“Hey!” he cried out, with a gay intonation, not intermitting his labors. “Hello!” That he was a stranger, a man of medium size and slenderly built, bending over the anvil in the shadow, since the fire languished for the lack of the breath of the bellows, was the merely momentary impression made upon Jepson’s mind. His eyes fell upon a woman sitting on an inverted keg in the red light of the dusky, half-illumined room; he did not recognize her instantly, although she rose at once and advanced upon them. Clem Sanders stepped back, a look of astounded doubt, as if he could not believe his eyes, contending with the certainty in his face. For the woman was his mother. “Waal, I hev hunted fur ye, an’ hunted,” she addressed him in a tone of acrid exasperation. “An’ I hollered an’ hollered. An’ I sent leetle Silas hyar”—she pointed to a small nephew of Clem’s, a frequent visitor at the blacksmith’s house, whom Jepson had not seen until this moment, a tow-headed urchin of twelve, who sat in a crouching position on the hub of a broken wheel which lay on the floor—“ter hunt fur ye, an’ he couldn’t find ye. Hyar’s a strange man in the Cove kem up ter the house a-sarchin’ fur ye, an’ wantin a leetle job o’ blacksmithin’ done, an’ ye can’t be rooted out from nowhar!” She was a tall, angular, thin-faced woman, with an expression of gravity and care in her lined features, and she had a tone that boded the rigors of domestic inquisition as she demanded, “Whar hev ye been?” Clem’s wildly anxious glance at his tools in the stranger’s hands availed nothing. The account of himself was evidently the essential preliminary. Jepson touched his shoulder with his own as a secret warning, as they stood side by side in the door of the forge, but had the disclosure been far more significant the hap-hazard Clem would have nevertheless blurted it out as he did. “In the barn,” he replied. “Ye air tellin’ a story,” his mother retorted, with a manner reprehensive certainly, but with a coolness as if contemplating an offense of infinitely multiplied precedents. “I sent leetle Silas ter the barn, an’ he ’lowed ye warn’t thar, though he hearn harnts talkin’ in the loft, an’ they made him ’feard. An’,” lifting her bony arm, shaking her forefinger, and lowering her voice impressively, as if fairly cornering him, “I sent him _agin_ ter climb up inter the loft, ez no harnts would hurt him with me so nigh, an’ he kem back, an’,” triumphantly, “he say ye warn’t thar, nuther.”