If Mark Yates had found himself suddenly in close proximity to a real panther he could hardly have felt more uncomfortable than these half-covert suggestions rendered him. He shrank from dwelling upon what they seemed to portend, and he was anxious to hear no more. The recollection of sundry maternal warnings concerning the evils, moral and temporal, incident upon keeping bad company, came on him with a crushing weight, and transformed the aspect of the fascinating still-house into a close resemblance to another locality of worm and fire, to which the baffled Carter had referred. He was desirous of going, but feared that so early a departure just at this critical juncture might be interpreted by his entertainers as a sign of distrust and a disposition to stand aloof when they were deserted by their other friends. And yet he knew, as well as if they had told him, that his arrival had interrupted some important discussion of the plot they were laying, and they only waited his exit to renew their debate. While these antagonistic emotions swayed him, he sat with the others in meditative silence, gazing blankly at the pleasing rotundity of the dense shadow which he knew was the “copper,” and listening to the frantic dance and roistering melody of its bubbling, boiling, surging contents, to the monotonous trickling of the liquor falling from the worm, to the gentle cooing of the rill of clear spring water. The idea of pleasure suggested by the very sight of the place had given way as more serious thoughts and fears crowded in, and his boyish liking for these men who possessed that deadly fascination for youth and inexperience,--the reputation of being wild,--was fast changing to aversion. He still entertained a strong sympathy for those fierce qualities which gave so vivid an interest to the stirring accounts of struggles with wolves and wild cats, bears and panthers, and to the histories of bitter feuds between human enemies, in the bloody sequel of which, however, the brutality of the deed often vied with its prowess; but this fashion of squaring off, metaphorically speaking, at the preacher, and the strange insinuations of sacrilegious injury to the church--the beloved church, so hardly won from the wilderness, representing the rich gifts of the very poor, their time, their labor, their love, their prayers--this struck every chord of conservatism in his nature.