XXV.

Eugene Rathburn could hardly be said to have awakened from his deep sleep, that stormy night in the Great Smoky Mountains, when Jake Baintree kept his strange vigil by the side of the dying fire. The alien scenes of his dream were suddenly possessed by a wild, unrealized tumult. His dormant consciousness became in some sort aware of a piercing sound, a fibrous, funnel-shaped glare, fierce but fleeting, and then he saw no more, knew no more, not even thus vaguely. How long he lay there on the floor of the mountain hut, in a pool of his own blood, he never sought to compute. One morning, while the rain yet beat on the roof, and the gullies ran full beneath the eaves; while the mists still further secluded the solitary spot, practically as inaccessible as if it had been lifted amidst the clouds that closed about it, his memory came back to him, his identity renewed with his body its coexistence, and he realized who it was lying wounded, fevered, exhausted from the loss of blood, on the fireless hearth, where he had fallen asleep when it was all a-sparkle and aglow, his own pistol, smoke-blackened, albeit but freshly cleaned and oiled, on the floor beside him.

“When the corpse is found,” he said impersonally, “if it ever is found, it might suggest a suicide.”

He experienced a feeble surprise to gauge the interest with which he noted the relative position of his weapon and his helpless body, and vaguely presaged the deductions of the coroner’s jury.

The fallibility of the supposititious verdict recurring to his mind after the sense of a long and vacant interval made him aware that he had again been unconscious, and had but now revived anew. Somehow, he wondered that he had ever dwelt upon it. He no longer thought of himself as the lifeless shell that might lie here impassive till some chance—nay, the predestined urgency of retribution—should lead hitherward a stranger’s step to discover Jake Baintree’s crime. He felt the throb of a turbulent resentment. He thirsted for revenge. A frail tenement, to be sure, his shattered body afforded for these robust and full-pulsed passions. Professionally speaking, he presently recognized the symptom with a new hope,—he was stronger, far stronger than he had thought. He had slept, he was sure,—slept despite his burning thirst, his gnawing pain. He had a dual series of impressions, the keenness of the one hardly mitigated by the poignancy of the other. He took note of his own sensations, both as physician and patient, and when he had lifted himself upon his elbow to examine the wounds,—there were two, the pistol-shots fired at such close range as to scorch his garments,—his face blanched to a yet more pallid tint as he looked; but with a sort of mechanical professional reticence he said not a word that might have roused the alarm of a patient in like case. As he lay back upon the blood-soaked rug, he closed his eyes to wait,—to hope that it might not be long. His wounds were serious enough in any case, but here, without food, parched with thirst, without skilled care or the merest ignorant help, it was only a question of time. His mind canvassed the alternatives,—to die of his wounds and the exposure, or to starve. As he thought of the relative anguish of the two fates that impended, he felt that his wounds were not so hopeless; he had doubtless exaggerated their menace; he would starve to death, here in these lofty altitudes, very slowly, very painfully; for although he was of no great stature or muscular strength, his constitution was tough and promised resistance. “I’ll have an awful time before I get off,” he said to himself in a panic. He writhed slightly as he spoke, although he had sedulously sought to lie still, that the gaping wounds might not bleed afresh, and as he stirred his hand touched something cold, from which he recoiled. It was only the barrel of his pistol, sleek and shining, and with a ready suggestion lurking in its muzzle. The time might be no longer than he willed it, the pain no greater than he chose to bear. He had a definite technical knowledge wherewith to plant the ball in lieu of Baintree’s clumsy hap-hazard ignorance. He drew back his hand from the cold touch of the insensate metal that beguiled him with this reasoning from out its hollow jaws; he shrank from the idea as if he definitely appreciated the crime to which he was tempted. “No,” he said aloud in a strong voice,—“no, my good friend Jake, this is _your_ job, and you shall swing for it. I’ll do nothing to hinder, if I lie here a year and a day in the pangs of hunger.”

