XVI.

The moment had come. That fact took precedence of every other impression, and annulled all the previous careful preparation. There was an instant rush toward the ladder, and the floor quaked beneath the swift but heavy feet. A voice checked the advance, that was like a rout in its wild, unreasoning motive power:—

“The fust man ez steps a foot on that thar rung, I’ll let the light through him!”

There was a sharp, decisive click, and the lynchers knew that Teck Jepson had cocked the pistol, which he wore no longer in his belt, but held in his right hand, as he stood beside the aperture in the floor.

A momentary hovering about it, a sound of quick, excited panting, and the massive figures fell back a little.

“Whyn’t ye say who air ter go fust, then?” exclaimed Bassett, in angry reproach. “Ye air too durned sot in yer way ter live, Teck Jepson. Ef we war right smart, we’d hang ye a leetle before we set out ter settle them t’ other men.”

“Don’t quar’l, boys,—don’t quar’l,” urged the paternal peace-maker. “Teck knows jes’ what we’d bes’ do.”

There was scarcely a murmur of dissent to this, for the usurper is more imposing than he who wields delegated authority, in that his supremacy is the trophy and the triumph of his own bow and spear. These wild and lawless men might hardly have accorded so ready an obedience to Teck Jepson’s mandate, had his power been conferred by the State of Tennessee.

“Ye’ll stay right hyar till ye air wanted,” he said despotically. “I be goin’ ter take one man an’ go down ter see what they air a-doin’ of. Ef I fire my pistol, ye kin come, the whole bilin’ of ye, ez hard ez ye kin travel. Me an’ one man will go fust.”

“I be that man!” cried Clem Sanders turbulently.

Jepson could hardly say him nay, since he was the first to volunteer. But his objection showed very plainly in his eyes, and the blacksmith sturdily responded to it.

“It’s _my_ forge!” He protested his special interest.

“Laws-a-massy, yes! an’ it’s _yer_ leetle tongs, too!” sneered Jepson, with the scorn of one who cares little for material possessions, as he took his way down the ladder.

Clem followed, and as the two emerged from the shadowy barn upon the frost-whitened sward below and into the full splendor of the moonlight, they were conscious of the eyes that pursued them from the window above. Once Jepson turned his head and glanced over his shoulder. It was not a reassuring sight, even to one whom it in no manner threatened,—that broad, low window of the simple log-barn, filled with the bearded, eager faces of silent armed men, some half crouching, others standing that they might look over the shoulders of those in front. Behind them all was visible, the hay piled to the roof, here silver skeins in the light, and again full of shadows and indefinite suggestions of depth.

As the two walked on together, Jepson took note of the moon in the sky. “Ain’t it some earlier ’cordin’ ter the moon than ’twar that night when ye say ye kem so nigh ter ketchin’ ’em?”

“Dunno,” panted Clem. “I hev hed suthin’ else ter do, sence then, than ter stare-gaze the moon.”

The tone of the retort arrested Jepson’s attention. He had hitherto taken little account of his rival’s mental attitude toward him. As he turned his head, and, though still walking forward, looked at Clem, he could scarcely interpret his expression. Antagonism he could read, to be sure, in the hard-set jaw, the gleam of his teeth between his half-parted lips, the glitter of his eye; but a sort of uncertainty was shadowed in his manner, with a tumultuous, fluttering excitement, a badgered, hopeless, yet still struggling anxiety,—he could not account for these in the light of the present surroundings. A much wiser man could hardly have divined the turbulent perplexity that surged through Clem’s mind, the coercive rigors of decision and yet the wild regret for whatever course he took. He seemed to himself to be living at a climax. Every breath he drew chronicled an emergency. He was in the clutch of contradictions, the victim of distorted and strangely reversed circumstances. He had set the machinery of vengeance in motion again when it had seemed to flag, and he had wished to hinder. He had forced himself upon Teck Jepson as his lieutenant in this abhorrent enterprise, hoping that in the guise of lending him aid he might be able to frustrate him utterly. Yet he was beginning to perceive that, should his scheme in aught go awry, it would seem to Marcella as if he had been foremost and active in the participation in the deed which she deemed an infamous cruelty, and which her father accounted a crime. His senses reeled as he sought to escape his dilemma. He wished himself back at the barn, leaving Jepson to conduct the affair at his own imperious will; and he wondered futilely and bitterly why he should have come forth at all in obedience to an impulse so strong, but so unreasoning. What had he, in his folly, expected to do? What could it avail to keep by Jepson’s side, and hold him under surveillance? He realized acutely that his simple brain was no instrument for clever scheming,—that every course of action which he sought to plan had only its preliminary impulse, thereafter dwindling to vague nullity in lieu of logical sequences. Nevertheless, he caught himself ever and anon casting sidelong glances at Teck Jepson, informed with a wild inclination to spring upon him unaware, and stifle his cries, and overbear him—for what? Even the futureless Clem could look forward far enough to anticipate the sallying forth of the reserves at the barn after so long a time, in default of any sign from the leader of the expedition.

