow, she was an innkeeper's wife, and her business was to make folks feel at home--so she laughed again with Jim.

"You know that's the funniest invitation I ever got in a car," he cried at last. "We fly in these things sometimes. And when you said, 'Won't you 'light,'"--he paused and turned to his wife--"I could just feel myself up in the air on that big old racer's back."

"Won't you-all stay all night with us?" the soft voice drawled again.

"Thank you, not tonight," Mary answered.

She waited for Jim to ask the way.

"No--not tonight," he repeated. "You happen to know an old woman by the name of Owens who lives up here?"

"Nance Owens?"