Ben Hanway was not a humane man in any special sense, but he was conscious of haste in concluding the tethering of the animal and in striding across the vacant weed-grown yard striped with the ever-descending rain.

"Ye'd better git in out'n all this wind an' rain," he said in his rough voice. "A power o' dampness in the air."

"No matter. There's no discount on me. Don't take cold nowadays. I've got right well here already."

The passage-way was dark, but the room into which Ben was ushered, illumined by two opposite windows, was as bright as the day would allow. A roaring wood fire in the great chimney-place reinforced the pallid gray light with glancing red and yellow fluctuations. The apartment was comfortable enough, although its uses were evidently multifarious,—partly kitchen, and dining-room, and sitting-room. Its furniture consisted of several plain wooden chairs, a table and crockery, a few books on a shelf, a lounge in the corner, and a rifle, after the manner of the mountaineers, over the mantelpiece. Upon the shelf a cheap clock ticked away the weary minutes of the lonely hours of the long empty days while the valley man abode here, exiled from home and friends and his accustomed sphere, and fought out that hopeless fight for his life.

Ben Hanway gave him a keen, covert stare, as he slowly and clumsily accepted the tendered chair and his host threw another log on the fire. Hanway had seen him previously, when Selwyn testified before the coroner's jury, but to-day he impressed his visitor differently. He was tall and slight, twenty-five years of age, perhaps, with light brown hair, sleek and shining and short, a quick blue eye, a fair complexion with a brilliant flush, and a long mustache. But the bizarre effect produced by this smiling apparition in the jaws of death seemed to Hanway's limited experience curiously enhanced by his attire. Its special peculiarity was an old smoking-jacket, out at the elbows, ragged at the cuffs, and frayed at the silk collar; Hanway had never before seen a man wear a red coat, or such foot-gear as the slipshod embroidered velvet slippers in which he shuffled to a chair and sat down, tilted back, with his hands in the pockets of his gray trousers. To be sure, he could but be grave when testifying before a coroner's jury, but Hanway was hardly prepared for such exuberant cheerfulness as his manner, his attire, and his face seemed to indicate.

"Ain't ye sorter lonesome over hyar?" he ventured.

"You bet your sweet life I am," his host replied unequivocally. A shade crossed his face, and vanished in an instant. "But then," he argued, "I didn't have such a soft thing where I was. I was a clerk—that is, a bookkeeper—on a salary, and I had to work all day, and sometimes nearly all night!"

He belittled his former vocation with airy contempt, as if he did not yearn for it with every fibre of his being,—its utility, its competence, its future. The recollection of the very feel of the fair smooth paper under his hand, the delicate hair-line chirography trailing off so fast from the swift pen, could wring a pang from him. He might even have esteemed an oath more binding sworn on a ledger than on the New Testament.

"And we were a small house, anyway, and the salary was no great shakes," he continued jauntily, to show how little he had to regret.

"An' now ye ain't got nuthin' ter do but ter read yer book," said the mountaineer acquiescently, realizing, in spite of his clumsy mental processes, how the thorn pierced the bosom pressed against it.

Selwyn followed his guest's glance to the shelf of volumes with an unaffected indifference.

"Yes, but I don't care for it. I wish I did, since I have the time. But the liking for books has to be cultivated, like a taste for beer; they are both a deal too sedative for me!" The laugh that ensued was choked with a cough, and the tactless Hanway was moved to expostulate.

"I wonder ye ain't 'feared ter be hyar all by yerse'f hevin' the lung complaint."

"Why, man alive, I'm well, or so near it there's no use talking. I could go home to-morrow, except, as I have had the house built, I think I'd better stay the winter in it. But before the cold weather comes on they are going to send up a darky to look after me. I only hope I won't have to wait on him,—awful lazy nigger! He used to be a porter of ours. Loafing around these woods with a gun on his shoulder, pretending to hunt, will be just about his size. He's out of a job now, and comes cheap. I couldn't afford to pay him wages all the time, but winter is winter."

He was silent a moment, gazing into the fire; then Hanway, gloomily brooding and disturbed, for the conversation had impressed him much as if it had been post-mortem, so immediate seemed his companion's doom, felt Selwyn's eye upon him, as if his sentiment were so obvious that the sense of sight had detected it.

"You think I'm going to die up here all by myself. Now I tell you, my good fellow, dying is the very last thing that I expect to do."

He broke out laughing anew, and this time he did not cough.

Hanway could not at once cover his confusion. He looked frowningly down at the steam rising from his great cowhide boots, outstretched as they dried in the heat of the fire, and slowly shifted them one above the other. The flush on his sunburned cheek rose to the roots of his dark hair, and overspread his clumsy features. His appearance did not give token of any very great delicacy of feeling, but he regretted his transparency, and sought to nullify it.

"Not that," he said disingenuously; "but bein' all by yerse'f, I wonder ye ain't willin' fur the county road ter be put through. 'T would run right by yer gate, an' ye could h'ist the winder an' talk to the folks passin'. Ye wouldn't be lonely never."

For the first time Selwyn looked like a man of business. His eyes grew steady. His face was firm and serious and non-committal. He said nothing. Hanway cleared his throat and crossed his legs anew. The thought of his true intention in coming hither, not his ostensible errand, had recurred more than once to his mind,—to lay bare the secret touching the visitor to Selwyn's remote dwelling, whom he could not or would not identify; and if there were aught amiss, as the mountaineer suspected, to take such action thereupon as in the fullness of his own good judgment seemed fit. But since the man was evidently so sharp, Hanway had hitherto feared even indirectly to trench upon it; here, however, the opening was so natural, so propitious, that he was fain to take advantage of it.

"An' see," he resumed, "what dangers kem o' hevin' no road. That thar man what war killed las' month, ef we hed hed a reg'lar county road, worked on an' kep' open, stiddier this hyar herder's trail, this-a-way an' that, he could hev rid along ez free an' favored, an'"—

"Why," Selwyn broke in, "the testimony was to the effect that he was riding a young, skittish horse, which was startled by stray hogs breaking at a dead run through the bushes, and that the horse bolted and ran away. And the man died from concussion of the brain. That would have happened if we had had a road of the first class, twenty feet wide, instead of this little seven-foot freak you all are so mashed on."

His face had not lost a tinge of its brilliant color. His animated eyes were still fired by that inward flame that was consuming his years, his days, even his minutes, it might seem. His hands, fine, white, and delicate, were thrust jauntily into the pockets of his red jacket, and Hanway felt himself no nearer the heart of the mystery than before. The subject, evidently, was not avoided, held naught of menace. He went at it directly.

"Seems strange he war a-comin' ter visit you-uns, an' hed yer mail in his pocket, an' ye never seen him afore," he hazarded, "nor knowed who he war."

"But I have found out since," Selwyn said, his clear eyes resting on his visitor without the vestige of an affrighted thought. "He was Mr. Keith, a chemist from Glaston; he was quite a notable authority on matters of physical science generally. I had written to him about—about some points of interest in the mountains, and as he was at leisure he concluded to come and investigate—and—take a holiday. He didn't let me know, and as I had never seen him I didn't at first even imagine it was he."

There was a silence. Selwyn's blue eyes dwelt on the fast-descending lines of rain that now blurred all view of the mountains; the globular drops here and there adhering to the pane, ever dissolving and ever renewed, obscured even the small privilege of a glimpse of the dooryard. The continual beat on the roof had the regularity and the tireless suggestion of machinery.

"How did ye find out?" demanded Hanway, his theory evaporating into thin air.

"Why, as he didn't reply to my letter about a matter of such importance"—he checked himself suddenly, then went on more slowly—"it occurred to me that he might have decided to come, and might have been the man who was killed. So I wrote to his brother. He had not been expected at home earlier. His brother doesn't incline to the foul-play theory. The horse he rode is a wild young animal that has run away two or three times. He had been warned repeatedly against riding that horse, but he thought him safe enough. The horse has returned home,—got there the day my letter was received. So the brother and an officer came and exhumed the body: he was buried, you know, after the inquest, over in the little graveyard yonder on the slope of the mountain."

Selwyn shivered slightly, and the fine white hands came out of the gaudy red pockets, and fastened the frogs beneath the lapels across his chest, to draw the smoking-jacket closer.

"Great Scott! what a fate,—to be left in that desolate burying-ground! Death is death, there."

"Death is death anywhar," said the mountaineer gloomily.

"No. Get you a mile or two of iron fence, and stone gates, and lots of sculptured marble angels around, and death is peace, or rest, or heaven, or paradise, according to your creed and the taste of the subject; but here you are done for and dead."

Hanway, in the limited experience of the mountaineer, could not follow the theory, and he forbore to press it further.

"Well," Selwyn resumed, "they took him home, and I was glad to see him go. I was glad to see them filling that hole up. I took a pious interest in that. I should have felt it was waiting for me. I shoveled some of the earth back myself."

The wind surged around the house, and shook the outer doors. The rain trampled on the roof like a squadron of cavalry. With his fate standing ever behind him, almost visibly looking over his shoulder, although he saw it not, the valley man was a pathetic object to the mountaineer. Hanway's eyes were hot and burned as he looked at him; if he had been but a little younger, they might have held tears. But Hanway had passed by several years his majority, and esteemed himself exempt from boyish softness.

Selwyn shook off the impression with a shiver, and bent forward to mend the fire.

"Where were you yesterday?" he asked, seeking a change of subject.

