The color surged to the young man’s face. He was realizing how few friends one has in the world; how alone, how piteously solitary, amongst the multitudes of one’s kind. He felt that Mrs. Strobe and her son, and all Broomsedge besides,—microcosmic illustration,—would have cared little had the event resulted differently. One would have blustered a trifle about the outraged dignity of the law. The other would have said some primitively witty things, hardly decent of one so recently dead, and, hampered by her sense of decorum, would have thought still more witty things, which she would reluctantly have refrained from saying. In Glaston and Colbury his most lenient obituary would have been, “Poor fool!” And his memory would have served as a tradition in the mountains to warn the next addle-pate that came prying into their hidden chambers, seeking silver and gold and worldly treasures! Only this girl would have risked aught to save his life. Only this girl truly cared that his life was saved. She seemed at the moment the only friend he had in the world,—surely, surely the best! That better nature of his, in its facile oscillations, was reasserted anew. He forgot the flattering personal tribute which he had been disposed to arrogate to himself. He did not speculate about her interest in him. He began to entertain a more definite intention as he talked. There was something—it had almost been forgotten—that he must let her know. “Mebbe,” Mrs. Strobe resumed, the pause not being conducive to entertainment,—“mebbe the gal, or the n’angel, ’lowed ez ye hed been doin’ suthin’ a heap wuss, though not so foolish, ez sarch the mountings fur silver. From the way ye an’ Jake Baintree talked the night ye kem hyar ter physic Eli, me an’ Marcelly ’lowed ye mus’ hev killed a man—I don’t mean through physickin’ him, but with a pistol or suthin’—an’ war a-hidin’ from jestice.” “Killed a man! Great Lord!” exclaimed Rathburn, aghast. He turned and looked at Marcella, reproach eloquent in his eyes. Had she ever thought this of him? The girl incoherently sought to defend herself—“Leastwise, granny said—’twar granny’s word”—and fell tremulously silent. “’Peared mighty reason’ble ter me,” asserted the unabashed little dame. “Mebbe that’s what the n’angel thunk too.” “If she thought it, she didn’t say so,” he replied slowly. “But I wanted it to seem to the lynchers as if it were by accident that I went to the forge and worked. So I came over betimes, and went from here to the blacksmith’s house, and couldn’t find him; and his mother gave me permission to open the forge, and I told her I had worked there once or twice before.” “I’ll be bound Clem war one o’ the lynchers!” cried Mrs. Strobe vivaciously. “Did they swaller that tale?” she demanded abruptly. “No they didn’t,” he rejoined. “Their leader knew I had been warned—and—knew who had warned me.”