“I don’t wanter stan’ in Jake Baintree’s shoes,” he muttered, forecasting their fury if balked. His tone, though so low, was audible, so silent was the night, to the man who walked by his side.

Jepson cast a glance of deep objection upon him.

“His shoes air mebbe powerful safe foot-gear,” he returned. “It depends on what he be a-doin’ of, an’ what sort’n account he kin gin o’ hisself. Ye air jes’ like them men yander;” he nodded his head backward toward the barn. “They ’pear ter rate tharse’fs with a pack o’ hounds arter a wild critter what they hev got a nateral right ter pull down. They fairly yelled ez ef they had struck the trail o’ deer or bar, whenst they hearn that hammer fust tech the metal.”

Clem Sanders suddenly lost his scanty self-control.

“I know whar ye got all that thar fine talk from,” he flared out in jealous rage. “Powerful nice an’ perlite ter be a-comparin’ baptized Christians ter hounds an’ sech. Ye been a-talkin’ ter Marcelly Strobe. Them’s her very words.”

The next moment, the tide of suspicion that had rolled in so tumultuously upon him was ebbing gradually. Once more he was to learn the irrevocability of a word given to the air. The idea that sound-waves, once astir, infinitely vibrate to perpetuate a record, albeit too subtle for mortal ear, was not even a vague theory with him, but he experienced in some sort its practical illustration. Teck Jepson had paused in the road, smitten motionless in amazement, and the inadvertent Clem saw gradually dawning in his eyes, widely opened and speculatively fixed upon him, the counterpart of the view which he himself had entertained. The inference was too plain for him to hope that it might be passed over. It was now not difficult to divine his confidences, and where they had been bestowed. It was evident, too, that with these words Marcella had received them.

Jepson said nothing. He still stood where he had paused, the moonlight a burnished glitter upon the barrel of the pistol that he held in his hand. His face, white in the pallid sheen, was reflective. He gazed now, not at Clem Sanders, but beyond him, into the vague shimmer of the frost amongst the black shadows of the woods; the curled dead leaves on the ground held within their curves the fine sparkling incrustation; every bramble of the undergrowth close by the roadside showed lines of silver gleams, and through the heavy interlacing boughs of the gigantic trees above their heads, rising high into the clear air, came the crystalline scintillation of the stars. Encircling all, the mountains stood sombre and lofty, sharply defined against the sky; adown the road the heavy shadows gloomed; suddenly, athwart them a red light flared, and the sigh of the bellows breathed forth. Teck Jepson, reminded of their destination, turned abruptly from the road, which they had hitherto followed, into the undergrowth of the woods.

“Bes’ take ter the bresh,” Jepson remarked in an undertone. “They mought hev set a lookout ter watch the road.”

Despite its denudation by the autumnal storm, the “brush” still afforded a dense covert, by reason of the young growth of the pines, whose lower branches jutted out level with the ground, and the predominance in its midst of the ever-green laurel. The crestfallen Clem kept close at Jepson’s heels, as he pushed cautiously through the shrubs, laden with the white rime and glittering with the moon. Now and again some dry fallen bough cracked beneath Clem’s careless, heavy tread, and thorns of stripped bushes caught and tore his garments, the rending of the fabric loud in the dumbness of the windless autumn night. And when this chanced Jepson cast over his shoulder a warning glance, imposing silence and heed, so freighted with the spirit of their expedition, so oblivious of all else, that Clem, preposterously hopeful, began to breathe more freely. Surely he had not so definitely committed himself as he had feared. In the excitement of the moment, he perchance did not distinguish between what he thought and what he said. Jepson doubtless had not comprehended; had he not stood like a stock in the road and stared, motionless and mute? When he saw Jepson pause beneath the gnarled, low-hanging boughs of a chestnut, gray with lichen, and here and there glimmering icily as if in presentiment of the coming snows, this idea had so possessed him that he had no apprehension that his coadjutor had aught of significance to say.