"At home sowin' turnip seed, mos'ly. I never hearn nuthin' 'bout'n it all."

Selwyn threw himself back in his chair, his brow corrugated impatiently at this renewal of the theme, and in the emergency he even resorted to the much-mooted point of the thoroughfare.

"I suppose all the family there are dead gone on that road?" he sought to make talk.

"Dad an' aunt M'nervy don't keer one way nor another, but my sister air plumb beset fur the jury of view to put it through."

"Why?" Selwyn had a mental vision of some elderly, thrifty mountain dame with a long head turned toward the enhancement of the values of a league or so of mountain land.

Hanway, slow and tenacious of impressions, could not so readily rouse a vital interest in another subject. He still gazed with melancholy eyes at the fire, and his heart felt heavy and sore.

"Waal," he answered mechanically, "she 'lows she wants ter see the folks go up an' down, an' up an' down."

Selwyn's blue eyes opened. "Folks?" he asked wonderingly. The rarest of apparitions on Witch-Face Mountain were "folks."

Hanway roused himself slightly, and raucously cleared his throat to explain.

"She 'lows thar'll be cornsider'ble passin'. Folks, in the fall o' the year, mought be a-wagonin' of chestnuts over the mounting an' down ter Colb'ry; an' thar's the Quarterly Court days; some attends, leastwise the jestices; an' whenst they hev preachin' in the Cove; an' wunst in a while thar mought be a camp-meetin'. She sets cornsider'ble store on lookin' at the folks ez will go up an' down."

There was a swift movement in the pupils of the valley man's eyes. It was an expression closely correlated to laughter, but the muscles of his face were still, and he remained decorously grave.

There was some thought in his mind that held him doubtful for a moment. His craft was cautious of its kind, and his manner was quite incidental as he said, "And the others of the family?"

"Thar ain't no others," returned Hanway, stolidly unmarking.

"Oh, so you are the eldest?"

"By five year. Narcissa ain't more 'n jes' turned eighteen."

The valley man's face was flushed more deeply still; his brilliant eyes were elated.

"Narcissa!" he cried, with the joy of delighted identification. "She is the girl, then, that testified at the inquest. Narcissa!"

Hanway lifted his head, with a strong look of surly objection on his heavy features. Selwyn noted it with a glow of growing anger. He felt that he had said naught amiss. People could not expect their sisters to escape attracting notice, especially a sister with a remarkable name and endowed with a face like this one's.

"Narcissa,—that's an odd name," he said, partly in bravado, and partly in justification of the propriety of his previous mention of her. "I knew a man once named Narcissus. Must be the feminine of Narcissus. Good name for her, though." The recollection of the white flower-like face, the corolla of red-gold hair, came over him. "Looks just like 'em."

Hanway, albeit all alert now, descried in this naught more poetical than the fact that Selwyn considered that his sister resembled a man of his acquaintance. As for that fairest of all spring flowers, it had never gladdened the backwoods range of his vision.

The exclusive tendency of the human mind is tested by this discovery of a casual resemblance to a stranger. One invariably sustains an affront at its mention. Whatever one's exterior may be, it possesses the unique merit of being one's own, and the aversion to share its traits with another, and that other a stranger, is universal. In this instance the objection was enhanced by the fact that the stranger was a man; ergo, in Hanway's opinion, more or less clumsy and burly and ugly; the masculine type of his acquaintance presenting to his mind few of the superior elements of beauty. He resented the liberty the stranger took in resembling Narcissa, and he resented still more Selwyn's effrontery in discovering the likeness.

"Not ez much alike ez two black-eyed peas, now. I reckon not,—I reckon not," he sneered, as he rose to bring his visit to an end.

His host's words of incipient surprise were checked as Hanway slowly drew forth from his pocket a letter.

"Old man Binney war at the Cross-Roads Sad'day, an' he fotched up some mail fur the neighbors. He lef' this letter fur you-uns at our house, 'lowin' ez I would fetch it over."

Selwyn sat silent for a moment. He felt that severe reprehension and distrust which a man of business always manifests upon even the most trifling interference with his vested rights in his own mail matter. The rural method of aiding in distributing the mail was peculiarly unpalatable to him. He much preferred that his letters should lie in the post-office at the Cross-Roads until such time as it suited his convenience to saddle his horse and ride thither for them. The postmaster, on the contrary, seized the opportunity whenever responsible parties were "ridin' up inter the mounting" to entrust to them the neighborhood mail, thus expediting its delivery perhaps by three weeks, or even more, and receiving in every instance the benediction of his distant beneficiaries of the backwoods.

"I'll write to the postmaster this very day!" Selwyn thought, as he tore the envelope open and mastered its contents at a swift glance. A half-suppressed but delighted excitement shone suddenly in his eyes, and smoothed every line of agitation and anxiety from his brow.

"I'm a thousand times obliged to you for bringing it," he exclaimed, "and for staying awhile and talking! I wish you would come again. But I'm coming to see you, to return your call." He laughed gayly at the sophisticated phrase. "Coming soon."

Hanway's growl of pretended pleasure in the prospect was rendered nearly inarticulate by the thought of Narcissa. He had not anticipated a return of the courtesy. He had no welcome for this stranger, and somehow he felt that he did not altogether understand Narcissa at times; that she had flights of fancy which were beyond him, and took a mischievous pleasure in tantalizing him, and was freakish and hard to control.

Moreover, under the influence of this reaction of feeling, a modicum of his doubts of Selwyn had revived. Not that he suspected him, as heretofore, but a phrase that had earlier struck his attention came back to him. Selwyn had written, he said, to the traveler to come and "investigate," and he had hesitated and chosen his phrases, and half discarded them, and slurred over his statement. What was there to "investigate" in the mountains? What prospect of profit worth a long, lonely journey and a risk that ended in death? The capture of moonshiners was said to be a paying business, and an informer also reaped a reward. Hanway wondered if Con Hite could be the point of "investigation," if the dead man were indeed of the revenue force.

"Oh, you needn't shut the door on me," Selwyn said, as they stood together in the passage, and Hanway, with his instinct to cut him off, had made a motion to draw the door after him; "this mountain air is so bland, even when it is damp." He paused on the dripping threshold, with his hands in the pockets of his red jacket, and surveyed with smiling complacence the forlorn, weeping day, and the mountains cowering under their misty veil, and the sodden dooryard, and the wild rocks and chasms of the gorge, adown the trough of which a stream unknown to the dry weather was tumbling with a suggestion of flight and trouble and fear in its precipitancy. "I'm well, well as a bear; and I'm getting fat as a bear, doing nothing. Feel my arm. I'm just following the example of the bears about this time of the year,—hibernating, going into winter quarters. I'm going to get this place into good shape to sell some day. I have bought that land over there all down the gorge from Squire Helm; and last July I bought all that slope at the tax sale, but that is subject to redemption; and then I am trying to buy in the rear of my wigwam, too,—a thousand acres."

"Ye kin sell it higher ef the road goes through," said Hanway doubtfully.

It seemed very odd that the man who protested that his stay in the mountains was so temporary, and whose stay in the world was evidently so short, should spend his obviously scanty substance in purchase after purchase of the worthless mountain wilderness. To be sure, the land was cheap, but it cost something. And Hanway looked again at the frayed cuffs and elbows of the red smoking-jacket. In his infrequent visits to Colbury, he had noted the variance of the men's costumes with the mountain standard of dress. He saw naught like this, but he knew that if ever the sober burghers lent themselves to this sort of fantastic toggery, it was certainly whole.

"Say, my friend, what day does the jury of view hold forth?" Selwyn called out after the slouching figure, striped with the diagonal lines of rain and flouted by the wind, tramping across the weeds of the yard to his horse.

"Nex' Chewsday week," Hanway responded hoarsely.

"Well, if this weather holds out, it is to be hoped that the gentlemen of the jury are web-footed!" Selwyn exclaimed.

He shut the door, and as he went back to his lonely hearth his eyes fell upon the letter lying on the table.

"Now," he said as he took it again in his hand, "if fate should truly cut such a caper as to make my fortune in this forlorn exile, I could find it in my heart to laugh the longest and the loudest at the joke."

VI.

If it had been within the power of the worshipful Quarterly County Court to issue a mandamus to compel fair weather on that notable Tuesday when the jury of view were to set forth, the god of day could scarcely have obeyed with more alacrity that peremptory writ once poetically ranked as "one of the flowers of the crown." The burnished yellow sunshine had a suggestion of joyous exuberance in its wide suffusions. Even the recurrent fluctuations of shadow but gave its pervasive sheen the effect of motion and added embellishment. The wind, hilarious, loud, piping gayly a tuneful stave, shepherded the clouds in the fair fields of the high sky, driving the flocculent white masses here and there as listed a changing will. The trees were red and yellow, the leaves firm, full-fleshed, as if the ebbing sap of summer still ran high in every fibre; their tint seemed no hectic dying taint, but some inherent chromatic richness. Fine avenues the eye might open amongst the rough brown boles that stood in dense ranks, preternaturally dark and distinct, washed by the recent rains, and thrown into prominence by the masses of yellow and red leaves carpeting the ground, and the red and yellow boughs hanging low above. They dispensed to the light, clarified air an aromatic richness that the lungs rejoiced to breathe, and all their flare of color might have seemed adequate illumination of their demesne without serving writs of mandamus on the sun; and indeed, the Quarterly County Court was fain to concern itself with far lesser matters, and wield slighter weapons. The jury of view, in a close squad, ambling along at an easy gait, mounted on nags as diverse in appearance, age, and manner as the riders, sufficiently expressed its authority and their own diligence in its behests, and their spirits had risen to the propitious aspect of the weather and the occasion. Their advent into this secluded region of the district—for to secure a strict impartiality they were not of the immediate neighborhood, and had no interest which could be affected by their report—was not hailed with universal satisfaction.

