“Bless your bones!” cried Harshaw, contemptuously, “I broke a path nigh a yard wide in the brush, and I blazed every oak-tree I met with my hunting-knife,—look and see how hacked it is,—and I cut my name on the first beech I came across. Think I was going to get lost in this wilderness without leaving any way for my friends to find me? They know pretty well where they left me. As soon as it’s light enough they’ll be on my track.” He lied seldom, but with startling effect. The verisimilitude of his invention, which had flashed upon him at the last moment, carried conviction. The other two men looked at each other in consternation. This they thought was the secret of his ease of mind. This was the reason that he was willing to abide with them as long as they listed. These mysterious friends, these lurking hunters, might materialize at any moment when day should fairly dawn. The moonshiners asked with eager curiosity the names of the party. Marvin knew none of them, for it was a new region to him, and his vocation restricted his social opportunities. He had sprung up from the bed, and stood holding his ragged beard with one hand, and gazing with perplexed eyes at the recumbent lawyer. The frightful deed that he and his confederates had contemplated, that had seemed their only safe recourse,—to fling the intruder over a precipice, and to leave his mare grazing near, as if in his search he had fallen,—had a predestined discovery through the craft of the man who had marked the devious trail of his footsteps to their door. The moonshiner trembled, as he stood so near this pitfall into which he had almost stumbled. There had been a stir on the ladder; clumsy feet descended the rickety rungs. The movements below continued; there sounded the harsh scraping of a shovel on the rude stones of the hearth, and presently the newly kindled flames were crackling up the chimney; the flickering tallow dip was not so bright that the lines of light in the crevices of the flooring might not indicate how the room below was suddenly illumined. A smell of frying bacon presently pervaded the midnight. “By Gosh!” cried Marvin, rousing himself from his brown study with a quick start, “air M’ria demented, ter set out a-cookin’ o’ breakfus’ in the middle o’ the night?”