The small Silas, disingenuous beyond his years and size, turned his eyes, which were of a very light color, and with a superabundance of white, that made them marked even in the duskiness, with a pleading apprehensiveness upon his uncle, but the excited, confused Clem was quaking, even at this moment, with the danger overpast. How closely discovery had approached the vigilantes in the barn! He had not his wits sufficiently about him to reproach his mother for believing the deceptive Silas rather than himself. “Whar hev ye been?” she demanded anew. Then with the impetus of her long pent-up rebukes constraining her she went on without waiting for an answer. “Hyar be this hyar man, obligated ter hev his tools mended, kase his work calls him betimes ter-morrer by daylight, an’ him a stranger in the Cove, an’ he ’lowed mebbe he mought git a leetle blacksmithin’ done, though ’twar arter dark, bein’ ez his work called him far up in the mountings by daylight. An’ me an’ Silas kem down hyar ter see ef we-uns could find yer tools, bein’ ez ye war nowhar, so ez he could patch his pick hisse’f. He ’lowed he knowed suthin’ ’bout blacksmithin’”— “Mighty leetle, I’ll be bound!” cried Clem, his professional consciousness restored by this arrogation on the part of the stranger. He dropped the hang-dog look that he had worn under his mother’s lecture, and strode with his habitual easy, confident air across the room and stood beside the anvil, watching the amateur smith’s performance with an air of silent, repressed ridicule and half-smiling scorn. “Go ahead,” he observed, with affected encouragement, as the young stranger looked up and hesitated. “What air ye goin’ ter do now,—het it some mo’?” as the other turned doubtfully toward the fire. “Ho! ho!” with a manner of bluff superiority. “Shucks! Git out o’ the way, my frien’. Lemme show ye what blacksmithin’ air.” He shouldered the stranger summarily from his own post at the anvil, then paused to take up the bit of iron, on which the amateur had been working, and shook his head smilingly, as if with an unspeakable contempt, as he carefully surveyed this handiwork. He turned and thrust it amongst the coals, evidently rejecting it as a mere beginning, and starting the process anew. “I’m willing,” the stranger said, with a laugh, as if accepting good-naturedly this cavalier criticism; and Jepson divined that he did not consider proficiency at the anvil the chief object of existence. The amateur smith, however, offered to work the bellows, but Clem, with a contemptuous “Don’t take two men ter do a leetle job like this,” discouraged further proffers of assistance, and then bent himself to the work with as complete an absorption as if there were no band of expectant, eager, bloodthirsty men waiting at the barn for a signal, and as if Teck Jepson’s presence, as he stood in the door, were not more significant than his daily loitering there.