He looked at his wife with a grin. She laughed aloud in tuneless scorn. The girl, gazing out of the back of the wagon as it jolted off, echoed the derision in a shrill key. And as the clumsy vehicle went creaking down the precipitous slope, beyond which could be seen only the flaming base of the opposite mountain, all luridly aflare in the windy dusk, they seemed to Alethea as if they were descending into Tophet itself. XVIII. For a long time that night Alethea sat on the cabin porch in Wild-Cat Hollow, absently watching the limited landscape seen through the narrow gap of the minor ridges superimposed upon the great mountain. The sky was dark but for the light that came from the earth. The flames were out of sight behind the intervening ranges. Weird fluctuating gleams, however, trembled over the cove below, and summoned from the darkness that stately file of peaks stretching away along the sole vista vouchsafed to the Hollow. Sometimes the illumination was a dull red suffusion, merging in the distance into melancholy gradations of tawny yellow and indeterminate brown, and so to densest gloom. Again it was golden, vivid, fibrous, divergent, like the segment of a halo about some miraculous presence, whose gracious splendor was only thus suggested to the debarred in Wild-Cat Hollow. The legions of the smoke were loosed: down in the cove, always passing in endless ranks what way the wind might will; along the mountain side, marshaled in fantasies reflecting from the fires subtle intimations of color,—of blue and red and purple; deploying upward, interposing between the constellations, that seemed themselves upon the march. There were clouds in the sky; the night was chill. Alethea gathered her shawl over her head. Now and then Tige, who sat beside her, wheezed and glanced over his shoulder at the door ajar, as if to urge her to go in. Sometimes he ran thither himself, looking backward to see if she would follow him. Then, as she continued motionless, he would come and sit beside her, with a plaintive whine of resignation. Tige was pensive and humble to-night, and was making an edifying show of repentance. On the homeward walk he had been disposed to follow the example of the moonshiner’s dogs and harass the coon, thereby becoming acquainted with the teeth of the smiling creature, and incurring Alethea’s rebukes and displeasure.