Jepson lifted grave, intent eyes as Clem came stumbling up. He was leaning, as he waited, against the tree. His hat was thrust far back, and his face was all unshaded; it seemed melancholy, but the light was pensive, and his voice had always those falling inflections.

“She war agin it, then,” he said, and the tone had none of the spirit of interrogation.

Clem took an unguarded step backward, recoiling as if he had been struck. Then he clumsily recovered his equilibrium, standing unsteadily on the uneven ground. He made some feint of self-defense.

“Who air ye a-talkin’ ’bout?” he demanded gruffly, slouching his heavy shoulders forward and fixing his long, narrow, gleaming eyes surlily on Jepson.

“Marcelly Strobe,” Jepson answered promptly. “Ye said she ’lowed them men war like hounds on a trail. She war agin ’em, then.”

Clem made still another desperate effort to shield himself. “She said some men—ginerally. How’d she know ennythin’ ’bout our goin’s on?”

“How’d she know? Kase ye told her,” retorted the discerning Jepson. “An’ it air ez much ez yer life air wuth.”

This knowledge, familiar enough to his own consciousness, became doubly impressive and coercively veracious in another man’s words. Clem Sanders, stout-hearted as he was, felt the sudden thrill of panic. It sharpened his faculties.

“It air jes’ ez likely ye told her ez me—_ef she knows_,” he equivocated. “Hyar ye air, a-dilly-dallyin’ in the woods, ’feard ter move hand or foot, doubtin’ ’bout whether she air agin it or no. I ain’t showed ez I set no sech store by sech ez she thinks or don’t think. Ef ennybody told her, it mought jes’ ez well hev been _you-uns_.”

Jepson’s reproachful and surprised gaze dealt a poignant wound to Clem’s careless conscience, but it failed to elicit confession. “Ef _she_ won’t tell, the Lord knows _I_ won’t,” he thought, but knowing his uncontrollable tongue, he was glad that Jepson began to speak of himself.

“I ain’t one ter falter fur sech ez others say,” protested Jepson, “though I ain’t got the pleasure in this hyar business ez folks in the old time ’peared ter take. Them in the Bible never turned fur the sight o’ blood, an’ they hung folks an’ chopped ’em into minch meat, an’ seemed ter find a savor in sech doin’s ez all my religion can’t gin! I can’t holp feelin’ sorter sorry fur the evil-doer wunst in a while, specially whenst the avenger air hard on his track; fur my heart is weak an’ needs strengthenin’ from above. The men o’ this day air pore, degenerate critters, an’ don’t sense jestice much more ’n Marcelly Strobe. But my hand air nerved by a stronger power ’n I kin command, an’ I dare all the mountings ter show the road whar I tuk the back-track, or tell the day.”

He turned, resolutely pushing on toward the forge, and Clem Sanders, greatly cast down and too much troubled to even glance toward the future, kept at his elbow.

The ringing clamor of the hammer came to them again as they pressed on, not regular, but with fitful pauses; and by the time that they were at the verge of the woods they heard voices, loudly conversing, casual voices. The tones came from the forge, and alternated with the clink of the hammer.

The next moment the little low-browed log shanty was before them, seen through the arching vistas of the laurel and the oak; its slanting roof glistened with moisture; the crag loomed high above, with the sentinel pines on its summit. Beyond the valley the dark mountains, black but for dusky olive-green suggestions, were visible against the horizon; and the moon, a sphere of gleaming pearl, swung high in the violet sky. The long path of light it shed upon the river stretched from bank to bank and seemed to part the dark lustrous waters, and Jepson bethought himself of that miraculous road in the midst of the Red Sea, when Israel trod its ways dry shod, with the waves like a wall on either hand. In front of the forge, a feeble red flare alternated with a fleeting brown flicker as the sigh of the bellows again broke forth. When, suddenly, the two vigilantes stood in the broad, open doorway, a man was at the anvil once more, and its keen, fine vibrations rang out responsive to the shrill tone of the hand-hammer, for he had no striker.

He did not move, for all he must have seen their eager eyes fastened upon him.

