Doaks glanced at him impatiently, and then turned his eyes away upon the landscape. Fascinations invisible to the casual gaze revealed themselves to him day by day. He had made discoveries. In some seeming indefiniteness of the horizon he had found the added beauty of distant heights, as if, while he looked, the softened outline of blue peaks, given to the sight of no other creature, were sketched into the picture. Once a sudden elusive silver glinting, imperceptible to eyes less trained to the minutiæ of these long distances, told him the secret source of some stream, unexplored to its head-waters in a dark and bosky ravine. Sometimes he distinguished a stump which he had never seen before in a collection of dead trees, girdled long ago, and standing among the corn upon so high and steep a slope that the slant justified the descriptive gibe of the region, “fields hung up to dry.” The sky too was his familiar; he noted the vague, silent shapes of the mist that came and went their unimagined ways. He watched the Olympian games of the clouds and the wind. He marked the lithe lengths of a meteor glance across the August heavens, like the elastic springing of a shining sword from its sheath. The moon looked to meet him, waiting at his tryst on the bald. He had become peculiarly sensitive to the electric conditions of the atmosphere, and was forewarned of the terrible storms that are wont to break on the crest of the great mountain. Often Mink appealed to him as he did now, imputing a certain responsibility. “Enny thunder in that thar cloud?” he demanded, with the surly distrust which accompanies the query, “Does your dog bite?” “Naw; no thunder, nor rain nuther.” “I’m powerful glad ter hear it, ’kase I don’t ’sociate with this hyar bald when thar’s enny lightning around.” He had heard the many legends of “lightning balls” that are represented as ploughing the ground on Piomingo, and he spoke his fears with the frankness of one possessed of unimpeachable courage. “That’s what makes me _de_spise this hyar spot,” he said, irritably. “Things ’pear so cur’ous. I feel like I hev accidentally stepped off’n the face o’ the yearth. An’ I hev ter go mighty nigh spang down ter the foot o’ the mounting ’fore I feel like folks agin.” He glanced downward toward the nearest trees that asserted the right of growth about this strange and barren place. “Ye can’t git used ter nothin’, nuther. Them cur’ous leetle woods air enough ter make a man ’low he hev got the jim-jams ez a constancy. I dunno _what’s_ in ’em! My flesh creeps whenever I go through ’em. I always feel like ef I look _right quick_ I’ll see suthin’ awful,—witches, or harnts, or—I dunno!” He looked down at them again, quickly; but he was sure not quickly enough.