Only idle wrath, an idle threat, void of even the vaguest intention. They all knew that at the time. But the significance of the scene was altered in the light of after events. Mink’s fate had mounted with him, and the mare carried double as he rode out of Piomingo Cove. III. The iterative echoes of the shooting-match, sharply jarring from mountain to mountain, from crag to crag, evoked a faint reverberation even in the distant recesses of Wild-Cat Hollow. Alethea Sayles, sitting at her loom on the porch of the little log cabin, paused, the shuttle motionless in her deft hand, to listen. All aloof from the world was Wild-Cat Hollow, a limited depression, high up on the vast slope of the Great Smoky. It might have seemed some secret nook, some guarded fastness, so closely did the primeval wilderness encompass it, so jealously did the ridgy steeps rise about it on every hand. It was invisible from the valley below, perhaps too from the heights above. And only a glimpse was vouchsafed to it of the world from which it was sequestered: beyond a field, in a gap of the minor ridges superimposed upon the mountain, where the dead and girdled trees stood in spectral ranks among the waving corn, might be seen a strip of woods in the cove below, a glint of water, a stately file of lofty peaks vanishing along the narrow skyey vista. Sunrise and sunset,—the Hollow knew them not: a distant mountain might flare with a fantasy of color, a star of abnormal glister might palpitate with some fine supernal thrill of dawn; but for all else, it only knew that the night came early and the day broke late, and in many ways it had meagre part in the common lot. The little log cabin, set among its scanty fields, its weed-grown “gyarden spot,” and its few fruit-trees, was poor of its kind. The clapboards of its roof were held in place by poles laid athwart them, with large stones piled between to weight them down. The chimney was of clay and sticks, and leaned away from the wall. In a corner of the rickety rail fence a gaunt, razor-backed hog lay grunting drowsily. Upon a rude scaffold tobacco leaves were suspended to dry. Even the martin-house was humble and primitive: merely a post with a cross-bar, from which hung a few large gourds with a cavity in each, whence the birds were continually fluttering. Behind it all, the woods of the steep ascent seemed to touch the sky. The place might give a new meaning to exile, a new sentiment to loneliness. Seldom it heard from the world,—so seldom that when the faint rifle-shots sounded in the distance a voice from within demanded eagerly, “What on yearth be that, Lethe?” “Shootin’ fur beef, down in the cove, I reckon, from thar firin’ so constant,” drawled Alethea. “Ye dunno,” said the unseen, unexpectedly, derisive of this conjecture. “They mought be a-firin’ thar bullets inter each other. Nobody kin count on a man by hisself, but a man in company with a rifle air jes’ a outdacious, jubious critter.”