“Hey!” he cried out, with a gay intonation, not intermitting his labors. “Hello!”

That he was a stranger, a man of medium size and slenderly built, bending over the anvil in the shadow, since the fire languished for the lack of the breath of the bellows, was the merely momentary impression made upon Jepson’s mind. His eyes fell upon a woman sitting on an inverted keg in the red light of the dusky, half-illumined room; he did not recognize her instantly, although she rose at once and advanced upon them.

Clem Sanders stepped back, a look of astounded doubt, as if he could not believe his eyes, contending with the certainty in his face. For the woman was his mother.

“Waal, I hev hunted fur ye, an’ hunted,” she addressed him in a tone of acrid exasperation. “An’ I hollered an’ hollered. An’ I sent leetle Silas hyar”—she pointed to a small nephew of Clem’s, a frequent visitor at the blacksmith’s house, whom Jepson had not seen until this moment, a tow-headed urchin of twelve, who sat in a crouching position on the hub of a broken wheel which lay on the floor—“ter hunt fur ye, an’ he couldn’t find ye. Hyar’s a strange man in the Cove kem up ter the house a-sarchin’ fur ye, an’ wantin a leetle job o’ blacksmithin’ done, an’ ye can’t be rooted out from nowhar!”

She was a tall, angular, thin-faced woman, with an expression of gravity and care in her lined features, and she had a tone that boded the rigors of domestic inquisition as she demanded, “Whar hev ye been?”

Clem’s wildly anxious glance at his tools in the stranger’s hands availed nothing. The account of himself was evidently the essential preliminary.

Jepson touched his shoulder with his own as a secret warning, as they stood side by side in the door of the forge, but had the disclosure been far more significant the hap-hazard Clem would have nevertheless blurted it out as he did.

“In the barn,” he replied.

“Ye air tellin’ a story,” his mother retorted, with a manner reprehensive certainly, but with a coolness as if contemplating an offense of infinitely multiplied precedents. “I sent leetle Silas ter the barn, an’ he ’lowed ye warn’t thar, though he hearn harnts talkin’ in the loft, an’ they made him ’feard. An’,” lifting her bony arm, shaking her forefinger, and lowering her voice impressively, as if fairly cornering him, “I sent him _agin_ ter climb up inter the loft, ez no harnts would hurt him with me so nigh, an’ he kem back, an’,” triumphantly, “he say ye warn’t thar, nuther.”

The small Silas, disingenuous beyond his years and size, turned his eyes, which were of a very light color, and with a superabundance of white, that made them marked even in the duskiness, with a pleading apprehensiveness upon his uncle, but the excited, confused Clem was quaking, even at this moment, with the danger overpast. How closely discovery had approached the vigilantes in the barn! He had not his wits sufficiently about him to reproach his mother for believing the deceptive Silas rather than himself.

“Whar hev ye been?” she demanded anew. Then with the impetus of her long pent-up rebukes constraining her she went on without waiting for an answer.

“Hyar be this hyar man, obligated ter hev his tools mended, kase his work calls him betimes ter-morrer by daylight, an’ him a stranger in the Cove, an’ he ’lowed mebbe he mought git a leetle blacksmithin’ done, though ’twar arter dark, bein’ ez his work called him far up in the mountings by daylight. An’ me an’ Silas kem down hyar ter see ef we-uns could find yer tools, bein’ ez ye war nowhar, so ez he could patch his pick hisse’f. He ’lowed he knowed suthin’ ’bout blacksmithin’”—

“Mighty leetle, I’ll be bound!” cried Clem, his professional consciousness restored by this arrogation on the part of the stranger. He dropped the hang-dog look that he had worn under his mother’s lecture, and strode with his habitual easy, confident air across the room and stood beside the anvil, watching the amateur smith’s performance with an air of silent, repressed ridicule and half-smiling scorn.

“Go ahead,” he observed, with affected encouragement, as the young stranger looked up and hesitated. “What air ye goin’ ter do now,—het it some mo’?” as the other turned doubtfully toward the fire. “Ho! ho!” with a manner of bluff superiority. “Shucks! Git out o’ the way, my frien’. Lemme show ye what blacksmithin’ air.”