"Jes' look at 'em, now," said old man Binney, as he stood in his door, leaning on his stick, to watch them pass,—"a jury o' view. An' who ever viewed a jury a-horseback afore? An' thar ain't but seben on 'em!"—laboriously counting, "five, six, seben. Thar's twelve men on a sure enough jury! I counted the panel ez hung Ezekiel Tilbuts fur a-murderin' of his wife. I war thar in town whenst they fetched in thar verdic'. I dunno what the kentry be a-comin' ter! Shucks! I ain't a-goin' ter abide by the say-so o' no sech skimpy jury ez this hyar. I'll go ter town an' see old Lawyer Gryce 'bout it, fust."

And with this extremest threat of vengeance he brought his stick down on the floor with so vigorous a thump that it had a certain profane effect; then having from under his bushy gray eyebrows gazed at the diminishing group till it was but a dim speck in the distance, he went in muttering, banging the door as if to shut out and reject the sight. His objection might have been intensified had he known that the days were at hand when legislative wisdom would still further reduce this engine of the law, making it consist of one road commissioner and two freeholders, the trio still pridefully denominated a "jury of view."

Others, however, favoring the enterprise, cheerfully fell into the line of march; and as the way lengthened the cavalcade grew, mustering recruits as it went.

Disputatious voices suddenly sounded loud on the clear air in front of them, mingled with the thud of horses' hoofs, the jingle of spurs, and now and again the whinny of a colt; and at the intersection of the trail with a narrow winding path there rode into view old "Persimmon" Sneed,—as he was sometimes disrespectfully nicknamed, owing to a juvenile and voracious fondness for the most toothsome delicacy of autumn woods,—arguing loudly, and with a lordly intolerance of contradiction, with two men who accompanied him, while his sleek claybank mare also argued loudly with her colt. She had much ado to pace soberly forward, even under the coercion of whip and spur, while her madcap scion galloped wildly ahead or lagged far in the rear, and made now and then excursions into the woods, out of sight, to gratify some adolescent curiosity, or perhaps, after the fashion of other and human adolescents, to relish the spectacle of the maternal anxiety. Ever and anon the sound of the mare's troubled call rang on the air. Then the colt would come with a burst of speed, a turbulent rush, out of the underbrush, and, with its keen head-tones of a whinny, all funnily treble and out of tune, dash on in advance. The rider of this preoccupied steed was a grizzled, lank, thin-visaged mountaineer, with a tuft of beard on his chin, but a shaven jowl, where, however, the black-and-gray stubble of several days' avoidance of the razor put forth unabashed. He shook his finger impressively at the jury of view as he approached them.

"Ef ye put this hyar road through my land," he said solemnly, "I'll be teetotally ruinationed. The cattle-thievin' that'll go on, with the woods so open an' the road so convenient, an' yit no travel sca'cely, will be a scandal ter the jay-bird. I won't hev so much lef' ez the horn of a muley cow!"

And with this extreme statement he whirled his horse and rode on at the head of the cavalcade in dignified silence. He was not a dweller in the immediate vicinity, but hailed from the Cove,—a man of substance and a large cattle-owner, pasturing his herds, duly branded, on a tract of unfenced wilderness, his mountain lands, where they roamed in the safe solitudes of those deep seclusions during the summer, and were rounded up, well fattened, and driven home at the approach of winter. He was the typical man of convictions, one who entertains a serious belief that he possesses a governing conscience instead of an abiding delight in his own way. He had a keen eye, with an upward glance from under the brim of his big wool hat, and he looked alert to descry any encroachment on his vested rights to prescribe opinion. The jury of view were destined to find it a doubtful boon that the road law interposed no insurmountable obstacle to prevent their hearing thus informally the views of those interested.

Persimmon Sneed's deep feeling on the subject had been evinced by his dispensing with the customary salutations, and one of the jury of view, with a mollifying intention, observed that they would use their best judgment to promote the interests of all parties.

"Ai-yi!" said Persimmon Sneed, ruefully shaking his head. "But s'pose ye hev got mighty pore jedgmint? Ye'll be like mos' folks I know, ef ye hev. I'd ruther use my own best jedgmint, a sight."

At which another of the jury suavely remarked that they would seek to be impartial.

"That's jes' what I kem along fur," exclaimed Persimmon Sneed triumphantly,—"ter show ye edzac'ly whar the bull's eye be. Thar ain't no use fur this road, an' ye air bound ter see it ef ye ain't nowise one-sided and partial."

The jury relapsed into silence and rode steadily on.

The true raw material of contradiction lay in three younger men among the spectators, contumacious, vehement, and, albeit opposed to the road, much inclined to spoke the wheel of old Persimmon Sneed, however that wheel might revolve.

"I got caught on a jury in a criminal case with him wunst," Silas Boyd, a heavy, thick-set, tall young fellow with a belligerent eye and a portentously square jaw, said sotto voce to his next comrade. "I hev sarved on a jury with him,—locked up fur a week 'thout no verdic'. He ain't got no respec' fur no other man's say-so. An' he talks 'bout his oath ez ef he war the only man in Tennessee ez ever war swore on the 'Holy Evangelists o' Almighty Gawd' in the court-house. He fairly stamped on my feelin's, in that Jenkins case, ter make me agree with him; but I couldn't agree, an' it hung the jury, ez they say. I wisht they hed hung the foreman! By Hokey, I despise a hard-headed, 'pinionated man."

"Look at his back," rejoined Jeremiah Sayres, a man of theory, who had a light undecided tint of hair and beard and scraggy mustache, and a blond complexion burned a permanent solid red by the summer sun. "I'd know his dispositions by his back." He waved his hand at the brown jeans coat that draped a spare and angular but singularly erect back, which scarcely seemed to move in response to the motions of the mare pacing briskly along. "What sorter back is that fur a man risin' fifty year old?—straight ez a ramrod, an' ez stiff. But, Silas, ef ever ye git the better o' him, ye hev got ter break it."

"I hearn his third wife married him ter git rid o' him," put in Peter Sims, given to gossip. "She 'lowed he warn't nigh so tarrifyin' 'roun' his own house, a-feedin' the peegs, an' ploughin' an' cuttin' wood, an' sech, occupied somehows, ez he war a-settin' up in his Sunday best at her house, with nuthin' ter do, allowin' she hed ter marry him, whether or not, 'kase he wouldn't hev 'No' fur a answer."

"An' look at it now!" exclaimed Silas Boyd, unexpectedly reinforced by the matrimonial phase of the question. "That thar man hev bodaciously argued an' contradicted two wimmin out'n this vale o' tears. An' everybody knows it takes a power o' contradiction to out-do a woman. He oughter be indicted for cold-blooded murder! That's what!" He nodded vindictively at the straight jeans-clad back in advance of him.

Over and again the party called a halt, to push about in search of a practicable seven-foot passage amongst crags and chasms, and to contend with the various insistence touching devious ways preferred by the honorary attendants, who often seemed to forget that they themselves were not in the exercise of a delegated jury duty. Tangles impeded, doubts beset them, although the axe by which the desired route had been blazed out aforetime by the petitioners had been zealous and active; but the part of a pioneer in a primeval wilderness is indeed the threading of a clueless labyrinth, and both sun and compass were consulted often before the continued direction of the road could be determined and located.

In such cases, to the lovers of the consistent in character, the respective traits of old Persimmon Sneed and Silas Boyd were displayed in all their pristine value; for although their interests were identical, both being opposed to the opening of the road, the dictatorial arrogations of the elder man and the pugnacious persistence of the younger served to antagonize them on many a minor point in question, subsidiary to the main issue, as definitely as if they were each arrayed against the other, instead of both being in arms under the "No Road" banner.

"Mighty nigh ez interestin' ez a dog-fight," said Jeremiah Sayres in an aside to one of the jury.

Midday found them considerably advanced on their way, but brought to a halt by an insistence on the part of Silas Boyd that the road should be diverted from a certain depression showing marshy tendencies to a rugged slope where the footing was dry but difficult.

"That's under water more 'n haffen the winter, I'll take my everlastin' oath. Ef the road runs thar, that piece will take enough mendin' in a season ter keep up ten mile o' dry road," he argued vehemently.

"Water ain't dangersome, nowise," retorted the elderly Persimmon, with a snarling smile. "Healthier 'n whiskey, my frien',—heap healthier 'n whiskey."

Boyd's serious countenance colored darkly red with wrath. Among the aggressive virtues of old Persimmon Sneed were certain whiskey-proof temperance principles, the recollection of which was peculiarly irritating to Silas Boyd, known to be more than ordinarily susceptible to proof whiskey.

"I be a perfessin' Baptis', Mr. Sneed," he retorted quickly. "I got no objection ter water, 'ceptin' fur the onregenerate an' spurners o' salvation."

Now Persimmon Sneed had argued the plan of atonement on every possible basis known to his extremely limited polemical outlook, and could agree with none. If any sect of eclectics had been within his reach, he would most joyfully have cast his spiritual fortunes with them, for he felt himself better than very many conspicuous Christians; and as he would have joyed in a pose of sanctity, the reproach of being a member of no church touched him deeply.

