He rose suddenly, and stepped out of the door. His footfalls sounded with a sullen thud in the utter quietude of the place; a long shadow thrown by the sinking moon dogged him noiselessly as he went, until he plunged into the depths of the woods, and their gloom absorbed both him and his silent pursuer. A dank, sunless morning dawned upon the house in which Josiah Tait and his fathers had lived for nearly a hundred years: it was a humble log cabin nestled in the dense forest, about four miles from the Settlement. Fifty cleared acres, in an irregular shape, lay behind it; the cornstalks, sole remnant of the crop lost at Old Sledge, were still standing, their sickly yellow tint blanched by contrast with the dark brown of the tall weeds in a neighboring field, that had grown up after the harvested wheat, and flourished in the summer sun, and died under the first fall of the frost. A heavy moisture lay upon them at noon, this dreary autumnal day; a wet cloud hung in the tree-tops; here and there among its gray vapors, a scarlet bough flamed with sharply accented intensity. There was no far-reaching perspective in the long aisles of the woods; the all-pervading mist had enwrapped the world, and here, close at hand, were bronze-green trees, and there spectre-like outlines of boles and branches, dimly seen in the haze, and beyond an opaque, colorless curtain. From the chimney of the house the smoke rose slowly; the doors were closed, and not a creature was visible save ten hogs prowling about in front of the dwelling among the fallen acorns, pausing and looking up with that odd, porcine expression of mingled impudence and malignity as Budd Wray appeared suddenly in the mist and made his way to the cabin. He knocked; there was a low-toned response. After hesitating a moment, he lifted the latch and went in. He was evidently unexpected; the two occupants of the room looked at him with startled eyes, in which, however, the momentary surprise was presently merged in an expression of bitter dislike. The elder, a faded, careworn woman of fifty, turned back without a word to her employment of washing clothes. The younger, a pretty girl of eighteen, looked hard at him with fast-filling blue eyes, and rising from her low chair beside the fire said, in a voice broken by grief and resentment, "Ef this hyar house air yourn, Budd Wray, I wants ter git out 'n it."