He shouldered the stranger summarily from his own post at the anvil, then paused to take up the bit of iron, on which the amateur had been working, and shook his head smilingly, as if with an unspeakable contempt, as he carefully surveyed this handiwork. He turned and thrust it amongst the coals, evidently rejecting it as a mere beginning, and starting the process anew.

“I’m willing,” the stranger said, with a laugh, as if accepting good-naturedly this cavalier criticism; and Jepson divined that he did not consider proficiency at the anvil the chief object of existence. The amateur smith, however, offered to work the bellows, but Clem, with a contemptuous “Don’t take two men ter do a leetle job like this,” discouraged further proffers of assistance, and then bent himself to the work with as complete an absorption as if there were no band of expectant, eager, bloodthirsty men waiting at the barn for a signal, and as if Teck Jepson’s presence, as he stood in the door, were not more significant than his daily loitering there.

The white light of the fire flaring up as Clem worked the bellows with one hand, while holding the metal in the coals with the other, revealed the stranger to the scrutiny of Jepson, who, recovering from his surprise, was taking due note of him. He sought to be just; to contend with mere suspicion; to separate his consideration of the subject from the personal interest that persistently linked itself with the circumstances. How much had Marcella known? Had she taken any action in the matter? And with what motive? He could not banish these thoughts, however, as he gazed at the stranger, who leaned against the elevated hearth, affecting to watch the smith’s work, but with a tense, alert attitude, and a wary eye that ever and anon furtively sought the silent figure standing in the broad, moonlit doorway, with the dark landscape, silver-flecked, vaguely visible in the background. His light hair made his head very definite against the black and sooty hood of the forge. Now and then he put up a slender hand, and pulled his long, yellow mustache with a gesture and manner alien to the mountains. His attitude and garb, the very shape of his boot, marked and individualized him. He was not of the region.

None of this did Clem Sanders observe as he worked. Once he held up the precious little tongs. “This is yer doin’,” he said reproachfully, indicating a small protuberance where the piece, broken off, had been welded on again.

The stranger burst into a laugh, showing his strong white teeth beneath his yellow mustache. A pleasant face he had, with this more jovial expression upon it. Clem Sanders’s frown relaxed as he looked at him.

“So you’ve found me out, have you? This ain’t the first time I’ve been here,” he said easily.

And then, although it might not be said how it was done, for there was not a perceptible lifting of an eyelid nor a hair’s-breadth turning of the head, Teck Jepson was aware that the stranger had covertly noted the effect of the words upon him. Already he had made the distinction between the two men as to which was to be feared.

“Yes, that’s a fac’!” cried Mrs. Sanders, with an unwonted animation. The singular event in her dull experience had roused a not unpleasurable excitement, and she had regarded the absorption of the two at the anvil with a reluctant sense of being shut out from continued participation, and having reached a finality. The allusion to the past revived her capacity for extracting interest from the circumstance. “What d’ ye think, Clem? This hyar man ’lows ez one night, not so long ago, he started over the mountings, ter kem down hyar ter git his pickaxe mended,—it war bruk,—an’ he los’ his way, an’ miscalc’lated his time somehows, an’ ’twar middlin’ late ’fore he got hyar. An’ he kem ter the house, an’ knocked an’ knocked, an’ never rousted up nobody. So—ha, ha!” the detail seemed to commend itself to Mrs. Sanders’s sense of humor, as she sat bolt upright on the keg of nails and recounted; “so ez he war goin’ back he passed by hyar, an’ a suddint thought streck him: he jes’ kindled up the fire,—thar war a few coals lef alive,—an’ mended his tool hisse’f. He say he jes’ wondered what we-uns would hev said ef we hed woke, an’ seen the light an’ hearn the hammer! I’d hev ’lowed ’twar Satan, or a harnt, one.”

She folded her arms, and with a deft motion of her head shook her sun-bonnet a little further back, that she might turn her smile upon the stranger; not so pleasing a demonstration as its good-nature might have desired to make it, for she had lost several of her front teeth, and those that were left were conspicuous in their isolation. It showed Teck Jepson that the stranger had succeeded in winning her good opinion; and even Clem, more thoroughly informed though he was, lifted his eyebrows and looked significantly at his coadjutor, evidently accepting this candid and obvious explanation of the mystery. Jepson began to see that he need expect nothing but hindrance from both mother and son, and that the least plausible wiles might prove efficacious to hoodwink these simple souls. He still stood in the doorway, but leaning against its frame, his arms folded across his broad chest, his hat far back on his head; and although he often gazed up speculatively at the moon, whose light was full in his face, he saw that the stranger still held his every movement under notice, and gave him the attention of a speculative glance after every phrase, as if seeking to judge how it impressed him.