"I ain't no ransomed saint, I know," he vociferated,—"I ain't no ransomed saint! But ef the truth war known, ye ain't got no religion nuther! That leetle duckin' ez ye call 'immersion' jes' diluted the 'riginal sin in ye mighty leetle. Ye air a toler'ble strong toddy o' iniquity yit. That thar water tempered the whiskey ye drink mighty leetle,—mighty leetle!"

The Christian grace of Silas Boyd was put to a stronger test than it might have been deemed capable of sustaining. But Sneed was a far older man, and as nothing short of breaking his stiff neck might suffice to tame him, Silas Boyd summoned his self-control, and held his tingling hands, and gave himself only to retort.

"I wouldn't take that off'n ye, Mr. Sneed, 'ceptin' I be a perfessin' member, an' pity them ez is still in the wiles an' delusions o' Satan."

What might have ensued in the nature of counterthrust, as Persimmon Sneed heard himself called by inference an object of pity, the subsidiary group were spared from learning, for at that moment the sound of steps heralded an approach, and Ben Hanway came into the circle, and sought to claim the attention of the party, inviting them to dine and pass the nooning hour at his house. His countenance was adjusted to the smile of hospitality, but it wore the expression like a mask, and he seemed ill at ease. He had been contending all the morning with Narcissa's freakishness, which he thought intensified by the presence of the valley man, who was returning the civility of that ill-omened visit, and who, by reason of the abnormal excitements of the day, had been received with scant formality, and was already upon the footing of a familiar friend. Selwyn stood smilingly in the way hard by, speaking to those of the men as they passed who gave his presence the meed of a start and a stare of blank surprise, or a curt nod. Narcissa lingered in the background, beneath a great oak; her chin was a little lifted with a touch of displeasure; the eyelids drooped over her brown eyes; her hands, with her wonted careless gesture and with a certain mechanical effort to dispel embarrassment, were raised to the curtain of her white sunbonnet, and spread its folds wingwise behind her auburn hair. Sundry acquaintances among the honorary attendants paused to greet her pleasantly as they passed, but old Sneed's disapprobation of a woman's appearance on so public an occasion was plainly expressed on his features. For all the Turks are not in Turkey. She followed with frowning, disaffected eyes the procession of men and horses and dogs and colts wending up to the invisible house hidden amongst the full-leaved autumn woods.

"Well, that's the jury of view; and what do you think of them?" asked Selwyn, watching too, but smilingly, the cavalcade.

"Some similar ter the cor'ner's jury. But they hed suthin' ter look tormented an' tribulated 'bout," said the girl, evidently disappointed to find the jury of view not more cheerful of aspect. "But mebbe conversin' a passel by the way with old Persimmon Sneed is powerful depressin' ter the sperits."

Selwyn's face grew grave at the mention of the coroner's jury.

"I'm afraid that poor fellow missed something good," he said.

Still holding out her sunbonnet in wide distention, she slowly set forth along the path, not even turning back, for sheer perversity, as she saw Ben look anxiously over his shoulder to descry if she followed in the distance.

"Thar ain't much good in life nohow. Things seem set contrariwise." Then, after a moment, and turning her eyes upon him, for she had an almost personal interest in the man whose tragic fate she had first of all discovered, "What sorter good thing did he miss?" she asked, as she settled her sunbonnet soberly on her head.

"Well"—Selwyn began; then he hesitated. He had spoken rather than thought, for he thought little, and he was not used to keeping secrets. Moreover, despite his courageous disbelief in his coming fate, he must have had some yearnings for sympathy; the iron of his exile surely entered his soul at times. The girl, so delicately framed, so flower-like of face, seemed alien to her rude surroundings and the burly, heavy, matter-of-fact folk about her. Her spirituelle presence did away in a measure with the realization of her limitations, her ignorance, and the uncouth surroundings. Even her dress seemed to him hardly amiss, for there then reigned a fleeting metropolitan fashion of straight full flowing skirts and short waists and closely fitting sleeves,—a straining after picture-like effects which Narcissa's attire accomplished without conscious effort, the costume of the mountain women for a hundred years or more. The sunbonnet itself was but the defensive appurtenance of many a Southern city girl, when a-summering in the country, who esteems herself the possessor of a remarkably beautiful complexion, and heroically proposes to conserve it. Unlike the men, Narcissa's personality did not suggest the distance between them in sophistication, in culture, in refinement, in the small matters of external polish. She seemed not so far from his world, and it was long since he had walked fraternally by the side of some fair girl, and talked freely of himself, his views, his plans, his vagaries, as men, when very young, are wont to do, and as they rarely talk to one another. He had so sedulously sought to content himself with the conditions of his closing existence that the process of reconciling the habit of better things was lost in simple acceptance. He was still young, and the sun shone, and the air was clear and pure and soft, and he walked by the side of a girl, fair and good and not altogether unwise, and he was happy in the blessings vouchsafed.

After a moment he replied: "Well, I thought he might have made a lot of money. I thought I might go partners with him. I had written to him."

Her face did not change; it was still grave and solicitous within the white frame of her sunbonnet, but its expression did not deepen. She did not pity the dead man because he died without the money he had had a chance to make. She evidently had not even scant knowledge of that most absorbing passion, the love of gain, and she did not value money.

"Somehow whenst folks dies by accident, it 'pears ter me a mistake—somehows—ez ef they war choused out'n time what war laid off fur them an' their'n by right." Evidently she did not lack sensibility.

"Yes," he rejoined, "and you know money makes a lot of difference in people's lives there in the valley towns. Lord knows, 't would in mine."

He swung his riding-whip dejectedly to and fro in his hand as he spoke, and she pushed back her sunbonnet to look seriously at him. He was a miracle of elegance in her estimation, but the fawn-colored suit which he wore owed its nattiness rather to his own symmetry than the cut or the cloth, and he had worn it a year ago. His immaculate linen, somewhat flabby,—for the mountain laundress is averse to starch,—had been delicately trimmed by a deft pair of scissors around the raveling edges of the cuffs and collar, and showed rather what it had been than what it was. His straw hat was pushed a trifle back from his face, in which the sunburn and the inward fire competed to lay on the tints. She did not see how nor what he lacked. Still, if he wanted it, she pitied him that he did not have it.

"Waal, can't you-uns make it, the same way?"

She asked this sympathetically. She was beginning to experience a certain self-reproach in regard to him, and it gave her unwonted gentleness. She felt that she had been too quick to suspect. Since Ben's report of the reconnoitring interview on which she had sent him in Con Hite's interest, she had dismissed the idea that Selwyn was in aught concerned with the traveler's sudden and violent death; and she did not incline easily to the substituted suspicion that the dead man was a "revenuer," and that Selwyn had written to him to recommend the investigation of Con Hite, whose implication in moonshining he had some cause to divine.

Narcissa had marked with displeasure Ben's surly manner to the valley man, connecting it with these considerations, and never dreaming that it was her acquaintance which her brother grudged the stranger.

"I ought never ter hev set Ben after him," she thought ruefully. "He'll hang on ter him like a bulldog." But aloud she only said, "You kin make the money all the same."

"Oh, I'll try, like a little man!" he exclaimed, rousing himself to renewed hope. "I have written to another scientific fellow, and he has promised to come and investigate. I hope to Heaven he won't break his neck, too."

She also marked the word "investigate," which had so smitten Ben's attention, and marveled what matter it might be in the mountains worth investigating, and promissory of gain, if not the still-hunt, as it were, of the wily moonshiners. But yet her faith in Selwyn's motives and good will, so suddenly adopted, held fast.

"Con Hite mus' l'arn ter look out fur hisse'f," she thought fretfully, for she could not discern into what disastrous swirl she might be guiding events as she took the helm. "He's big enough, the Lord knows."

The little log cabin on the slope of the ascent had come into sight. They had followed but slowly; the horses were already tethered to the rails of the fence, and the jury of view and its escort had disappeared within. A very spirited fracas was in progress between the visiting dogs and the inhospitable home canines, and once Ben appeared in the passageway and hoarsely called his hounds off.

"I ain't a-goin' ter hurry," Narcissa remarked cavalierly. "Let Ben an' aunt Minervy dish up an' wait on 'em. They won't miss me. Thar's nuthin' in this worl' a gormandizin' man kin miss at meal-times,—'ceptin' teeth."

Selwyn made no comment on this touch of reprisal in Narcissa's manner. If old Persimmon Sneed had deemed her coming forth to meet them superfluous, she in her own good judgment could deem her presence at table an empty show.

"I ain't a-goin' in," she continued. "Ye kin go," she added, with a hasty afterthought. "Thar's a cheer sot ter the table fur you-uns. I'm goin' ter bide hyar. They 'll git done arter a while."

She sat languidly down on a step of a stile that went over the fence at a considerable distance from the house, and Selwyn, protesting that he wanted no dinner, established himself on the protruding roots of a great beech-tree that, like gigantic, knuckled, gnarled fingers, visibly took a great grasp of the earth before sinking their tips far out of sight beneath. The shade was dense; the sound of water trickling into the rude horse-trough on the opposite side of the path that was to be a road was delicious in its cool suggestion, for the landscape, far, far to see, blazed as with the refulgence of a summer sun. The odor of the apple orchard, heavily fruited, was mellow on the air, and the red-freighted boughs of an old winesap bent above the girl's head as she sat with her elbow on her knee and her chin in her hand. She gazed dreamily away at those vividly blue ranges, whither one might fancy summer had fled, so little affinity had their aspect with the network of intermediate brown valleys, and nearer garnet slopes, and the red and yellow oak boughs close at hand, hanging above the precipice and limiting the outlook.

