A glimmer of light quivered on the brown rafters; it grew momently less flickering; it revealed the wretched apartment, the slanting floor, one or two pallets rolled up against the wall. And finally, as from a trap-door of a theatre, through the rude aperture in the floor, Jeb’s gaunt black head appeared among the shadows which the tallow dip, that he carried in his hand, could not dispel. He came in, and placed the sputtering light on a strut that supported one of the rafters, and was converted to shelf-like utility. Marvin followed, sitting down on the foot of Harshaw’s bed. His face was more lowering than that of the other man; he leaned his hands ponderingly on his knees, his elbows turned outward, and bent his eyes on the floor in deep meditation. There was a short silence. “Hello?” said Harshaw interrogatively, raising himself on his elbow and boldly taking the initiative. “Anything the matter?” Jeb sat down on a keg close to the chimney, and the perturbed hosts glanced at one another. “Waal, stranger,” said Marvin, “ye hev gone an’ put us in a peck o’ troubles, ter kem interruptin’ us in this fur place, whar we hev been hunted an’ hounded ter.” “Yes, sir,” remarked “hongry Jeb,” “same ez the varmint, ez be specially lef’ out’n salvation by the Bible.” Marvin cast a glance over his shoulder at Harshaw. Then he continued, evidently striving to put the worst possible interpretation on the situation and to work himself into a rage: “We-uns air a-thinkin’ ez ye mought be a spy fur the revenuers.” Harshaw let his head fall back on the pillow. His resonant, burly laugh rang out, jarring the rafters, and rousing in its hearty jocundity the reciprocity of a smile on “hongry Jeb’s” cadaverous face. Even Marvin, casting another hasty look over his shoulder, was mollified. “Ye’d better be keerful how ye wake Philetus up, with his nap haffen out; ye’ll ’low ye air neighborin’ a catamount,” he admonished his guest. “I tell you,” said Harshaw, clasping his hands behind his yellow head as he lay at length, “you fellows live up here in these lonesome woods till your brains are addled. Why on earth would I, single-handed, mind you, a lawyer, a member of the legislature, with a good big farm of my own and half a dozen houses in town,” (he had never before thought to brag of them,) “risk myself here, for the little reward I could get _if_—mighty big _if_, folks—if I could get away again?” He lifted his eyes, with a bluff challenge of fair play. “You know who _I_ am. You’ve seen me in Shaftesville. You know my farm down there in Kildeer County, on Owl Creek. Spy! Shucks! it makes me laugh. Do the quality often come spying for the revenuers in this neighborhood?” Ten days ago he could not have believed that, however closely harried, his tongue would ever so forget its formula as thus to repudiate his alignment with the Plain People, and to claim to rank with “the quality.”