The pause was broken only by a cricket, in some sheltered nook among the eaves, and a wheezing coughing that Silas presently set up, as if some of the lies he had told were choking him, as he crouched on the hub of the broken wheel. But when Mrs. Sanders remarked, that she would give him some hoarhound when she got him to the house, he contrived to swallow them all, and relapsed into wide-eyed silence.

“That was the time I broke the tongs. I was here once besides,” said the stranger, who seemed to feel more and more at ease.

“Ye don’t say!” exclaimed Mrs. Sanders, who evidently thought the intrusions a great joke.

“Waal, stranger,” said Teck Jepson, and the man’s nerves became tense and his face rigid and watchful the moment the melancholy, drawling, mellow voice sounded on the air, “what mought yer work be on the mounting?”

Mrs. Sanders cast a glance of indignant reproof at her neighbor, for the slightest manifestation of curiosity concerning another’s affairs is a flagrant breach of mountain etiquette.

But the stranger answered quickly, as if he were prepared to meet the question and glad to have it asked. He had a sudden, sharply clipped method of enunciation, doubly marked in contrast with the mountaineer’s elongation of the vowels. His words were even more compact and staccato than their wont.

“I’m prospecting,—prospecting for silver.”

There was a momentary silence. Even Clem held the hammer poised for an instant, while the iron glowed on the anvil, and looked contemptuous comment from out his long, narrow, twinkling eyes. Mrs. Sanders observed, “Law, stranger, ain’t ye got no better sense ’n that? Thar _ain’t_ no silver in these mountings,—leastwise none the yearth’s a-goin’ ter spare. Jes’ enough ter fool fellers inter wastin’ thar time.”

“An’ breakin’ the p’ints off’n thar good pickaxes,” added Clem, examining the implement with some interest; “fust-rate one, too,—oughter las’ ye a long time.”

Jepson watched the stranger color with vexation; then recovering himself he casually observed, “I reckon may be I’ll come up with a little silver, after a while; indications are first-rate.”

“Thar war a man,” Jepson began abruptly, “he lived hyarabouts five year ago an’ better—he b’lieved thar war silver hyar. He got put down in the mouth of a cave; his partner done it; he warn’t seen no more.”

The stranger’s light brown eyes were all afire. He leaned forward, and held out one arm to Jepson. “Say!” he exclaimed, “do you know where that exact cave is?”

Jepson turned an impassive look upon him. “Dunno the edzac’ spot, an’ don’t want ter know.”

A patent disappointment was on the stranger’s face. Then he said, “I ain’t one of the kind that gets put down in caves; you needn’t be uneasy about me.”

This was something in the nature of a flippant retort. He was evidently sorry for it immediately afterward, and there was a deprecatory expression on his face as he looked at Jepson, who, however, showed no sign of feeling of any sort as he inquired,—

“Who did ye hev ter strike fur ye when ye kem ter the forge? Could ye do sech work by yerself?”

He fixed his contemplative eyes on the stranger’s face. It was not an ingenuous face, but the circumstances were coercive, and it showed the heed, the fear, the vacillating hope, that animated him as he replied, “Yes, I had Jake Baintree to strike for me.”

His lips were dry. He bit the nether one hard as he looked at Jepson, seeing in his eyes that he understood much,—much that was not said.

For Jepson knew well that this man had been warned, and that he had flung himself for safety upon the truth, perchance with some slight admixture, realizing that the boldness of innocence alone could rescue him. As to Baintree, it was eminently in character that he should cringe, and cower, and lurk in hiding, knowing that the investigation by vigilantes impended.

Nevertheless, despite Clem’s confidences to Marcella and the warning which she had doubtless conveyed, it was evident that the facts could be elicited here and now as well as if the men had been taken by surprise. The stranger made no resistance to the inquiry, and this indicated that he recognized its inevitable character, and had not sought to shirk it. Jepson went on steadily, unmoved by any consideration save the effort to perform his duty to the organization that had intrusted him with his mission. But notwithstanding its paramount interest, it seemed secondary in importance, in Clem’s estimation, to the necessity of forging the bit of metal on the anvil, and the subsequent conversation took place annotated by his ringing blows, from which the stranger, his nerves on the rack, palpably recoiled, but which had scant effect on the more impassive mountaineer, save to induce him to slightly lift his voice.

