There seemed something sinister to her in this deliberate ignoring of the singular circumstances of the encounter: she could not account for it; she could only perceive the relief in the stranger’s manner, a covert reliance on Jake Baintree’s cleverness to possess the situation. He looked down, and mechanically turned the piece of iron on the anvil with the smith’s tongs, and she knew he thus hid a smile of relish of his coadjutor’s ready retort. She was easily angered, and it was not in Eli Strobe’s daughter to be readily affrighted. She replied with that note of reproof and objection with which she had inaugurated the conversation. “I never would hev kem ter Clem Sanders’s forge a-sarchin’ fur you-uns,” she said. “I never would hev expected ter see ye hyar.” Somehow, her faculties seemed extended in some sort. She was looking at Baintree’s sharp features, cut upon the darkling shadows about him, and yet she knew that the stranger, although his head was bent down, was gazing at her with fixed and curious eyes. She did not realize the interest awakened by her face, richly dim in the shadow, like an old painting, pale no longer, but with the dull flush of excitement and anger, her brilliant clear eyes and the curling tangles of the wind-tossed hair indefinite against the folds of the dark red shawl and the obscurity without. She was feeling baffled; her nerves were strained; somewhere the terrible heights gave forth a wild, sonorous, maddened voice, full of a frantic anguish, and she was reminded of her father, and his torturing frenzy, and her errand for help, which the surprise had effaced for the instant. She suddenly flung out her arms toward them through the window. “He’s dyin’! He’s dyin’! An’ I mought ez well go ax the mountings fur holp ez you-uns!” She fell half fainting against the window-frame, hardly noticing that, with a change of expression and an abrupt start, Jake Baintree came with his deft, light step toward her. But when he was near she shrank from him, with that aversion which one experiences from the propinquity of a cold-blooded animal, and she stood erect. His voice was, full of feeling, and she was sensible of an effort at self-reproach, as a duty which she owed him as reparation. “Laws-a-massy, Marcelly, air Eli wuss? I kin do ennythin’ fur him ez Clem Sanders kin.”