“Trouble to Beeman’s, now.” “Yea, verily,” said Allen to Newton, whose face flashed at the boy’s words. “Rise up and gird on your swords, you and your sons. The Philistines are upon you even as it has been prophesied. Felton and his gang of land thieves. The son of Belial was warned to depart from the land of the elect, but he heeds not those who cry in the wilderness. Confound the rascal! He must be ‘viewed’! You and your two boys take your guns and jog down that way, and as you go cut a goodly scourge of blue beech, for verily there shall be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. We’ll rally the Callenders, and Jones, and Harrington, and North, and my friend Beeman here will tell Job. We’ll gather a good dozen. Enough to mete out the vengeance of the Lord to eight Yorkers, I’ll warrant!” Strange and abrupt as were the transitions from Allen’s favorite Scriptural manner of speech to the ordinary vernacular, no one thought of laughing. As the boy dismounted, Allen said: “You go straight to Job and do as he tells you;” and as he rode away called back, “everybody lay low and keep dark till you hear the owl hoot.” Soon Nathan turned from the road into an obscure footpath that led in the direction of Job Carpenter’s cabin. The gloom and loneliness of the mysterious forest, through which the narrow footpath wound, so pervaded it that the song birds seemed awed to silence, and the woodpeckers tapped cautiously, as if afraid of being heard by some enemy. No boy, even of backwoods breeding, would care to loiter had his errand been less urgent, and he gave but a passing notice to things ordinarily of absorbing interest. A mother partridge fluttered along the ground in simulated crippledness while her callow brood vanished among the low-spread leaves. A shy wood bird disclosed the secret of her nest as he sped by. Against a dark pine gleamed the fiery flash of a tanager’s plumage. A wood mouse stirred the dry leaves. His own foot touched a prostrate dead sapling, and the dry top rustled unseen in the wayside thicket. There was a sound of long, swift bounds, punctuating the silence with growing distinctness, and a hare, in his brown summer coat, wide-eyed with terror, flashed like a dun streak across the path just before him, and close behind the terrified creature a gray lynx shot past, eager with sight and scent of his prey, closing the distance with long leaps. Before the intermittent scurry of footfalls had faded out of hearing they ceased, and a wail of agony announced the tragical end of the race. The cry made him shiver, and he could but think that the lynx might have been a panther and the hare a boy.