"Yes," he said, after a moment's cogitation, while he absently turned a cluster of beech-nuts in his hands, "I'll try it, for keeps, you may bet,—if you were a betting character. There's lots of good things going in these mountains; that is, if a fellow had the money to get 'em out."

He looked up a trifle drearily from under the brim of his straw hat at the smiling summertide of those blue mountains yonder. Oh, fair and feigning prospect, what wide and alluring perspectives! He drew a long sigh. Is it better to know so surely that winter is a-coming?

"An' the sense, too," remarked Narcissa, her eyes still dreamily dwelling on the distance.

He roused himself. The unconsciously flattering inference was too slight not to be lawfully appropriated.

"Yes, the sense and the enterprise. Now, these mountaineers,"—he spoke as if she had no part among them, forgetting it, indeed, for the moment,—"they let marble and silver and iron, and gold too, all sorts of natural wealth, millions and millions of the finest hard-wood timber, lie here undeveloped, without making the least effort to realize on it, without lifting a finger. They have got no enterprise in the world, and they are the most dilatory, slowest gang I ever ran across in my life."

A dimple deepened in the soft fairness of her cheek under the white sunbonnet.

"They got enterprise enough ter want a road," she drawled, fixing her eyes upon him for a moment, then reverting to her former outlook.

He was a trifle embarrassed, and lost his balance.

"Oh, I'll want a road, too, after a while," he returned. "All in good time." He laughed as if to himself, a touch of mystery in his tone, and he took off his hat and jauntily fanned himself.

"Sorter dil'tory yerse'f now; 'pears ter be a ketchin' complaint, like the measles."

Perhaps she secretly resented the reflection on the mountaineers, for there was a certain bellicose intention in her eye, a disposition to push him to his last defenses.

"No; but a body would think a fellow might get enough intelligent cooperation in any promising matter from right around here without corresponding all over the country. And the mountaineers don't know anything, and they don't want to learn anything. Now," convincingly, "what would any of those fellows in there say if I should tell them that I could take a match "—he pulled a handful of lucifers from, his pocket—"and set a spring afire?"

She gazed at him in dumb surprise.

"They'd say I was lying, I reckon," he hazarded. With an ebullition of laughter, he hastily scrambled to his feet and unhitched his horse; then, as he put his foot in the stirrup, he paused and added, "Or else, 'Better leave it be, sonny,'" with the effrontery of mimicry. "'Mought set the mounting afire.'"

He forthwith swung himself into the saddle, and, with a jaunty wave of the hand in adieu, fared forth homeward, leaving her staring after him in wide-eyed amazement.

VII.

The love of contention served, in the case of old Persimmon Sneed, in the stead of industry, of rectitude, of perseverance, of judgment, of every quality that should adorn a man. So eager was he to be off and at the road again that he could scarcely wait to swallow his refection. All the charms of the profusely spread board had not availed to decoy him from the subject, and the repast of the devoted jury of view was seasoned with his sage advice and vehement argument against the project, which its advocates, fully occupied, failed for the nonce to combat. Now and again Mrs. Minerva Slade sought to interpose in their behalf, and many a tempting trencher was thrust to his elbow to divert the tenor of his discourse. But despite his youthful vulnerability to the dainty which had won him his sobriquet, Persimmon Sneed's palate was not more susceptible to the allurements of flattery than his hard head or his obdurate heart. There was, however, at intervals, a lively clatter of his knife and fork, and some redoubtable activity on the part of his store teeth, frankly false, and without doubt the only false thing about him. Then he hustled up the jury of view and their confreres to the resumption of their duties, and was the first man to put foot in stirrup. Certain other mountaineers would fain have lingered, as was manifest by the triangular slices of "apple custard pie" in their hands, as they stood, still munching, on the porch, watching the departing jury of view with their active and aged precursor, and by their loitering farewells and thanks to Aunt Minerva Slade. A beaming countenance did she wear this day. She had cooked to some cheerful purpose. Not one failure had marred the menu, in testimony of which, as she afterward remarked, "I never seen scraps so skimpy." Her spectacles reflected the bland light of the day as smilingly as the eyes above which they were poised, as she stood in the doorway, and with fluttering graciousness received the homage of her beneficiaries.

"That youngest one, Con Hite, was sorter mild-mannered an' meek," she afterward said, often recounting the culinary triumphs of the great day, "an' I misdoubts but he hed the deespepsy, fur he war the only one ez didn't pitch in an' eat like he war tryin' to pervide fur a week's fastin'. I reckon they all knowed what sort'n pitiful table they sets out at Mis' Cornely Hood's, t'other side the mounting, whar they expected ter stop fur supper, an' war a-goin' ter lay up suthin' agin destitution."

For an hour, perhaps, before reaching Hanway's, Con Hite had ridden with the jury of view. He had not much expectation of influencing the fate of the road in any respect by his presence, but he felt it was a matter of consistency to appear with the others of the opposition. He desired, too, to publicly urge, as his reason for objecting to the project, the insufficiency of hands in so sparsely populated a region to make a road and keep it in repair; lest another reason, the wish to preserve the seclusion so dear to the moonshiner, be attributed to him. This matter of policy had been made very palatable by the probability that he would see Narcissa, and it was with a deep disappointment that he beheld Selwyn beside her, and received only a slight movement of her drooping eyelids as a token of recognition and welcome. He had been minded to dismount and walk with her, but his heart burned with resentment. Of what worth now were all his buoyant anticipations, while she was listening to the sugared flatteries of the "town cuss"? He had this subject for cogitation, while, in a stifling room, he was regaled with hard cider and apple-jack by no more fascinating Hebe than old Mrs. Slade, with her withered sallow skin, her excited, anxious eye, her fluttered, tremulous, skinny fingers, her hysteric cap with its maddeningly flying strings, and her wonderfully swift venerable scamper in and out of the kitchen.

Con Hite was the last to go. He led his horse down to the watering-trough, oblivious of the stream, with its ample supply, a hundred yards or so further on and in full view; and as he stood there, with his hand on the animal's shoulder, he turned his eyes, somewhat wistful, though wont to be so bold and bright, upon Narcissa, still seated on the stile. Her own brown long-lashed eyes had a far-away look in them. They evidently passed him over absently, and followed the squad of men swiftly trotting adown the road, all in good heart and good temper again, to take up their duty where they had laid it down. No faint vestige of a dimple was now in her daintily white cheek.

"Ye be powerful sparin' o' speech ter-day," he remarked.

Her eyes did not move from the distant landscape. "Folks ez hev got nuthin' ter say would do well ter say it."

He flushed. "Ye hed mo' ter say ter the stranger-man."

"Don't see him so powerful frequent. When a thing is sca'ce, it's apt ter be ch'ice," she retorted.

She experienced a certain satisfaction in her acridity. For his sake, lest suspicion befall him, she had sought to inaugurate an investigation—nay, a persecution—of this man, and he a stranger; and but that circumstance was kind to him, her effort might have resulted cruelly. And now that she had done so much for Con Hite, it was her pleasure to take it out on him, as the phrase goes. All unaware of this curious mental attitude, he winced under her satire.

"Waal, I kin make myself sca'ce, too," he said, an impulse of pride surging in his heart.

"It mought be better fur ye," she replied indifferently.

His momentary independence left him suddenly.

"Narcissa," he said reproachfully, "ye didn't always talk this way ter me."

"That ain't news ter me. Ben 'lows ez I talk six ways fur Sunday."

"Ye dunno how I feel, not knowin' how ye be set towards me, an' hevin' ter see ye so seldom, a-workin' all the time down yander, a-moonshinin'"—

"I wouldn't talk 'bout it so turr'ble loud." She glanced apprehensively over her shoulder. "An' ye'd better quit it, ennyhows."

"Ye 'lows it be wrong," he said, his bold bright eyes all softened as he looked at her, "bein' agin the law?"

"I ain't keerin' fur the law. Ef the truth war knowed, the law is aimin' ter git all the benefit o' whiskey bein' drunk itself. That's whar the law kems in. I only keer fur"—She stopped abruptly. She had nearly revealed to him that she cared only lest some disaster come to him in his risky occupation; that she would like him to be ploughing in a safe level field at the side of a cabin, where she might sit by the window and sew, and look out and see that no harm befell this big bold man, six feet two inches high. "Con Hite!" she exclaimed, her face scarlet, "I never see a body ez hard-hearted an' onmerciful ez ye air. Whyn't ye water that sufferin' beast, ez air fairly honing ter drink? Waal," she continued, after a pause in which he demonstrated the axiom that one may lead a horse to water, but cannot make him drink, "then whyn't ye go? I ain't got time ter waste, ef ye hev."

She rose as if for departure, and he put his foot in the stirrup. "I wish ye wouldn't be so harsh ter me, Narcissa," he said meekly.

"Waal, thar be a heap o' saaft-spoken gals ter be hed fur the askin'. Ye kin take yer ch'ice."

And with this he was fain to be content, as he mounted and rode reluctantly away.

