"Meanness an' grudge-nursin' kin bring on a heap of pestilence," he mused. "This Ratler will nurse his on ther bottle, an' he won't never wean hit--an' some day----! But it don't profit a feller ter borry trouble. These hills hes got enough misfortunes withouten thet." Already twilight was settling over the valleys and the ridges were starkly grim as their color died to the neutrality of night, and the murk of a gathering storm. CHAPTER IV With a mutter of distant thunder in his ears, the young mountaineer plodded "slavishly" on under his load as night closed about him. The path twisted among heaped up bowlders where a misstep might mean broken bones and crawled through entanglements of fallen timber: of gnarled rhododendron and thorn-leaved holly. It wormed into dew-drenched thicknesses where branches lashed the burden-bearer's face with the sting of whips, and soon the colossal barriers began to echo with the storm roar of high places. The clouds were ripped with the blue-white blades of lightning. The rock walls of the ranges seemed quaking under the thunder's incessant cannonading, and the wind's shrieking mania. Then through the rent and buffeted timber-tops the rain burst in a lashing curtain of water as violent as a shot-shower. Bear Cat Stacy, wet to the skin, with the steaming sweat of toil and fight turned into a marrow-pinching chill, cast about him for a place where he could protect his sack of meal until an abatement should come to the storm's violence. As he sat under a dripping roof of shelving rock to which he had groped his way by the beacon of the lightning, a startled owl swept past him, almost brushing his face with its downy wings. His wet clothes hung to his flesh with what seemed icy coldness. His shoulder throbbed with an abomination of pain and his bones ached with a dull wretchedness. But after a time the wind and thunder dropped away to whimpering echoes. It was as if the hound pack of the furies had been whistled in, its hunt ended. Turner rose and stamped his numbed feet. There was yet a long way to go before he arrived at the low-built shed, thatched with brush and screened behind a fallen hemlock top, where the Stacy still lay hidden. At last he was there, with every muscle proclaiming its location by the outcry of sore tissues, and ahead of him lay the task of watching and feeding the fire under the mash kettle until dawn. "Ye kin lay down when ye're ready, Lee," he said shortly to the stockily built man whom he was relieving from duty there. "I'll keep ther fire goin' an' call ye round about dawn." Taking up the rifle to which he had fallen heir, as picket, he made his way from the sentinel's shelter to the still-house itself, stooping low, so that the waning fire might not throw his figure or face into relief. He piled a handful of wood under the kettle and crawled back into the timber.