It was vacant. The cows still stood lowing at the bars; the sheep cowered together in their shed; the great whitened cone of the fodder-stack gleamed icily in the purple air; beside it lay the lantern where Millicent had cast it aside. She was gone! He would not believe it till he had run to the barn, calling her name in the shadowy place, while the horse at his manger left his corn to look over the walls of his stall with inquisitive surprised eyes, luminous in the dusk. He searched the hen-house, where the fowls on their perches crowded close because of the chill of the evening. He even ran to the bars and looked down across the narrow ravine to which the clearing sloped. Beyond the chasm-like gorge he saw presently on the high ascent opposite footprints that had broken the light frostlike coating of ice on the dead leaves and moss--climbing footprints, swift, disordered. He looked back again at the lantern where Millicent had flung it in her haste. Her mission was plain now. She had gone to warn Dundas. She had taken a direct line through the woods. She hoped to forestall the deputy sheriff and his posse, following the circuitous mountain road. Keenan’s lip curled in triumph. His heart burned hot with scornful anger and contempt of the futility of her effort. “They’re there afore she started!” he said, looking up at the aspects of the hour shown by the sky, and judging of the interval since the encounter by the spring. Through a rift in the gray cloud a star looked down with an icy scintillation and disappeared again. He heard a branch in the woods snap beneath the weight of ice. A light sprang into the window of the cabin hard by, and came in a great gush of orange-tinted glow out into the snowy bleak wintry space. He suddenly leaped over the fence and ran like a deer through the woods. Millicent too had been swift. He had thought to overtake her before he emerged from the woods into the more open space where the hotel stood. In this quarter the cloud-break had been greater. Toward the west a fading amber glow still lingered in long horizontal bars upon the opaque gray sky. The white mountains opposite were hung with purple shadows borrowed from a glimpse of sunset somewhere far away over the valley of East Tennessee; one distant lofty range was drawn in elusive snowy suggestions, rather than lines, against a green space of intense yet pale tint. The moon, now nearing the full, hung over the wooded valley, and aided the ice and the crust of snow to show its bleak, wan, wintry aspect; a tiny spark glowed in its depths from some open door of an isolated home. Over it all a mist was rising from the east, drawing its fleecy but opaque curtain. Already it had climbed the mountain-side and advanced, windless, soundless, overwhelming, annihilating all before and beneath it. The old hotel had disappeared, save that here and there a gaunt gable protruded and was withdrawn, showed once more, and once more was submerged.