“Waal, sir,” he exclaimed, with a long breath. “Ye see,”—he seemed to feel that he must account for his excitement and interest,—“bein’ hid out, I hain’t hearn no news, sca’cely, sence we-uns lef’.” “Whar be Tad now?” Alethea asked suddenly, realizing that here was the man who had seen him last. He glanced quickly at her, then in perplexed dubitation at his wife. In common with many women, she was willing enough to steer when it was all plain sailing, but among the breakers she left him with an undivided responsibility. She fell to pulling corn with an air of complete absorption in her work. He made a clumsy effort at diversion. “By Gosh,” he declared, waving his hand about his head, “ef this hyar smoke don’t clar away, we-uns’ll all be sifflicated in it.” But the smoke was not now so dense. High up, its sober, dun-colored folds were suffused with a lurid flush admitted from the wintry sunset. The black, dead trees within the inclosure stood out distinctly athwart the blank neutrality of the gray, nebulous background. The little house on the rise was dimly suggested beyond the corn-field, across which skulked protean shapes of smoke,—monstrous forms, full of motion and strange consistency and slowly realized symmetry, as if some gigantic prehistoric beasts were trembling upon the verge of materialization and visibility. The wind gave them chase. It had lifted its voice in the silences. Like a clarion it rang down the narrow ravine below. But Sam Marvin, expanding his lungs to the freshened air, declared that he felt “plumb sifflicated.” “Whar be Tad now?” persisted Alethea. He spat meditatively upon the ground. “Waal, Lethe,” he said at last, “that’s more’n I know. I dunno whar Tad be now.” She detected consciousness in the manner of the woman and the girl. She broke out in a tumult of fear:— “Ye didn’t harm Tad, did ye?” with wild, terrified eyes fixed upon him. “Ye didn’t kill Tad fur a spy?—’kase he warn’t.” “Shet up, ye blatant fool!” exclaimed Mrs. Marvin, “layin’ sech ez that at we-uns’s door.” “An’ shet up yerse’f, M’ria. Least said, soonest mended,” Marvin interposed. “Look-a-hyar, Lethe Sayles, ye hev done harm enough; it may be ’kase it war right. Take sech satisfaction ez ye kin in yer notion. It never turned out right,—turned out mighty wrong. I ain’t goin’ ter answer ye nare nuther word. I hev got a question ter ax you-uns right now. Who war it ye tole ’bout findin’ out ’twar me a-moonshinin’?” She detailed tremulously the scene in the court-room, and the impression it produced was altogether at variance with her expectations. Perhaps, however, it was only natural that Sam Marvin should feel less interest in the belated disclosure, which he had thought was made months previous, than in the circumstances of the trial, Peter Rood’s death, the imprisonment of the jury, and the riot of the rescuing mob. As to his wife, she was chiefly shocked by the publicity attaching to testimony in open court.