"He is mad, or somethin’s happened. I never seed him look like he does this mornin’." She turned the ox into another furrow, but stepped silently behind the plow. She sang no more that morning. Beaver Cove was really a long, narrow valley, shut in by ranges of high mountains, the serried peaks sharply outlined against the sky on clear days. The mountain-sides were broken into deep ravines, and here and there, near the base, rose sheltered nooks, in which the mountaineers dwelt, cultivating patches and eking out a primitive livelihood with game and fish. It was in one of these retreats that Ephraim Hurd and his mother lived, with all the length and breadth of the valley lying below them, and the mountains overshadowing them above. As Ephraim turned from the main settlement road into the wilder trail leading up to his house he met met Elisha Cole driving a yoke of oxen. He was whistling a dance-tune, and hailed Ephraim with a cheerful, friendly air, his whole manner betraying a suppressed exultation. Ephraim noticed it quickly, and clenched his hand on the switch he held—that manner said so plainly, "I have won her; I can afford to be friendly with you now." "Just gittin’ home?" he inquired with a jocular air. "Yes." "Oh, ho! Which one o’ the Wood girls is it, ’Mandy, or Sary Ann?" Ephraim flushed, but let the rude joke pass. "Where are you goin’?" "To the sawmill for a load o’ lumber." "Goin’ to build?" "Yes; in the fall." "Thinkin’ o’ marryin’, I s’pose?" "You’ve hit it plumb on the head, Eph’um. I am thinkin’ o’ that very thing," he said, with a loud, joyous laugh. It grated on the miserable Ephraim. He was full of one thought, which he repeated over and over to himself, "To-morrow he’ll be in prison, an’ Armindy’ll be cryin’ her eyes out." "You’ll not be at the ’stillery to-night?" he inquired stammeringly. "Yes, I will. Man alive, what ails you, Eph’um?" "Nothin’—nothin’. Hadn’t you better go to see Armindy?" Elisha eyed him suspiciously. "Me an’ Armindy understand one another," he said roughly. Ephraim rode on, his guilty conscience forbidding any more conversation. He longed to give Elisha a hint of approaching danger—to say carelessly, "I hear the raiders’ll be out tonight;" but he knew that he could not without betraying the whole truth. Breakfast awaited him, and his mother sat in the doorway, smoking, when he arrived at home—a homely woman, yellow as saffron, wrinkled as parchment, and without a tooth in her mouth. Her face lighted up at the sight of her son, and she knocked the ashes from her pipe. He had been a good son, a steady boy, and his absence alarmed her. "Law! but this is a relief!" she cried as he came in after caring for the mule. "I didn’t know you ’lowed to stay out all night." "I didn’t, neither, when I left home." "I was pestered, thinkin’ o’ the raiders. Anythin’ happened to you?" "Nothin’, mother." "Are you sick?" "No."