He stood off from the rock for an instant, his big white wool hat in one hand, the other in his leather belt where that formidable array of weapons still gleamed. His head was thrown back from the loose collar of his blue-checked shirt; his straight hair was tossed from his brow; his gray eyes, scornfully bitter, surveyed the dripping walls,--so dark that in the recesses here and there clusters of bats hung head downward, dimly descried, awaiting the night,--the rugged obtrusion of rock through the clay, the chill, chill flowing of the brown water in the channel below, as ceaseless, as cold, as heedless, as relentless, as in the days of yore when it broke its allotted bounds, rose into alien hewn-out caverns, and flooded the mine, wrecking the humble industry of man, wresting away with its grasping currents two struggling human lives, and carrying not even a gruesome memory or token of its deeds upon its sleek waves out into the sunshine, and the free air, and the genial warmth of the upper world. "'Tain't much I hev axed,--this hole ter starve an' die in,--but mebbe it's too much!" Then, turning, with an eye alight, and a furious flush that made him look all at once well and strong and alert and reckless again, "But tell whar I be hid out--tell--tell who ye want! Tell ennybody--everybody! Cap'n Lucy! the sher'ff! Taft! Jasper Lar'bee!" And what miracle was this! The silent, impassive, reserved, reticent Julia fixed her eyes upon him for a moment, amazed, troubled, and then, as she suddenly comprehended, full of a keen but tender reproach. And until that moment he had not known how beautiful those much-vaunted eyes could be. The next they were full of tears, and Julia, leaning back against the wall behind her, had burst into sobs. "Tell! Why, Jack Espey, how kin ye think I could be made to tell whar ye be hid out?" She turned her head to look at him again with hurt and indignant amazement. "I'd die first! Powder an' lead"--she hesitated for hyperbole that might express this impossibility--"all the powder and lead the men shot away in the war times couldn't git a word from me o' what I hev fund out this evenin'!" "I know it!" he protested, coming up close to her, as she sat on the ledge. "I oughtn't ter hev said that, but ye see, Julia, I feel so s'picious, sometimes; I be so hunted an' harried, an' nobody keers fur me or whar I be--'ceptin' the sher'ff." He lifted his eyebrows, with a fleering laugh at his own forlorn estate. "I keer," said Julia stoutly. "I won't tell nobody whar ye be hid out,--not even dad, nor Luther, nor nobody, 'ceptin' Ad'licia." He gasped in haste for utterance. He caught at her hand as if he were drowning,--as if she might be gone before he could stay her for a word.