That night a wind arose; a great, sonorous, declamatory voice it had. Some rude iconoclastic spirit was rife in its midst, and threatened alike roof-tree and hearth-stone. The shutters were closed; the door was barred; but its heavy touch was on the walls, and every timber shook. The sense of it pervaded the deep unconsciousness that had hitherto enwrapped Eli Strobe. The continuity of the knowledge of cause and effect was broken; he did not realize why he was awake, what turmoil affected his perceptions; he only knew again himself for himself, and talked and raged incoherently, the strength of delirium in his muscles. The little dame and the two frightened girls were alone to experience these undreamed-of terrors; for since the invalid had been so quiescent, and all had been done that was needful, the helping neighbors had felt their services superfluous, and had betaken themselves home. His mind had gone back to the scene of the disaster. As the thunder rolled he would lift himself in bed, ghastly with his bloody, bandaged head, his wild, unreasoning eye, and with his strong right hand upheld warningly as he listened. “Hear! hear!” he would cry. “Hear ’em gallopin’ thar horses! Down the very throat o’ the law!” And when a new peal sounded louder and deeper than before, he sprang up, catching at an imaginary bridle, declaring that he had unhorsed Teck Jepson and had broken his neck. And there was Teck now, in hell!—so surprised to be there, and so taken aback to see the devil, that Eli Strobe, who had sent him thither, could not refrain from laughing. He held his sides while his wild shrieks of frenzied mirth filled the cabin, shriller than the wind, more turbulent than the thunder, as persistent as the rain that came down in torrents upon the roof. The women clung together in terror, and with trembling lips devised futile expedients to quiet him. But the vaunted “yerb tea” failed; and although at first some vague recognition of Marcella, or Isabel, or his mother would prevail, and after a wild sidelong stare and a doubtful mutter he would consent to lie back upon the pillow and have the quilts drawn close about his shoulders again, he would soon forget them, and would spring up anew; and presently he recognized them no more. He declared now that one, then another, was Teck Jepson, and should be arrested on the spot. And as a ghastly flash of lightning made a mockery of the gleam of the little tallow dip and the smouldering fire, and filled the room with a quivering blue flare of a blinding intensity, he began to cry out that he was dead,—he was a dead man; that Teck Jepson had killed him, and nobody cared to avenge him. But he would walk, he protested with a terrible fury; as a ghost he would walk this earth. He would make the gallows seem a kind fate to the man who had cheated it, and who had torn him from life that was so fair and full, and had cast him into some outer darkness where there was gnashing of teeth; and he