She paused in the work, looking drearily about her. The wind tossed her garments; she was fain at times to catch her bonnet by the curtain, to hold it. The smoke had taken flight; dragons, winged horses, griffins, forgotten myths, all scurrying away before the strong blast. And still they came and went, and rose once more, for the wind that lifted the smoke fanned the fire. The flames were in sight along the base of Big Injun Mounting, writhing now like fiery serpents, and now rising like some strange growth in quivering blades; waving and bowing, appearing and disappearing, and always extending further and further. They seemed so alive, so endowed with the spirit of destruction, so wantonly alert, so merciless to the fettered mountain that tossed its forests in wild commotion, with many a gesture of abject despair, and spite of all could not flee. Their strong, tawny color contrasted with the dull garnet of the bare boughs and the deep, sombre green of the solemn pines. The smoke carried from the fire a lurid reflection, fading presently in the progress across the landscape of the long, dun-colored flights. The wintry sunset was at hand. The sky was red and amber; the plains of the far west lay vaguely purple beneath. On Walden’s Ridge, rising against the horizon, rested the sun, from which somehow the dazzling fire seemed withdrawn, leaving a sphere of vivid scarlet, indescribably pure and intense, upon which the eye could nevertheless gaze undaunted. Pensive intimations there were in its reduced splendors; in the deep purple of Chilhowee, in the brown tints of the nearer ranges. Something was gone from the earth,—a day,—and the earth was sad, though it had known so many. And the night impended and the unimagined morrow. And thus the averted Future turns by slow degrees the face that all flesh dreads to see. The voice of lowing cattle came up from the cove. The fires in the solitudes burned apace. “I hev axed ye time an’ agin, Sam Marvin, whar Tad be. Ef ye don’t tell, I’ll be bound ter b’lieve ye moonshiners hev done suthin’ awful ter him.” They were about to depart on their journey. Already Serena was on her uneasy bed of corn in the ear. But the pullet’s life had been made up chiefly of rough jouncing, and never having heard of a wagon with springs, she was in a measure incapable of appreciating her deprivation. She had wrapped a quilt of many colors about her shoulders, for the evening air was chill, and she looked out of the opening in the back of the canvas-covered wagon in grotesque variegation. Mrs. Marvin was climbing upon the wheel to her seat on the board in front. The moonshiner stood by the head of one of the mules, busy arranging the simple tackling. He looked with a sneer at Alethea over the beast’s neck. “An’ I hev tole ye, Lethe Sayles, ez I dunno whar Tad be now. I’m a mighty smart man, sure enough, but ’twould take a smarter one ’n me ter say whar Tad be now, an’ what he be a-doin’.”