“It was you who let the secret slip, then,” he said, his face flushing slightly. A hot, infrequent moisture had risen suddenly to his eyes. “That lovely, noble girl!” he faltered. Sanders lost the final words in his eagerness to impress his theory of the clemency extended to the intruder, or it might have been tempered. “Ye see, stranger, I hev got a tongue ez ’minds me o’ a cow a-swimmin’. Ter see the critter ker-wallop round in the water ye’d think ’twarn’t goin’ nowhar in ’special, an’ ’fore ye know it the beastis air out’n ear-shot. An’ Teck air a sorter—I-dunno-what—I tell all I know when he air around; an’ ef ye’ll b’lieve me, he got it outer me ez we-uns war a-kemin’ down hyar, ez I hed let out the secret ter Marcelly Strobe, an’ she war agin hangin’. I dunno how he guessed ’twar her ez warned ye,—jes’ kase nobody else knowed it. But that’s how kem ye ain’t dead now,—kase Marcelly war agin it.” “Is he in love with her?” “Yes,” assented Clem, “but,” with decision, “he air barkin’ up the wrong tree. Ye kin put _that_ in yer pipe an’ smoke it.” Rathburn was silent for a few moments, while Clem clatteringly completed the orderly arrangement of the tools about the forge. Then they both stood together in the road, after the great barn-like doors were closed. The moon hung near the meridian; the shadows had dwindled. There were wider avenues of frosty brilliance in the dense woods; the full splendor of the night was climaxing. The stars were few, however, and very faint; the wide spaces of the indefinitely blue sky were a desert, save here and there a vague scintillation that one might hardly distinguish as sidereal glinting or some elusive twinkle of frost in the air. Midnight, doubtless, and a cock was crowing. A muffled resonance the sound had, intimating that the fowl was housed in lieu of camping out among the althea bushes,—in imminent danger of fox and mink,—according to the recent summertide wont of the mountain poultry. A faint blare of a horn from the dense coverts of the distance, and an elfin shout of hilarity, barely discernible, betokened a coon-hunt on some far-away mountain. Then there fell again the deep silence of the windless night. When it was suddenly broken by a sharp sound, the interruption smote with a jar the senses, lulled and quiescent in the muteness of the resting nature. As Rathburn lifted his head, he discriminated the tones of raucous disputatious voices rising vehemently, and anon sinking down. There was an unconscious inquiry, perchance, in his eyes as he turned them upon Clem Sanders, who replied with a guttural chuckle, “Them boys at the barn a-quar’lin’ with Teck.” A renewed anxiety beset Rathburn. “You reckon they won’t agree with him?” “They never do, sca’cely. Teck’s all one ter hisse’f. But they don’t do nuthin’ agin his say-so. Dunno why, but they don’t. He be so durned robustious.”