Once more he recognized, with a start, the lapse of a vacant interval. His professional consciousness, first of all his mental faculties, took note of it. “Sleep is the best thing,—quiet and sleep,—itself a curative agent,” he muttered feebly, drowsing off again. He waked now, however, at frequent intervals. Once he noted that the rain had ceased its melancholy drone on the roof, and once he heard the wind. The mists fell away from the window, where he had dully marked their presence close to the rift in the batten shutter, and feeble shafts of sunlight flickered across the melancholy, fireless hearth, and anon faded out. Suddenly a galvanic thrill jarred every pulse, as he lay motionless, his eyelids half closed. Delirium, surely. How hard it was, he thought, that he would have differentiated the symptoms so certainly were the hurt another man’s, but that even his own professional skill could avail him naught, could not serve as the one friend in the world he had earned, as he lay here dying and alone in this innermost seclusion of solitude! Deny it however his reason might, call it fever, or fantasy, or fear, his eyes were fastened on Baintree’s face peering in at the rifts of the shutter,—peering in, a pallid, drawn, distorted likeness of himself, such as might haunt the dying dreams of the man he had murdered. Fact or fiction, the sight petrified Rathburn. He did not stir a fibre; his half-closed eyes were fixed; while his mind took eager cognizance of the probability that this should be the figure to loom in his fevered fancy, he wondered that the delirium should so furnish forth the detail and circumstance of its delusion; that the face in the rift of the shutter should blanch, and shrink away, and come again, with a look of fascinated horror, to peer within; that the figment of fever should put up a hand, so long, so thin, so well remembered, to hold the flapping shutter still; that the mere idea of crafty, furtive, terrified eyes should scan the lines of his motionless figure with an expression he could never have imagined, as if hoping to detect a movement, yet fearing, and then despairing. Suddenly, with a spasm of remorse that naught but the actuality of anguish could depict upon a human countenance, the face disappeared. Was it fancy, too, or did he hear the dead leaves rustle beneath a shambling step? Other ears, hardly so keen, so expectant, as his own, took heed. There was the tramp of hoofs outside, trotting from the shanty of a stable and around the house, and his mare’s shrill whinny of recognition rang out cheerfully, as if the creature welcomed the sight of any familiar being, so long left lonely as she had been. Rathburn doubted no more. He heard his feeble breath flutter, his faint heart beat, the sound seeming loud and obstructive in the silence, so did his ear yearn to follow the footsteps, hoping that they were bearing Jake Baintree away, satisfied that his work had been done thoroughly, and fearing lest he enter to reassure himself anew. It seemed long, long after he could detect no further intimation of Baintree’s progress that the mare, whom he fancied standing still without, gazing after the slouching, retreating figure, turned, and slowly ambled back to her stall. Even in the tumult of his agitation Rathburn reflected with satisfaction that she was at liberty, with food and running water at hand. “Else I’d have to get out of this somehow,” he said, for he would have sacrificed much in the sacred cause of physical suffering; even a brute’s pain might not appeal to him in vain. A new hope came to him. Could he but foster the strength to lift himself, to creep to the door, to make shift to mount the animal, he might still escape; he might reach some friendly hut, and, with food and nursing, save his life. With hope a torturing fear arose because the mare was at liberty. She would grow tired and lonely, and would wander away. He heard again the quick beat of her hoofs, as she came snorting forth once more, expectant of Baintree’s return. He forgot her the next moment, in the realization of what this possibility boded for him. Remorse, was it, on Baintree’s face, as he peered in at the rigid form, so still on the fireless hearth? How long would it have lasted, Rathburn asked himself, with a sneer, had the rigid form moved, had the eyelids stirred, had Baintree possessed more expert knowledge of the signs of death? A chance might bring him back, as a chance had brought him first to gaze, with a fascinated horror, on the deed he had done, and then he would do it, in self-defense, more surely. No sound, no stir without, listen as he might, but the wind and the scudding leaf, till presently, with a long-drawn breath, the mare trotted back once more to munch her corn.

Rathburn was all on the alert, although he strove to lie still and calm his nerves. “All this excitement is bad,” he rebuked himself, as if he were an unruly patient. And then relapsing into his other _rôle_, he strove to adjust his mind in obedience to the professional dictum. He could sleep no more, with the expectation, the fear, of Baintree’s return vigilant in every nerve. He watched the sunlight strike across the floor, reddening now, with vague motes bespangling the broad bars, so still, so silent, that when a rat, swift and lean and whiskered, sped through it, he gave a start of repulsion that sent a pain as of dislocation throughout his frame, and roused a new terror in his helplessness. But the rat fled as he lifted his hand, and his attention was called to the lure that had brought it from its hole—the broken bits of bread fallen from the table when overturned last night—last night?—he knew not how many nights ago, and never was the wiser. Some of the food was within his reach,—it had lain on the unswept floor, and the rats had perhaps fought over it; he had a strong loathing for it, but he felt better after eating a morsel of bread, and reflected that he was hardly likely to relish daintier food if he had had it. So much of vigor did it impart that he dragged himself, after a time, by slow and agonized degrees, across the floor to the shelf whereon was the little medicine-chest the gratuitous services of which he had proffered to Baintree. He lay still for some time, exhausted by his exertions, when he had crawled back to his pallet. At last, mindful of the dulling light, he opened the lid of the chest, and his hand poised hovering above the rows of bottles.

