The thick tangled mass of the undergrowth presently intervened, so that, as he broke his way through it, he wondered that its bosky dimness should be so visible beneath the heavy shadows of the great trees looming high overhead. Once he stopped dubiously; the glow evidently came rather from below than above. It is too much to say that a thrill of fear tried the fibres of Persimmon Sneed's obdurate old heart. But he listened for a moment to hear, perchance, the sound of voices from the group he had left, or the champing of the picketed steeds. He was an active man, and had come fast and far since quitting his companions. Not even a vague murmur rose from the silent autumnal woods. The stillness was absolute. As he moved forward once more, the impact of his foot upon the rain-soaked leaves, the rustle of the boughs as he pressed among them, the rise and fall of his own breathing, somewhat quicker than its wont, served to render appreciable to Persimmon Sneed the fact that he possessed nerves which were more susceptible to a quaver of doubt than that redoubtable endowment called his hard head. "Somebody hev jes' sot out fire in the woods,--though powerful wet," he muttered, his intellectual entity seeking to quiet that inward flutter of his mere bodily being. "But I'm a-goin' on," he protested obstinately, "ef it be bodaciously kindled by the devil!" And as he spoke, his heart failed, his limbs seemed sinking beneath him, his pulses beat tumultuously for a moment, and then were abruptly still; he had emerged from the woods in a great flickering glare which pervaded an open, rocky space shelving to a precipice, and beheld a tall, glowing yellow flame rising unquenched from the illuminated surface of a bubbling mountain spring. His senses reeled; a myriad of tawny red and yellow flashes swayed before his dazzled eyes. He had heard all his life of the wild freaks of the witches in the woods. Had he chanced on their unhallowed pastimes in the solitudes of these untrodden mountain wildernesses? Was this miraculous fire, blazing from the depths of the clear water, necromancy, the work of the devil?