“How long hev ye been bidin’ in the mountings?”

“Since August.”

“Dell-law!” commented Mrs. Sanders. “Ye hev kep’ yerse’f mightily ter yerse’f; I’ll say that fur ye.”

The logical inference might be that she commended his magnanimity in sparing them his society. But the good woman meant nothing of this kind, her exclamation being simply a rural formula.

“Who hev ye bided with?” demanded Jepson.

The stranger colored slightly. Then making an effort to put the matter in its most favorable aspect, he replied with some show of communicativeness:—

“With Baintree. You see I was his doctor—I am a physician by profession—when he was in jail in Glaston, the regular jail-physician being ill himself, and Baintree told me about the silver mine he thought he had discovered. So I came to see if it were true. I happen to know something about mining. But Jake,—he’s a queer fish,—he wasn’t willing for anybody to know what we were after. I believe he never tells me truly where his best find was; he thinks somebody will chouse him out of it yet.”

“Ez ef ennybody would hev it,” exclaimed Mrs. Sanders, with sweeping contempt, “an’ ez ef thar war enny ter hev!”

“Whar hev ye bided with him?” asked Jepson, seemingly all unaffected by any phase of the detail.

“Waal, Teck Jepson!” cried Mrs. Sanders, scandalized by his curiosity, as she construed his persistence, “ye mus’ hev hed yer tongue iled. I hev never hearn sech a lot o’ whys an’ wharfores ez it hev got on ter the e-end o’ it ter-night.”

But the catechumen responded at once, scarcely waiting for her to finish her sentence. “We stayed for a while in a deserted house,—the old Jepson house, he said it was.”

“His’n!” broke in Mrs. Sanders, identifying the locality joyously, and pointing Jepson out still more unmistakably with a long, bony index-finger.

“Is it yours?” said the young stranger. “Well, the owner came and fired out our traps, one day, while we were gone, so we went to another deserted cabin, up near the summit of the mountain.”

“Mighty cur’ous way ter be a-livin’,” commented Mrs. Sanders, with a very definite infusion of scorn. “An’ fur a silver mine, ez mought be in the mountings, an’ then agin moughtn’t. Look-a-hyar, stranger, ain’t ye ’quainted with nobody in Brumsaidge Cove mo’ ’spectable ’n Jake Baintree?”

There was a sudden triumph in the young man’s face. He shook himself free from his unpalatable confessions, as if they had been a cloak falling from his shoulders. “I’m acquainted with some very respectable people,—very good people. I’m well acquainted with the Strobe family.”

He had lived somewhat in the world, and was aware that in some places people have been known to prop their social standing by bragging of their acquaintances. He had never thought that this necessity would supervene for him in Broomsedge Cove.

“Dell-law!” exclaimed Mrs. Sanders, seeming as delighted to meet the Strobes in the desolation of the stranger’s social circle—which had consisted, apparently, of Jake Baintree—as if she had encountered them in the solitude of a desert island. “Old Mis’ Strobe!”

“Yes, old Mrs. Strobe,” he said, “and the young girls, Miss Marcella and little Isabel.”

The impartial, judicial interest with which Teck Jepson had listened gave way suddenly. His eyes were deeply glowing, and fastened intently on the stranger’s face. His cheek had flashed darkly. Somehow the idea of the warning that Marcella had conveyed had suggested to his mind no personal association. She had told Baintree, perhaps, he had thought, or she had sent a message. But her name upon the stranger’s lips—the very sound of it odd and incongruous, with his unfamiliar accent and the unwonted and punctilious title—intimated abruptly the possibility of a personal interest, of a longer acquaintance, of a future of which Jepson had never dreamed. She had risked much,—with the transparent blacksmith to know that she was in possession of the secret,—she had risked much. And what, a dapper, slender, handsome young fool was this silver hungry stranger!

“An’ Eli!” cried Mrs. Sanders in a shrill crescendo of pleasurable reminiscence.

“I never knew him before he was injured. But I had a long talk with him this evening, and”—he drew out his watch composedly—“I promised him that I would come back if not too late, after I got through at the forge here. A very respectable family, and very hospitable.”