“Ye know my name, ’pears like, better ’n yourn,” he grinned, with a guttural, foolish laugh. As the boy spoke Harshaw was impressed anew with the change in his fate; the creature of cuffs and curses, who had been the very derision of perverse circumstances, was a marvelous contrast to the well-fed, fat, kindly-tended lad who leered good-humoredly from where he lounged against the great chimney. Yet despite this attestation of benignant impulses harbored here, there was the rifle, which had had such importunate concern for his attention, standing ready at the woman’s right hand. “Well, madam,” said the politician, “I have been about right smart in the mountains, and I have partaken of the cheer around many a hearth-stone, but this is the first time I have ever been invited to look down the muzzle of a rifle.” She winced visibly at this reflection upon her hospitality, as she knelt on the hearth, slipping the knife under the baking pones on the hoe, and turning them with a dexterous flip. “I wouldn’t have believed it,” continued Harshaw. “I have never heard of anybody but law-breakers giving themselves to such practices,—moonshiners and the like.” The woman suddenly lifted her face, her dismayed jaw falling at the significant word. Harshaw could have laughed aloud. The simple little riddle was guessed. And yet the situation was all the graver for him. There was a step outside; the door opened for only a narrow space; darkness had fallen; the room was illumined by the flaring flames darting up the chimney; he knew that he was scrutinized sharply from without, and now and then he heard the sound of voices in low conference. It was well, doubtless, that the secret petitions he preferred to the powers of the earth and the air for the utter confusion and the eternal destruction of the mountain hunters who had made so slight and ineffective a search for him—or perhaps none at all—could not be realized, or his misfortune might have engendered far-reaching and divergent calamity, disproportionate in all eyes save his own. He knew now that he had stumbled upon a gang of moonshiners, and had been taken for a revenue spy, or a straggler from a raiding party. How to escape with this impression paramount, or indeed how to escape at all, was a question that bristled with portentous dubitation. He was content to pretermit it in the guarded watchfulness that absorbed his every faculty, as one by one the men strode in to the number of four or five, each casting upon him a keen look, supplementing the survey through the door. One of them he suddenly recognized. “I have seen you before,” he said, with a jolly intonation. “This is Sam Marvin, ain’t it?” The owner of the name was discomfited when confronted with it, and seeing this, Harshaw was sorry that he had, with the politician’s instinct, made a point of remembering it.