These wise counsels were heeded. Old Corbin started back to the store with his friend after one more apprehensive, tremulous, and searching glance for the witches’ lair in the laurel which he dreaded to discover, and the constable took his way cautiously through the woods toward the river. The morning wore on to the vertical noontide when the breeze died, and the shadows collapsed, and the slumberous purple haze could neither shift nor shimmer, but brooded motionless over the ravines and along the mountain slopes; the midday glowed, and burned with color more richly still, until the vermilion climax of the sunset made splendid the west, and tinged the east with gold and pink reflections. And all day the constable himself, hidden in a clump of crimson sour-wood, knelt on the summit of the Bluffs, watching the deep silent gliding of the river and the great sand-stone cliffs—with here a tuft of grass or a hardy bush in a niche, with sheer reaches and anon crevices, and on a ledge the ball from the deadly gun, lying silent and motionless in the sun. Nothing came except a bird that perched on the cannon-ball; a mocking-bird, all newly plumed. He trimmed his jaunty wing, and turned his brilliant eye and his delicately poised head upward. Then, with his white wing-feathers catching the light, away he went to where the echoes awaited him. A star was in the river—its silver glitter striking through the roseate reflections of the clouds; and presently the darkness slipped down. And the constable’s joints were very stiff when he clambered out of the clump of sour-wood shoots. XII. It was a very dark night. The wind freshened; leaves were set adrift in the black void spaces; the jarring of bare boughs, continually clashing together, pervaded the gloom: the water was ruffled, and the reflection of the stars was distorted or annulled amongst the vacillating ripples as the faint beams fell. No other sound near Keedon Bluffs, no other stir. By the fireside of Hiram Guyther’s house one could hardly be unconscious of the tumult of the mountain forest, or of the swirl of the wind in the funnel-like depths of the Cove, however deep the reverie, however the fire might crackle as the big blazes sprang up the chimney, however the little Rosamondy might laugh or might sing. “How the wind blows!” the blind man said from time to time, lifting his gray head and his young face. And aunt Jemima would remark on “the powerful clatter” of the orchard boughs and the rustling swish of the Indian corn standing dead and stark in the fields. As the trumpeting blast came down the chimney once more Ab roused himself anew and exclaimed, “’Minds me o’ the night Rosamondy kem.” “Did the wind blow me hyar?” cried Rosamondy, as she sat in her little chair. “The bes’ wind that ever blew!” declared aunt Jemima, her gleaming spectacles intercepting her caressing glance.