“Owen Haines,” cried Peter Knowles suddenly, “hev that thar man what calls hisself a juggler-man done ennythin’ but harm sence he hev been in the Cove an’ the mountings?” Haines, the color flaring to his brow, laid quick hold on his shingle-knife and rived the wood apart; his breath came fast and his hand shook, although his work was steady. He was all unnoting that Peter Knowles was watching him with an unguarded eye of open amusement, and a silent sneer that left long tobacco-stained teeth visible below the curling upper lip. But a young fool’s folly is often propitious for the plans of a wiser man, and Knowles was not ill pleased to descry the fact that the relations between the two could not admit of friendship, or tolerance, or even indifference. “Fust,” he continued, “he gin that onholy show in the church-house, what I never seen, but it hev set folks powerful catawampus an’ hendered religion, fur the devil war surely in it.” Owen Haines took off his hat to toss his long fair hair back from his brow, and looked with troubled, reflective eyes down the long aisles of the gold-flecked verdure of the woods. “Then he tricked you-uns somehows out’n yer sweetheart, what ye hed been keepin’ company with so long.” Haines shook his head doubtfully. “We-uns quar’led,” he said. “I dunno ef he hed nuthin’ ter do with it.” “Did Phemie an’ you-uns ever quar’l ’fore he kem ter Sims’s?” demanded the sly Knowles. They had never quarreled before Haines “got religion” and took to “prayin’ fur the power.” He had never thought the juggler chargeable with these differences, but the fallacy now occurred to him that they might have been precipitated by Royce’s ridicule of him as a wily device to rid her of her lover. His face grew hot and angry. There was fire in his eyes. His lips parted and his breath came quick. “He hev toled off Tynes too,” resumed Knowles, with a melancholy intonation. “He hev got all the lures and witchments of the devil at command. I kem by the church-house awhile ago, an’ I hearn him an’ Tynes in thar, speakin’ an’ readin’. An’ I sez ter myself, sez I, ‘Pore Owen Haines, up yander in the woods, hev got nuther his frien’, now, nor his sweetheart. Him an’ Phemie keeps company no mo’ in this worl’.’” There was a sudden twitch of Haines’s features, as if these piercing words had been with some material sharpness thrust in amongst sensitive tissues. It was all true, all true. The iron was hot, and Peter Knowles struck. “That ain’t the wust,” he said, leaning forward and bringing his face with blazing eyes close to his companion. “This hyar juggler hev killed a man, an’ flung his bones inter the quicklime in my rock-house.”