Crane was desperately silent. "He's a handsome man, too, and I suspect it's a genuine love affair," Mrs. Bridges went on, fanning herself complacently. Back and forth, walking slowly and conversing in a soft minor key, save when now and then Miss Moyne laughed melodiously, the promenaders passed and repassed, Peck never deigning to glance toward Crane, who had forgotten both Sappho and the moon. Miss Moyne did, however, once or twice turn her eyes upon the silent poet. "Oh," went on Miss Crabb, filling Dufour's ears with the hurried din of her words, "Oh, I'm going to write a novel about this place. I never saw a better chance for local color, real transcripts from life, original scenes and genuine romance all tumbled together. Don't you think I might do it?" "It does appear tempting," said Dufour. "There's Tolliver for instance, a genuine Chilhowee moonshiner." He appeared to laugh inwardly as he spoke. Indeed he heard the plash of water and the dripping, shivering mountaineer stood forth in his memory down there in the gorge. "A moonshiner!" gasped Miss Crabb, fluttering the leaves of her note-book and writing by moonlight with a celerity that amazed Dufour. "Potentially, at least," he replied evasively. "He looks like one and he don't like water." "If he _does_ turn out to be a real moonshiner," Miss Crabb proceeded reflectively to say, "it will be just too delicious for anything. I don't mind telling you, confidentially, Mr. Dufour, that I am to write some letters while here to the _Chicago Daily Lightning Express_. So I'd take it as a great favor if you'd give me all the points you get." "That's interesting," he said, with a keen scrutiny of her face for a second. "I shall be glad to be of assistance to you." He made a movement to go, but lingered to say: "Pray give me all the points, too, will you?" "Oh, are you a journalist too?" she inquired, breathlessly hanging over him. "What paper--" "I'm not much of anything," he hurriedly interposed, "but I like to know what is going on, that's all." He walked away without further excuse and went up to his room. "I've got to watch him," soliloquized Miss Crabb, "or he'll get the scoop of all the news. Give him points, indeed! Maybe so, but not till after I've sent them to the _Lightning Express_! I'll keep even with him, or know the reason why." It was a grand panorama that the climbing moon lighted up all around Mount Boab, a vast billowy sea of gloom and sheen. Here were shining cliffs, there dusky gulches; yonder the pines glittered like steel-armed sentinels on the hill-tops, whilst lower down they appeared to skulk like cloaked assassins. Shadows came and went, now broad-winged and wavering, again slender and swift as the arrows of death. The hotel was bright within and without. Some one was at the grand piano in the hall making rich music--a fragment from Beethoven,--and a great horned owl down the ravine was booming an effective counterpoint.