"Oh, how I wish he'd stop moonshinin' an' sech!" She moved so suddenly on the edge of the precipice, as she lifted her hands and drew down her sunbonnet over her face, that Ben's glance was full of terror. "Move back a mite, Nar'sa; ye'll go over the bluff, fust thing ye know! Yes, Con's mighty wrong ter be moonshinin'. The law is the right thing. It purtects us. It holps us all. We-uns owe it obejiunce, like I hearn a man say in a speech down yander in"-- "The law!" cried Narcissa, with scorn. "Con Hite kin tromp on the revenue law from hyar ter the witch-face, fur all I keer. Purtects! I pity a man ez waits fur the law ter purtect him; it's a heap apter ter grind him ter pomace. _I_ mind moonshinin' 'kase it's dangersome fur the moonshiners. The law--I don't count the fibble old law!" She sat brooding for a time, her face downcast. Then she spoke in a low voice:-- "Whyn't ye find out, Ben? What ails ye ter be so good-fur-nuthin'? Thar be other folks beside Con ez air law-breakers." She edged nearer to him, laying her hand on his arm. "Ye've got to find out, Ben," she said insistently. "Keep an eye on that thar valley man, an' find out all 'bout'n him. Else the killin' 'll be laid ter Con, who never done nuthin' hurtful ter nobody in all his life." "The idee jes' streck me ter-day whenst I viewed him along about that road. Whenst that thar dead man tuk yer han' an' tried ter find a word of speech-- Why, hullo, Narcissa!" With a short cry she had struggled to her feet. The gathering gloom, the recollection of the tragedy, the association of ideas, bore too heavily on her nerves. She struck petulantly at his astounded face. "Why air ye always remindin' me?" she exclaimed, with a sharp upbraiding note. And then she began to cry out that she could see again the coroner's jury pressing close about the corpse, with a keen ravenous interest like the vile mountain vultures, and then colloguing together aside, and nodding their heads and saying they had found their verdict, when they had found nothing, not even the poor dead man; and she saw them here, and she saw them there, and everywhere in the darkling mountain woods, and she would see them everywhere as long as she should live, and she wished with all her heart that they were every one at the bottom of the black mountain river. And the slow Ben wondered, as he sought to soothe her and take her home, that a woman should be so sensitive to the mention of one dead man, and yet given to such wishes of the wholesale destruction of the harmless coroner's jury, because their appearance struck her amiss, and they collogued together, and nodded their heads unacceptably, and found their verdict. V.