She sat down again, and was still for a long time after the last echo of his horse's hoofs had died on the air. Her thoughts did not follow him, however. They turned again with renewed interest to the fair-haired young stranger. Somehow she was ill at ease and vaguely disillusioned. She watched mechanically, and with some unaccustomed touch of melancholy, the burnished shimmering golden haze gradually invest far blue domes and their purple slopes, and the brown valleys, and the rugged rocky mountains nearer, with a certain idealized slumberous effect like the landscape of a dream. In these still spaces naught moved now save the imperceptible lengthening of the shadows. It had never occurred to her to deem the scene beautiful; it was the familiar furniture of her home. Upon this her eyes had first opened. She had never thought to compare it to aught else,—to the suffocating experience of one visit to the metropolitan glories of the little town in the flat woods known as Colbury. It had seemed, indeed, magnificent to her ignorance, and the temerity of the architecture of a two-story house had struck her aghast. She had done naught but wonder and stare. The trip had been a great delight, but she had never desired to linger or to dwell there. Certain sordid effects came over her; reminiscences of the muddy streets, the tawdry shops, the jostling, busy-eyed people.

"Ain't this ez good?" she said to herself, as the vast scene suddenly fluctuated beneath a flare of wind amidst the sunshine, and light, detached white flakes of cloud went winging athwart the blue sky; their shadows followed them fast across the sunlit valley,—only their dark and lifeless semblances, like the verbal forms of some white illumined thought that can find no fit expression in words. The breath of the pines came to her, the sound of the water, the sudden fanfare of the unseen wind in the sky heralding the clouds. "Ain't this ez good?" she said again, with that first deadly, subtle distrust of the things of home, that insidious discontent so fatal to peace. He evidently did not deem it as good, and the obvious fact rankled in her. The mountain men, and their lack of enterprise, and their drawling speech which he had mimicked,—they too shared his disparagement; and she was conscious that she herself did not now think so well of them,—so conscious that she made a loyal struggle against this sentiment.

"So shif'less, so thrif'less," she echoed his words. "An' I dunno ez I ever viewed a waste-fuller critter'n this hyar very Mister Man." She stooped down, gathering together the handful of matches that Selwyn had inadvertently pulled from his pocket with the one which he had used in illustrating his suggestion of setting the waters of a spring afire. "Ef he keeps on ez wasteful ez this, he'll get out o' matches whar he lives over yander; an' I misdoubts ef, smart ez he 'lows he be, he could kindle the wood ter cook his breakfus' by a flint rock,—ef he air so boastful ez ter 'low ez he kin set spring water afire."

She made the matches into a compact little budget and slipped them into her pocket, and as she rose and looked about uncertainly, she heard her aunt Minerva calling to her from the house that it was high time to go and drive up the cows.

Aunt Minerva had not bethought herself to summon the girl to dinner. The whole world seemed surfeited to her, so had dinner occupied her day. Narcissa herself, under the stress of the abnormal excitements, felt no lack as she slowly trod the familiar paths in search of the bovine vagrants.

Her thoughts bore her company, and she was far from home when the aspect of the reddening sun smote her senses. She stood and watched the last segment of the vermilion sphere sink down out of sight, and, as she turned, the October dusk greeted her on every side. The shadows, how dense in the woods; the valleys, darkling already! Only on the higher eastern slopes a certain red reflection spoke of the vanishing day. She looked vainly as yet for some faint silvery suffusion which might herald the rising of the moon; for it was to be a bright night. She was glad of the recollection. She had not hitherto realized it, but she was tired. She would rest for a little while, and thus refreshed she would be the sooner home. She sat down on a ledge of the outcropping rock and looked about her. The spot was unfamiliar, but in the far stretch of the darkening scene she identified many a well-known landmark. There was the gleaming bend of the river in the valley, lost presently amidst the foliage of its banks; and here was an isolated conical peak on a far lower level than the summit of the range, and known as Thimble Mountain; and nearer still, across a narrow bight of the Cove, was a bare slope. As she glanced at it she half rose from her place, for there was the witch-face, twilight on the grim features, yet with the aid of memory so definitely discerned that they could hardly have been more distinct by noonday,—a face of inexplicably sinister omen. "Oh, why did I see it to-day!" she exclaimed, the presage of ill fortune strong upon her, with that grisly mask leering at her from across the valley. But the day was well-nigh gone; only a scant space remained in which to work the evil intent of fate. She seated herself anew, for in the shadowy labyrinth of the woods her path could scarcely be found. She must needs wait for the moon.

She wondered, as she sat and gazed about, how far she might be from that new dwelling where he lived who so scorned the mountain, and who owed to it his every breath. There was no sound, no suggestion of human habitation. The shadowy woods stood dense about the little open ledgy space on three sides; toward the very verge of the mountain the rocks grew shelving and precipitous, and beyond the furthest which she could see, the gray edge of which cut sharply against the base of a distant dun-tinted range, she knew the descent was abrupt to the depths of the valley. Looking up, she beheld the trembling lucid whiteness of a star; now and again the great rustling boughs of an oak-tree swayed beneath it, and then its glister was broken and deflected amidst the crisp autumnal leaves, but still she saw it shine. It told, too, that there was water near; she caught its radiant multiplied reflection, like a cluster of scintillating white gems, on the lustrous dark surface of a tiny pool, circular and rock-bound, close beneath the ledge on which she sat. She leaned over, and saw in its depths the limpid fading red sky, and the jagged brown border of the rocks, and a grotesque moving head, which she recognized, after a plunge of the heart, as her own sunbonnet. She drew back in dismay; she would have no more of this weird mirror of the rocks and woods, and looked up again at the shining of the star amidst the darkening shadows of the scarlet oak. How tall that tree was, how broad of girth! And how curiously this stranger talked! What was there to do with all these trees! Would he cut down all the trees on the mountain? A sudden doubt of his sanity crossed her mind. It was the first, and her heart stood still for a moment. But as she slowly canvassed the idea, it accounted for much otherwise impossible to comprehend: his evident poverty and his efforts toward the purchase of lands; his illness and his bluff insistence on his strength; his wild talk of enterprise and his mysterious intimations of phenomenal opportunities. Confirmations of the suspicion crowded upon her; above all, the mad boast that with a match he could set the waters of a spring afire.

With a sad smile at the fatuity of the thing, in her idle waiting she drew one of his matches from her pocket; then she struck it briskly on the rugged rock, and cast it, blazing lightly, into the bubbling waters of the spring.

The woods, the rocks, the black night, the fleering, flouting witch-face, all with an abrupt bound sprang into sudden visibility. A pyramid of yellow flame was surging up from the bubbling surface of the water. Long, dark, slim shadows were speeding through the woods, with strange slants of yellow light; the very skies were a-flicker. She cowered back for a moment, covering her face with her hands. Then, affrighted at her own sorceries, she fled like a deer through the wilderness.

VIII.

One by one, as the afternoon wore on, the spectators began to desert the jury of view, their progress over the mountain being slower than had been anticipated. So often, indeed, did insoluble difficulties arise touching the location of the road and questions of dispute that it might be wondered that the whole body did not perish by faction. After the party had passed the boundary line of Persimmon Sneed's tract, where he seemed to consider the right of eminent domain merged in nothingness in comparison to his lordly prerogatives as owner in fee simple, he ceased to urge as heretofore. He dictated boldly to the jury. He rode briskly on in advance, as if doing the honors of his estate to flattered guests, now and again waving his hand to illustrate his proposition, his keen, high-pitched voice overcoming in its distinct utterance the sound of hoofs and spurs, and the monotonous bass contradictions proffered by Silas Boyd.

And the jury of view, silent and circumspect, rode discreetly on.

Persimmon Sneed's mare seemed as fresh as himself, and when he would turn, as he often did, to face the fatigued, wilted, overwhelmed jury jogging along on their jaded steeds, tired out with the long day's jaunt and the rough footing, the mare would move swiftly backward in a manner that would have done credit to the manege of a circus. And at this extreme advantage Persimmon Sneed and his raised adjuring forefinger seemed impossible to be gainsaid. His arguments partook of the same unanswerable character.

"Ye don't see none o' my cattle, do ye?" He waved his hand toward the woods flecked with the long slantings of the sun. "I hev got more 'n a hunderd head grazin' right hyar in the bresh. Cattle-thieves could call an' salt 'em easy enough, but they couldn't drive 'em off through the laur'l thar; it's thick ez hell!" pointing to the dense jungle. "But ef we-uns hed this hyar road what ye air aimin' ter lay off, why, a leetle salt an' a leetle drivin' an' a moonlight night would gather 'em, an' the whole herd would be in Georgy by daybreak. I wouldn't hev the hawn of a muley cow lef'. Now, ez it be, them cattle air ez safe from sight ez ef I hed swallowed 'em!" And he whirled again, and led the column.

The jury of view rode disconsolately on.

They experienced a temporary relief when they had passed the confines of his tract,—for it was across but a protruding tongue of the main body of his land that the road was expected to run,—and entered upon the domain of the "valley man with the lung complaint;" for this diverted Persimmon Sneed to the more amiable task of narrating how the stranger had sought to buy land of him, and the high prices he had scornfully refused, the adaptability of his land to his own especial needs being so phenomenally apt.

A sudden query from Silas Boyd rendered their respite short: "What's that man Selwyn want so much land fur, ennyhows? He hev been tryin' ter buy all that 'crost the gorge, too." He waved his hand toward the gloomy woods darkening on the opposite slope.

