For some time no word was spoken. Strobe, gasping for breath, ever and again looked fearfully over his shoulder to where the languid autumnal sunshine lay still and vacant upon the expanse of the pallid corn. Pilgrims were abroad in the blue sky, and now and then a wild weird cry floated down from migratory birds, sometimes unseen, and sometimes visible only in the tiny converging lines bespeaking the files of the wild geese, all a-journeying. When wings not afar off, with a silken rustle and gleams of living light, came cleaving the sunshine and dimpling the waters of the shallows of the river, he showed a momentary interest to see the wild ducks settle and rise again, as the crack of a gun told that a death-charged missile had pierced their ranks. He glanced mechanically after their flight as with clamorous cries they took to wing. And then he did not forget to gaze once more upon the curtaining corn where that significant figure had disappeared. A gray squirrel scudded along the rail fence, then across the door-yard, with a large hickory-nut in his mouth, and vanished up the bole of the chestnut-tree, making small account of the old hound, who simply growled in an undertone, his eyes bright and liquid and his ears pricked up. The wounded man’s heavy-lidded eyes followed with a twinkle the whisking squirrel. “Ye ain’t a-goin’ hongry this winter, air ye, bubby? I’ll be bound ye be a reg’lar high liver, ef the truth war knowed.” Marcella took note of the easy, natural tone. She drew a long sigh of relief. The tense, feverish spark had died out of her eyes; they were pensively bright, as she fixed them smilingly upon her father. She believed that her quick resource had taken effect. He had seen Teck Jepson, certainly, but she thought that at the distance he could not have recognized him, and that she had averted the calamity which the sudden entrance upon the scene of the man whom he supposed dead would surely have precipitated. He might have been shocked into a relapse of his ravings and his violent mania, from which perhaps he would never have emerged again. “An’ the doctor say, ‘Keep him quiet,’” she muttered. The sunshine, and the air, and the wonderful balsamic freshness and buoyancy that seemed to pervade it, all had a tonic effect on Eli Strobe. His color became more natural, his eye was calmer, the blood in his veins seemed charged with his own bold identity. He began to feel his courage.