After a long time, when the stir of passing feet, the sound of talking and laughter, the champing and whickering of horses, had been more than usually marked to the tantalized referees, whom the county court combined to honor, they noted that an expectant stillness fell suddenly upon the crowd. Then half a dozen men pushed into the blacksmith shop, and turned about with excitement, as if to await and watch an entrance at the door. Other men stood by without. There were half a dozen heads at the little window, and the batten shutter was swinging. The bird had flown from her nest in the elder-bush to a bough of a dogwood-tree above, and perched there, with quivering, outspread wings, and a feverish, excited eye, and a harsh, querulous, ceaseless chirring. A ray of sunlight fell through a rift in the clapboards like some splendid glittering lance, reaching from the dusky, peaked roof to the “dirt-floor” beneath. The polished face of the anvil caught the beam and reflected it,—all else was dark and shadowy; even through the broad door the light was only a vista of deep green leafage and harmonious gray commingling tones, hardly definite enough to be called shadow, but of tender and modulating effects; and the plows left to be sharpened, and the wheels to be tired, and the bar on which the smith’s tools hung, were but dimly descried. Thus stepping suddenly into this shaft of light, Jake Baintree’s figure was singularly distinct, but was not instantly recognized by the judges. One of them slowly brought down the forelegs of his chair to the ground, and sat looking at him, one hand on either knee, and with a round, red, wondering face and an inquisitive eye. So long it had been since Baintree was familiarly seen in Broomsedge—going thence a stripling, returning a man—that the certainty of his identity gradually dawning on their minds was not recognition, but inference. Who else unknown would present himself to cast his vote in their midst? Who else wore so blanched a face but the jail-bird, long shut in from the sun and the wind and all the familiars of the weather? He was very tall and slender, and in the shaft of light in which he stood, the extraordinarily sharp, clear cutting of his features was apparent. His hair was black and sleek, and lay close to his narrow head; it had a fine and thrifty look, like the coat of an animal. He seemed very meek, but for all that his gray eye was uncertain, it glittered. He looked about him with a comprehensive understanding, unlike the dawdling inattention of the mountaineers. As he offered the closely rolled scroll, his vote was challenged by one of the judges, and he was quick and ready and self-possessed, and took the oath which Jethro Peake administered, with a steady manner, and evidently with a deliberate intention. He wished, perhaps, the crowd thought, to show that he was entitled to vote; that whatever they might say, the law held him innocent and denied him none of the rights of citizenship.