"Ter graze cattle, o' course," promptly surmised Persimmon Sneed. "Jes' look at my fine chance o' yearlin's, a-layin' on fat an' bone an' muscle every day, with no expense nor attendance, an' safe an' sound an' sure. An' now," he cried suddenly, and the shuddering jury saw the collocation of ideas as it bore down upon them, and Persimmon Sneed swiftly turned, facing them, while the mare nimbly essayed a passado backward, "ye air talkin' 'bout changin' all this, ruinationin' the vally o' my land ter me. Ye 'low ye want ter permote the interus' o' the public! Waal," raising an impressive forefinger, "ain't I the public?"

No one ventured a reply.

The jury of view rode desperately on.

They had presently more cause for depression of spirit. It began to be evident that with the dusk some doubt had arisen in the minds of the mountaineers of the party as to the exact trend of the herder's trail. The doubt intensified, until further progress proved definitively that the indistinct trail was completely lost. Darkness came on apace; the tangled ways of the forest seemed momently more tortuous; wolves were not rare in the vicinity; rumors of a gang of horse-thieves were rife.

After much discussion, the jury of view agreed that they would go no further at present, but wait for the rising of the moon, on the theory that it would then be practicable to make their way to the Hood cabin, on the other side of the mountain, which was their immediate goal, and which they had expected to reach by sunset; unaware that in their devious turnings they had retraced several miles of their course, and were now much nearer Selwyn's dwelling in the woods than the terminus of their route.

Despite their uncertainty and anxiety, the rest was grateful. The shades of night were cool and refreshing after the glare of the day, as they sat smoking on the rocks about the verge of the mountain. The horses had been unsaddled, and were picketed in an open glade at a little distance: in recurrent pauses in the talk, the sound of their grazing on the scanty grass came to the ear; all else was silence save the tinkling of a mountain rill,—a keen detached appoggiatura rising occasionally above the monody of its murmurous flow,—and the melancholy chiming of some lingering cicada, the latest spared of the frost.

The night was as yet very dark; the stars were dull in a haze, the valley was a vague blur; even the faces of the men could not be dimly distinguished. Strange, then, that an added visibility suddenly invested the woods and the sky-line beyond a dense belt of timber.

"'Pears ter me toler'ble early fur the moon," observed one of the men. "She's on the wane now, too."

"'Tain't early, though," replied the sullen bass voice of Silas Boyd from the darkness; it was lowered, that the others might not hear. "That thar old perverted Philistine of a Persimmon Sneed kep' us danderin' roun' hyar till mighty nigh eight o'clock, I'll bet, a-persistin' an' a-persistin' he knowed the road, when he war plumb lost time we got on that cowpath. An' the jury o' view, they hed ter take Persimmon Sneed's advice, he bein' the oldest, an' wait hyar fur the risin' moon. Persimmon Sneed will repent he picked out this spot,—he'll repent it sure!"

This dictum was only the redundancy of discontent; but when, in the light of subsequent events, it was remembered, and special gifts of discernment were attributed to Silas Boyd, he did not disclaim them, for he felt that his words were surely inspired by some presentiment, so apt were they, and so swiftly did the fulfillment follow the prophecy.

There was a sudden stir among the group. The men were getting quickly to their feet, alert, tense, with broken whispers and bated breath. For there, on a bare slope, viewed diagonally across the gorge and illumined with a wavering pallor, the witch-face glared down at them from the dense darkness of the woods. The quick chilly repulsion of the strangers as they gazed spellbound at the apparition was outmatched by the horror of those who had known the fantasy from childhood;—never thus had they beheld the gaunt old face! What strange unhallowed mystery was this, that it should smile and grimace and mock at them from out the shadowy night, with flickers of light as of laughter running athwart its grisly lineaments? What evil might it portend? They all stood aghast, watching this pallid emblazonment of the deep night.

"Boys," said old Dent Kirby tremulously, "thar's suthin' powerful cur'ous 'bout this 'speriunce. That thar light war never kindled in heaven or yearth."

"Let's go!" cried Jeremiah Sayres. "We hev got ter git out'n this somehows."

"Go whar?" croaked Silas Boyd, his deep bass voice lowered to a whisper. "I be 'feard ter quit the trail furder. 'Pinnock's Mis'ry' be hyar-abouts somewhar, a plumb quicksand, what a man got into an' floundered an' sank, an' floundered agin, an' whenst they fund him his hair war white an' his mind deranged. Or else we-uns mought run off'n a bluff somewhar, an' git our necks bruk."

Now Persimmon Sneed was possessed of a most intrusive curiosity, and he was further endowed with a sturdy courage.

"I'll jes' step off a leetle way to'des that light, an' view whar it kems from," he observed coolly. "The woods air too wet to burn."

He would not listen to protest.

"The witch-face ain't never blighted me none," he rejoined stoutly as he set forth.

IX.

The thick tangled mass of the undergrowth presently intervened, so that, as he broke his way through it, he wondered that its bosky dimness should be so visible beneath the heavy shadows of the great trees looming high overhead. Once he stopped dubiously; the glow evidently came rather from below than above. It is too much to say that a thrill of fear tried the fibres of Persimmon Sneed's obdurate old heart. But he listened for a moment to hear, perchance, the sound of voices from the group he had left, or the champing of the picketed steeds. He was an active man, and had come fast and far since quitting his companions. Not even a vague murmur rose from the silent autumnal woods. The stillness was absolute. As he moved forward once more, the impact of his foot upon the rain-soaked leaves, the rustle of the boughs as he pressed among them, the rise and fall of his own breathing, somewhat quicker than its wont, served to render appreciable to Persimmon Sneed the fact that he possessed nerves which were more susceptible to a quaver of doubt than that redoubtable endowment called his hard head.

"Somebody hev jes' sot out fire in the woods,—though powerful wet," he muttered, his intellectual entity seeking to quiet that inward flutter of his mere bodily being. "But I'm a-goin' on," he protested obstinately, "ef it be bodaciously kindled by the devil!"

And as he spoke, his heart failed, his limbs seemed sinking beneath him, his pulses beat tumultuously for a moment, and then were abruptly still; he had emerged from the woods in a great flickering glare which pervaded an open, rocky space shelving to a precipice, and beheld a tall, glowing yellow flame rising unquenched from the illuminated surface of a bubbling mountain spring. His senses reeled; a myriad of tawny red and yellow flashes swayed before his dazzled eyes. He had heard all his life of the wild freaks of the witches in the woods. Had he chanced on their unhallowed pastimes in the solitudes of these untrodden mountain wildernesses? Was this miraculous fire, blazing from the depths of the clear water, necromancy, the work of the devil?

The next moment his heart gave a great throb. He found his voice in a wild halloo. Among the fluttering shadows of the trees he had caught sight of the figure of a man, and, a thousand times better, of a face that he knew. The man was approaching the fire, with a stare of blank amazement and fear as his distended eyes beheld the phenomenon of the blazing spring. Their expression changed instantly upon the sound. His face was all at once alert, grave, suspicious, a prosaic anxiety obliterating every trace of superstitious terror. His right hand was laid upon his hip in close proximity to a pistol-pocket, and Persimmon Sneed remembered suddenly that his own pistol was in its holster on his saddle, he could not say how far distant in these wild, trackless woods, and that this man was a notorious offender against the law, sundry warrants for his arrest for horse-stealing having been issued at divers times and places. There had been much talk of an organized band who had assisted in these and similar exploits in secluded districts of the county, but Persimmon Sneed had given it scant credence until he beheld several armed men lagging in the rear, their amazed, uncouth faces, under their broad-brimmed hats, all weird and unnatural in the pervasive yellow glow. They had, evidently, been led to the spot by the strange flare in the heart of the woods; but Nick Peters could well enough pretermit his surprise and whatever spiritual terrors might assail him till a more convenient season for their indulgence. A more immediate danger menaced him than the bodily appearance of the devil, which he had momently expected as he gazed at the flaming water. He had seen the others of his own party approaching, and he walked quickly across the clear space to Persimmon Sneed. He was a little, slim, wiry man, with light, sleek hair, pink cheeks, high cheek-bones, and a bony but blunt nose. He had a light eye, gray, shallow, but inscrutable, and there was something feline in his aspect and glance, at once smooth and caressing and of latent fierceness.

"Why, Mr. Persimmon Sneed," he exclaimed in a voice as bland as a summer's day, "how did you-uns an' yer frien's do sech ez that?" and he pointed at the flaring pyramid on the surface of the water.

Persimmon Sneed, in his proclivity to argument, forgot his lack of a pistol and his difficult position, unarmed and alone.

"I'll hev ye ter remember I hev no dealin's with the devil. I dunno how that water war set afire, nor my friends nuther," he said stiffly.

"Whar air they?"

Nick Peters's keen, discerning eye had been covertly scanning the flickering shadows and the fluctuating slants of yellow light about them. Now he boldly threw his glance over his shoulder.

Persimmon Sneed caught himself sharply.

"They ain't hyar-abouts," he said gruffly, on his guard once more.

A look of apprehension crossed the horse-thief's face. The denial was in the nature of an affirmation to his alert suspicion; for it is one of the woes of the wicked that, knowing no truth themselves, they cannot recognize it in others, even in a transient way, as a chance acquaintance. He must needs have heed. A number of men, doubtless, well armed, were in the immediate vicinity. As he whirled himself lightly half around on his spurred heel, his manner did not conform to his look.

