For a long time she interrogated the blackness about her with wide open eyes. The house was strangely still. She could hear the movement and squawk of a chicken in one of the trees in the side yard when some fellow lodger disturbed it, or a sudden breeze shook the limb upon which it roosted. She wondered if the boys had come back yet and slipped in quietly. Had she slept at all? About eleven o'clock there arose an unquiet, gusty, yet persistent wind, that moved the cedar tree against the edge of the porch roof and set it complaining. For a time it moaned and protested like a man under the knife. Then its deep baritone voice began to cry out as though it were calling upon her. The tree had long ceased to mean anything other than Creed to Judith, and now its outcry aroused her to an absolute terror. Again and again as the wind the tree, so those tones shook her heart with their pain and love and anguish of entreaty. Finally she arose in a kind of torture, slipped on her clothes and went through all the rooms. They were silent and empty. Not a bed had been disturbed. She breathed loud and short in irrepressible excitement. "They're all over at the still," she whispered, clutching at the breast of her dress, and shivering. But the old man never went near the still, she knew that. For a while she struggled with herself, and then she said, "I'll just go and listen outside of Uncle Jep's door. That won't do any harm. Ef so be he's thar, then the boys is shore at the still. Ef he ain't----" She left her mentally formed sentence unfinished and, on feet that fear winged, stole through the side yard, across the long, lush, uncut grass to her uncle's door. The old man must have been a light sleeper, or perhaps he was awake before she approached, for he called out while she yet stood irresolute, her hand stretched toward the big wooden latch. "Who's thar?" Startled, abashed, she replied in a choked, hesitating tone. "It's only me--Jude. I reckon I'm a fool, Uncle Jep. I know in reason there ain't nothin' the matter. But I jest couldn't sleep, and I got up and looked through the house, and the boys is all gone, and I got sorter scared." He was with her almost instantly. "I reckon they're all over 'crost the gulch," he said in his usual unexcited fashion, though she noted that he did not go back into his room, but joined her where she lingered in the dark outside. "Of course they air," she reassured herself and him. "Whar else could they be?" "Now I'm up, I reckon I mought go over yon myself," the old man said finally. "My foot hurts me this evening; I believe I'll ride Pete. I took notice the boys had all the critters up for an early start in the mornin'."