He was not the only one of the spectators who thought, in view of the magnitude of the ruin, that the whole project was necessarily ended, and who looked on Kenniston's invasion of the Cove as a thing already of the past. It was a matter of very general surprise when the "town man" suddenly reappeared upon the scene in a bounding fury, and, in the metaphorical phrase of the mountaineers, "primed and loaded for b'ar." They little dreamed how literal a reason he had to hold a grudge against Bruin. X. The season seemed full of menace to the troglodytes of the Lost Time mine. The work went on about the still as hitherto, but with added precaution--various and vain, for the limits of their ingenuity had already been reached--and with a heavy sense of presage. The old moods that had prevailed here were gone, whether of brag and bluster, or wild hilarity, or jocose horse-play, or the leisurely and languid spinning of yarns to help the hour to pass. Even the industry of old Zeb Copley, the veteran of the force, was mitigated by sudden long pauses and a disposition to hearken fearfully for unaccustomed noises, and by eager and earnest urgency that the work should be pretermitted for a time. The youngest moonshiner of all felt it a dreary world to look at with sober eyes, and, despite his morose abstinence and surly staidness, a less discerning judgment than Taft's might have foreseen the brevity of this enforced drought and the danger of a relapse, with all his reminiscences at his thick tongue's end, were he free to fare about the world without. Espey's vacant place was ever significant of the reason for it, and Larrabee would sit for hours brooding over the untoward chances of his own fortunes; his gloomy eyes on the ever-glinting line of light playing through the furnace door, his motionless pipe full only of dead ashes in his heedless hand. "Ye air a toler'ble dangersome neighbor," Taft remarked one day; for the complication of the mistaken identity had come to his ears during a sortie from his stronghold, and the threats of the deputy sheriff against the supposed Jasper Larrabee coupled with his suspicions as to moonshining. Larrabee looked up fiercely. "Move, then, ef ye don't like yer neighbor."