She sat down on a log at the forks of the road, feeling greatly perturbed and anxious. To do what she proposed to do was to take her life in her hands. Not her step-mother alone, but Jacob Jessup, had warned her, and Jerry Price had repeated what they had said, almost in their very words. But they had only sought to curb her foolish tongue. They had never dreamed of the reckless temerity of going into the moonshiner’s den to defy him, proclaim herself the informer, and warn him to save himself. He had already threatened her; she remembered his stern, vehement face in the closing dusk. She wondered that her mind should balk from the decision so imperatively urged upon it. She seemed, as it were, to catch herself in lapses of attention. Often she looked, first at one, then at the other, of the roads,—neither visible for more than a few yards up the steep ascent,—as if she expected some diversion, some extraneous aid, in her dilemma, something to happen to decide it for her. What, she said to herself, if never again she should behold this place? What if, in taking choice of the forks of the road, she should take a path she might never tread again? And then she wondered that she should notice that the log on which she sat was a “lick log,” should speculate whether the cattle often came here for salt, should look idly into the cleft within it to see if perchance there were still salt there. It would be safer, it might be better for all, to give her testimony if it should be called for, and leave Sam Marvin to the law. “I’m fairly feared o’ him, ennyways. I’m feared ter go thar an’ let him know that he’ll git fund out, mebbe, fur I’ll tell on him ef I’m summonsed ez a witness. My step-mother’s always sayin’ I’m a meddler, an’ mebbe I be.” She listened to the sound of an outgushing roadside spring. She looked up at the new moon, which seemed to follow the lure of the wind beckoning in the trees. They shook their splendid plumes together like an assemblage of bowing courtiers, gayly bedight.