“This opportunity,” he remarked satirically, “of trying one’s remedies _in propria persona_ is one which few young surgeons have the privilege of enjoying.”

And then he was reminded to glance up warily at the window, trembling anew at the thought of Baintree and the conclusive significance of his attitude should the crafty mountaineer once more peer through the window, lured again by some morbid fascination to the scene of his crime.

He was glad to watch the red light fade on the brown walls, to note the purpling spaces of the twilight through the rift in the batten shutter; for as the shadows mustered about him he felt indistinguishable in their midst,—indistinguishable even to eyes so keen, so furtive, as those he fancied forever at the window.

He thought of the caution, the vigilance, the skill, that, were he the poorest charity patient in the wards of a hospital, his wounds would command; and the contrast of his plight here, to die so far from help, and the prospect of the suffering of the dreary interval before his release, forced a groan from his lips. He distrusted the treatment he had administered; he had used perforce what he had, not what he would have chosen. His mind ran continually upon the remedies that he would have applied had the means been at hand. He kept thinking of himself as some impersonal patient. A gnawing trouble beset his mind because of the deficiency of his resources.

“I ought to get somebody to look after that chap. He’s a goner, I reckon, but somebody ought to go through the motions of trying to save him.”

His fever was rising; more than once he caught himself lifted upon his elbow, and searching with dilated eyes amongst the rows of bottles in the chest, in the dim glimmer of the twilight, for he knew not what. “I oughtn’t to be trusted with these things!” he cried in a sudden lucid panic, as the realization of the rift between his discriminating mind and his groping, foolish hands, free to follow their own vague impulses amongst the powerful drugs, forced itself into his thoughts. He closed the lid with a snap, and gathering his strength and setting his teeth hard, he flung the chest from him, he knew not where in the darkness. He heard it crash against the wall and drop to the floor, with a fine, high, crystalline shiver, as of the breaking of the vials within; then, as he lay still, with perverse ingenuity his uncontrollable thought began to canvass where it had fallen, deducing the locality from the sound. “Oh, I could get it again, get it mighty easy, if I am delirious, and could take enough poison to establish a suicide and set Jake Baintree free.”

He dwelt upon the idea with irritable suspense, now and again starting violently, as if he truly harbored the fancied impulse that he sought to restrain. A stir without,—the approach of a real danger nullified this terror of the nerves. The dead leaves rustled. A step—the wind? He lay motionless, hardly daring to breathe. It came again, and presently a crunching sound and a snarl. He experienced momentary relief: some wild thing was gnawing the bones and bits of meat flung out into the yard, for the prospectors had not been careful housekeepers. He had often heard this as he chanced to wake at night, but now he reflected that the door must be ajar,—a touch would open it; and with his wounds and fever and helplessness he was at the mercy of the wild beasts. He reached out his hand to make sure that the revolver was beside him. In touching it his confidence was restored in some sort, yet in this environment he could not sleep, despite the drowsy influences of weakness and fever. The repulsion of it even in a measure dominated delirium. Sometimes he would hear his voice break forth incoherently upon the air; then subdue himself to silence to listen to the jaws of the startled beast, once more at work upon the bones.

Toward midnight the moon rose. Through the rift in the batten shutter the melancholy golden bars struck across the floor. The scene within, so hateful to his eyes, revived from the encompassing gloom,—the few chairs, the overturned table, the great, wide, vacant hearth, his long figure stretched at length amongst the rigid, blood-stiffened folds of the rug, and the untouched pallet of the fugitive. And later, down the broad shaft of the stick-and-clay chimney the clear lustre burned amid the fireless gray ashes, all gleaming white. No sound from without now, and the wind was laid. Here all solitary, save for the moon. As the reminiscent, meditative mood that comes in her train drowsed down with quiescent influence upon his senses, he wondered vaguely that he should think of the great golden disk, waning and yellow, as it looked when it hung above the pines without, and silvered the frosted grasses of the great bare dome of the mountain, and made the vast spaces of the sky blue with that fine deep tint of the lunar nights; not as it had looked elsewhere, in foreign lands, or shimmering in deep sea waters, or in the grotesque incongruity of its melancholy and its poetry over the sordid streets of cities,—only here, where it seemed native. And the faces that came to him were not those that he had known in that wider life of his, conventional, comfortable, eventless, he seemed discarded by the past, an alien to the future. He could only think of the days just at hand, and of those who had walked through them, and his heart was bitter against them all,—all except Marcella. And somehow, with her face in his mind, and her name forming itself on his lips, he fell asleep in the silence of the dull gray dawn and the fading glamours of the yellow moon.