"Did you-uns an' them kem all the way from the valley ter view the blazin' spring?" he asked. "Looks some like hell-fire," he added incidentally, and with the tone of one familiar with the resemblance he descried.

"Naw; we-uns never hearn on it afore; I jes' run on it accidental," Sneed replied succinctly, hardly daring to trust himself to an unnecessary word; for the staring men that had gathered at a respectful distance about the blazing spring numbered nine or ten, and an ill-advised tongue might precipitate an immediate attack on the dismounted, unarmed group awaiting his return at the verge of the bluff. A genuine thrill of terror shook him as he realized that at any moment he might be followed by men as ill prepared as he to cope with the horse-thief's gang.

"I see ye rid," said Nick Peters, observing his acquaintance's spurs. "Yer frien's rid, too, I s'pose?"

Persimmon Sneed, desirous of seeming unsuspicious, merely nodded. He seemed as suspicious, in fact, as watchful, as stanch, as ready to spring, as a leopard in a cage. His thin lips were set, his alert eyes keen, his unshaven, stubbly jaws rigid, his whole body at a high tension. The man of quicker perceptions was first to drop the transparent feint, but only to assume another.

"Now, Mr. Sneed," he said, with an air of reproach and upbraiding, "do ye mean ter tell me ez ye hev kem up hyar with the sheriff or dep'ty ter nose me out; me, who hev got no home,—folks burned my house ter the yearth, namin' me 'horse-thief' an' sech,—nor frien's, nor means, nor havin's, plumb run ter groun' like a fox or sech?"

"Ef ye did"—said a gigantic ruffian who had come up, backed by a shadow twice his size, and stood assisting at the colloquy, looking over the shoulder of his wiry little chief. He left the sentence unfinished, a significant gesture toward the handle of the pistol in his belt rendering the omission of slight moment.

"Some o' them boys war wondering ef that fire out'n the water would burn," observed a fat, greasy, broad-faced lout, with a foolish, brutal grin. "It mought make out ter singe this stranger's hair an' hide, ef we war ter gin him a duckin' thar."

"Air ye a-huntin' of me, too, Mr. Sneed,—ye that war 'quainted with me in the old times on Tomahawk Creek?" Peters reiterated his demand in a plaintive, melodramatic tone, which titillated his fancy, somehow, and, like virtue, was its own exceeding great reward; for both he and Persimmon Sneed knew right well that their acquaintance amounted only to a mere facial recognition when they had chanced to pass on the country road or the village street, years before. Nevertheless, under the pressure of the inherent persuasiveness of the suggested retribution, Persimmon Sneed made haste to aver that his errand in the mountains was in no sense at the sheriff's instance. And so radical and indubitable were his protestations that Nick Peters was constrained to discard this fear, and demand, "What brung ye ter Witch-Face Mounting then, Mr. Sneed?"

"Waal, some fellows war app'inted by the county court ter view the road an' report on it," said Persimmon, "an' I kem along ter see how it mought affect my interust."

How far away, how long ago, how infinitely unimportant, seemed all those convolutions of trail and argument in which he had expended the finest flowers of his contradictory faculties, the stanch immobility of his obstinacy, his unswerving singleness of purpose in seeing only one side of a question, this afternoon, a few short hours since! The mutability of the affairs of the most immutable of human beings!

This reflection was cut short by observing the stare of blank amazement on Nick Peters's face. "Road!" he said. "Thar ain't no road."

"They air app'inted ter lay out an' report on openin' one," explained Persimmon Sneed.

Evidently Nick Peters's experience of the law was in its criminal rather than in its civil phases, but the surprise died out of his face, and he presently said, with a beguiling air of frankness, "Now, Mr. Sneed, ye see this happens right in my way of trade. Jes' tell me whar them loafers air, an' how many horses they hev got along, an' I'll gin ye the bes' beastis I hev got ter ride, an' a pair o' shootin'-irons and set ye in the valley road on the way home. Ye kin say ye war lost from them."

It is true that in this moment Persimmon Sneed remembered each of his contumacious comrades, and saw that they outnumbered by one the horse-thief's gang; he realized that they were out of leading-strings, and amply capable of taking care of themselves. He had that wincing terror which an unarmed man experiences at the sight of "shootin'-irons" in the grasp of other and antagonistic men. More than all, he looked at those hell-lighted flames, as he esteemed them, rising out of the lustrous water, and believed the jocose barbarity of the threat of the brutal henchman might be serious earnest in its execution.

But the jury of view and their companions were all unprepared for molestation in such wise as menaced them. He reflected anew upon their dismounted condition, the horses hitched at a distance, the saddles scattered on the ground in the darkness, with the holsters buckled to them and the pistols within. A sudden attack meant a successful robbery and perchance bloodshed.

"I'll die fust!" he said loudly, and he had never looked more painfully obstinate. "I'll die fust!" He lifted his quivering hand and shook it passionately in the air. "I ain't no ransomed saint, an' I know it, but afore I'll betray that thar jury o' view what's been app'inted by the county court ter lay off the damned road, I'll die fust! I ain't no ransomed saint, I ain't, but I'll die fust! I ain't no ransomed"—

"Stop, boys, stop!" cried the wiry little horse-thief, as the others gathered about Sneed with threatening eyes and gestures, while he vociferated amongst them, as lordly as if he were in his oft-time preeminence as the foreman of a jury. Nick Peters's face had changed. There was a sudden fear upon it, uncomprehended by Persimmon Sneed. It did not occur to him until long afterward that he had for the first time used the expression "a jury of view," and that the horse-thief's familiarity with the idea of a jury was only in the sense of twelve men.

Peters spoke aside to the others, only a word or so, but there was amongst them an obvious haste to get away, of which Persimmon Sneed was cognizant, albeit his head was swimming, his breath short, his eyes dazzled by the fire which he feared. His understanding, however, was blunted in some sort, it seemed to him, for he could make no sense of Nick Peters's observation as he took him by the arm, although afterward it became plain enough.

"Ye'll hev ter go an' 'bide along o' we-uns fur awhile, Mr. Sneed," he said, choking with the laughter of some occult happy thought. "Ye ain't a ransomed saint yit, but ye will be arter awhile, I reckon, ef ye live long enough."

Their shadows skulked away as swiftly as they themselves, even more furtively, running on ahead, in great haste to be gone. The fire-light slanted through the woods in quick, elusive fluctuations, ever dimmer, ever recurrently flaring, and when the jury of view and their companions, alarmed by the long absence of Persimmon Sneed, followed the strange light through the woods to the brink of the burning spring, they found naught astir save the vagrant shadows of the great boles of the trees, no longer held to their accustomed orbit, but wandering through the woods with a large freedom.

That this fire, blazing brilliantly on the surface of the clear spring water, was kindled by supernatural power was not for a moment doubted by the mountaineers who had never before heard of such a phenomenon, and the spiriting away of Persimmon Sneed they promptly ascribed to the same agency. With these thoughts upon them, they did not linger long at the spot where he had met so mysterious a fate. Their ringing halloos, with which the woods were enlivened, took on vaguely appalled cadences; the echoes came back to them like mocking shouts; and they were glad enough to ride away at last through the quiet moonlit glades, their faltering voices silent, leaving that mystic fire slowly dying where it had blazed so long on the face of the water.

* * * * *

A more extended search, later, resulting as fruitlessly, the idea that Persimmon Sneed had been in some way lured bodily within the grasp of the devil prevailed among the more ignorant people of the community; they dolorously sought to point the moral how ill the headstrong fare, and speculated gloomily as to the topic on which he had ventured to argue with Satan, who in rage and retaliation had whisked him away. But there was a class of citizens in Colbury who hearkened with elated sentiments to this story of the burning spring. A company of capitalists was promptly organized, every inch of attainable land on the mountain was quietly bought, and machinery for boring for oil was already at the spring when the news was brought to Selwyn by Hanway, who, not having seen the young stranger for the past week or so, feared he was ill. The flakes of the first snow of the season were whirling past the windows—no more on autumn leaves they looked, no more on far-off bare but azure mountains, feigning summer. The distant ranges were ghostly white. The skeleton woods near at hand were stark and black, and trembled with sudden starts, and strove wildly with the winds, and were held in an inexorable fate, and cried and groaned aloud.

Hanway was right in his surmise, for Selwyn was ill, and lay on the lounge wheeled up to the fire. His cheeks seemed still touched with color, the reflection from the ragged red smoking-jacket which he wore, but a sort of smitten pallid doom was on his brow and in his eyes. His gaze dwelt insistently on the doctor, the tall, thin practitioner of the surrounding country, who had just finished an examination and was slowly returning his spectacles to their case as he stood before the fire. It seemed as if the patient expected him to speak, but he said nothing, and looked down gravely into the red coals.

Then it was that Hanway narrated the sensation of the neighborhood. It roused Selwyn to a frenzy of excitement; his disjointed, despairing exclamations, in annotation, as it were, of the story, disclosed his own discovery of the oil, his endeavors to secure the opinion of an expert as to its value, his efforts to buy up the land, his reasons for opposing the premature opening of a road which might reveal the presence of the oil springs, when the law discriminating in favor of oil works and similar interests would later make the way thither a public thoroughfare at all events. He cried out upon his hard fate, when money might mean life to him; upon the bitter dispensation of the mysterious kindling of those hidden secluded waters to blazon his secret to the world, to enrich others through his discovery which should have made him so rich.