Dan made no answer. He did not like to lose all these nice things on which he had set his heart, but there was old Jordan’s “haunt” (that is a term which some people in the South apply to what we call a ghost), of which he stood in great fear. He could not then make up his mind just what he would do in the future, so he said nothing more, and neither did his father. They finished their walk in silence, and reaching the cabin, went to bed and tried to go to sleep. But that was for a long time quite impossible. The remembrance of their evening’s experience kept them awake, and it was not until the gray streaks of dawn began to stream in through the cracks in the cabin walls, that they fell into an uneasy slumber. They arose at the usual hour, however, and David chopped wood while his mother cooked breakfast, and Dan loafed and Godfrey sat on the bench and smoked and meditated. The meal over, Dan shouldered his rifle and disappeared, and Godfrey, because he could not make up his mind to do anything else, resumed his pipe and his meditations, from which he was aroused by the sight of a stranger coming along the road from the direction of General Gordon’s. Godfrey looked closely at him, and saw that he was one of the two young men whom he had seen land from the steamer Emma Deane on the previous day. He carried a gun of some description in his hands, a game-bag hung over his shoulder, and he was dressed in a hunting suit of the latest and most fashionable cut. He walked leisurely along, stopping now and then and looking about as if he were searching for some object to try his skill upon. “Humph!” sneered Godfrey, who at once took a dislike to the hunter on account of his good clothes. “Yer a nice lookin’ chap to be loafin’ about with a gun in yer hands. I’ll take my ole Betsey Jane an’ beat the hind sights off’n a hul army of yer. That’s jest what makes me so savage agin everybody. What this feller’s clothes cost would keep me an’ my family in grub all the winter!” While Godfrey was talking thus to himself, the stranger stopped again, raised his gun quickly to his shoulder and fired, the weapon making a report scarcely louder than that of an ordinary gun cap. Godfrey sneered again, and was about to give it as his private opinion that such a load as that would not kill anything, when he was surprised to see a squirrel leave the very topmost branch of a tall hickory that stood by the roadside, and come to the ground dead. The hunter loaded his weapon before he went to pick up his game, and Godfrey saw that he carried a breech-loader. He became interested at once, and began to have some respect for the stranger who had shown himself to be no mean marksman. He arose and took his pipe out of his mouth. “How do?” said he, as he went to meet the hunter. “I ’lowed that ye wouldn’t get nothing that shot, no how. Ye wouldn’t take no offence if I should ax ye to let me see that we’pon o’ your’n?”