From the dense darkness the officer's voice, with a changed tone, a sharp note of surprise, was crying, "Look out! Look out!" The other men were stunned with amazement. They had only a vague sense of struggling mounted figures which the darkness did not suffer them to descry. And suddenly a second swift funnel-shaped glare for an instant invaded the gloom,--it came from the officer's pistol this time,--a second clamorous report rang amongst the rocks. The frightful, almost human scream of a wounded horse, a wild plunging on the side of the rocky bridle-path, and Espey and the yellow roan disappeared over the verge of the cliff. The three men standing in the road, hearing with sickening horror the dull thud far below, might judge of the terrors of the fall by the time elapsing before the sound reached their ears. VIII. The household at the Tems cabin were keeping late hours that night. Except for a certain reserve of cogitation, which at times held him silent with a burning thought in his eye, his superficially moving lips framing unspoken words, and occasionally a keen, sarcastic smile irradiating his features with the light of some satiric expectation, Cap'n Lucy had resumed his wonted aspect and mental attitude and the habits of his simple existence. "Ye fetch yer book out'n yer pocket," he said imperatively to Jasper Larrabee early in the evening, when the young man had joined them on the porch. "The gals ain't goin' ter run away,--leastwise 'thout cornsider'ble mo' incourage_mint_ 'n they hev hed. They'll keep! Ye jes' sot awhile by that thar taller dip in thar an' read yer book, an' I'll listen out hyar." The penalties of the acquisition of knowledge, from the days of the Garden of Eden to those of the hero of the horn-book, have not been few. They fell somewhat heavily on Jasper Larrabee, debarred the fresh air, heavy with perfumed dew; the vicinage of dank vines; the glimmer of the firefly in the bosky gloom; the scintillating stars in the sky above the massive mountains; the sweet, low voices of the two girls, silenced now; and the trivial chatter so dear to the heart of youth. The room, with the low red glow of the embers, was warm to-night; the tallow dip melted and sputtered and cast a wan, melancholy, ineffective radiance into the dusky spaces, rendering the aspect of the familiar furnishings strange and spare and dull, instead of all ruddily a-flicker with the dancing firelight in which he was accustomed to see them. Even the dogs had deserted the hearthstone, and went in and out with lolling tongues, and hot, sleepy eyes, and an inattentive manner. Moths and strange winged fire-worshipers, unknown to his observation hitherto, would fly in from the cool darkness without, circle swiftly about the white jet of the candle, and now and then, with a sudden dart, would fall, shriveled cinders but for the convulsive throes of lingering life, on the page of the volume.