Suddenly the resonance of a horn was on the air, with a trailing refrain of echoes. So far they rang, so faint, so fine, they hardly seemed akin to the homely blast wound close at hand. The moon, rising now,—a lucent yellow sphere in the pink haze of the skies, far above the purple earth,—might naturalize such sounds. Thus rings the horn of Diana, perhaps, amidst the lunar mountains. And when the vibrations died away the ear strained to hear them again; so elfin was the final tone that the succeeding interval was less like silence than a sound which the sense was not fine enough to discern. “Wanter ride, A’minty?” Teck demanded of his small niece. Her shyness vanished instantly. She showed a rounded freckled face and shining eyes, and an assemblage of jagged gleeful teeth, as she ran, with the deft noiselessness of the barefooted gentry, almost under his horse’s heels and caught the stirrup. He reached down gravely for the cat, holding it by the middle, with its four stiff paws outstretched, and A’minty clutched his great spurred boot, and climbed up his long leg like a squirrel. He rode off, the rifle stayed upon the pommel of the saddle by the hand that held too the reins, while the little girl, nestling in his arms, looked back at the two men by the side of the fence, and the cat, which she clasped, turned its supple neck and gazed back, too, from its perch above the horseman’s shoulder. The two men followed them with a languid gaze for a moment; then Strobe was moved to seat himself slowly and circumspectly on a bowlder near the roadside. As he leaned his shoulder against the pawpaw tree close by, the locust shrilling high up among its branches suddenly ceased its iteration. “Teck air too durned smart,” he said, his own individuality reasserting itself since freed from the dominant presence of the other,—“too durned smart. Set an’ talk afore a off’cer o’ the law ’bout lynchin’ a man, an’ gin his opinion agin a jury’s verdic’ an’ a jedge’s say-so. He hev got the big-head powerful bad. Axin’, ‘_Whar’s Sam’l Keale? Whar’s—Sam’l—Keale?_’ ez ef enny cit’zen hev got enny right ter know or say, when the law’s done its sheer.” “I reckon Jake Baintree mus’ be innercent,” observed Bowles, with the mild eye and voice of the temporizer. “He war twenty when it happened, an’ he be twenty-five now—a year older ’n Teck. It tuk all that time ter jail an’ try him.” “Waal, the law is slow,—the law is slow.” The important constable deported himself with a sort of clumsy pride in the lingering exploits of the law. “Yes, sir; ’minds me of a slow mule-race all the time, the law does,” said Bowles. Strobe looked at him, surlily suspicious of a satiric intent, but the mild Bowles had evidently spoken in all good faith.