Her name was on his lips when he woke. “Marcella!” he cried aloud, with a vague idea that she was standing in the door. He lifted himself on his elbow, his heart throbbing with the thought that she had brought deliverance to him, and a fear that the image was but the distraught fantasy of his fevered brain. She seemed to change her identity before his very eyes. He had a vague sense that the walls were still resounding with a shrill cry; was it he who had uttered it, or she?

It was not repeated. Of all the possibilities to steady Mrs. Bowles’s nerves in this unlooked-for emergency, naught could have been as efficacious as the error of mistaking her for another woman.

“’Tain’t Marcelly!” she observed stiffly, while he still lay motionless, half lifted on his elbow, staring at her as if every faculty were merged in that of sight.

She made a motion as if to withdraw, despite her curiosity; then she bethought herself of her inexplicable intrusion, the breach of good manners on which she piqued herself, and thus of her errand.

“I knocked, but nobody answered,” she observed primly and politely, although her bead-like eyes, glancing to and fro, were distended to a degree which had no precedent of elasticity in their experience, as she noted the paucity of the furniture, the dust, the fireless hearth. “The door was on the jar, an’ I ’lowed I’d push it open, an’ mebbe would see one o’ the wimmen-folks o’ the fambly.” She said this with a manner which implied that she did not preferably confer with the men-folks. She assumed a matronly air as she proceeded: “I be a-sarchin’ fur my leetle boy ez strayed off from home. Mebbe some o’ the wimmen-folks hev seen him—ef they air up an’ doin’.” Thus she conveyed a reproof upon his seeming sloth and late hours. Once more her bead-like eyes quickly took an inventory of the belongings. “Whar be the wimmen-folks? A-washin’ of clothes at the spring—_of a Wednesday_?”

Perhaps it was a pity, for the sake of discipline in the abstract and the promulgation of correct housekeeping principles, that these were merely mythical women to whose methods Mrs. Bowles thus definitely made known her objections. A somewhat lively life she might have led them on the Great Smoky, despite the wide, unpopulous stretches of wilderness. She turned her head as she stood on the vantage-ground of the doorstep which commanded the descent to the left of the cabin, where the path in sinuous vagaries led down among the bowlders to the spring. The growth about it was leafless now, and she could see the steely gleam of the water under the dull gray sky. It did not seem to move; its margin was solitary; no whisking, spiral twirls of smoke climbed that unwilling gray sky; no flash of red and yellow flames made cheerful the dull, dun wintry day, merrily wreathing about the great wash-kettle, and singing a roundelay with the bubble of the boiling water, and the sharp crackling of the briery fuel, and the strokes of the paddles beating the clothes white as behooved them; no agents of all this domestic industry were visible, with skirts pinned back and sleeves rolled up. Some such picture Mrs. Bowles’s expectation had projected upon the gray background of wood and mountain; she turned with a bewildered stare from the blank nullity of the prospect. Her flexible lips were more firmly compressed, the bead-like gleam of her eyes more definitely antagonistic, as she looked again at the recumbent figure. The tears had sprung to Rathburn’s eyes,—he was so weak, so full of pain, the deliverance she had brought near so sorely needed, so beyond all license of hope! He could hardly speak in answer to her query, and when he did a sob was in his throat.

“Don’t you see what’s the matter?” Once more her unfriendly eyes dilated.

“Laziness,” she declared unequivocally. “Though I reckon ye’d ’low ye air ailin’ somehows.” She turned to go. “Waal, I hev got no time ter waste. I’ll jes’ leave”—She was about to leave her respects for the “wimmen-folks,” then concluded to deprive of the honor any housekeepers who maintained a hearth like that.

A low cry escaped Rathburn’s lips; he held out his hand. “Don’t you see I am dying—I am dying?” he exclaimed. “I have been murdered! I have been shot and left for dead!” Mrs. Bowles stared speechless at him. “Do you live near here? Can you get me away from this accursed place?” he continued,—“anywhere—anywhere to die but on this floor!”

“I live a good piece off,” she replied. “Yander at the Notch. I be Mis’ Bowles.” Then with a sudden recollection of his ecstatic cry “Marcella!” she added, “Ef ye air ’quainted in the Cove, ye mus’ hev hearn tell ’bout me. I war M’ria White.” The name woke no responsive recognition in his face; he seemed agitated, exhausted, almost spent. “I be kin ter Marcelly Strobe—ye hev hearn her talk ’bout’n me?”

His tact was not prolonged beyond his other waning faculties. He forlornly shook his head, and Mrs. Bowles’s face suddenly hardened. He had had something better, perchance, to talk of with Marcella Strobe; and he evidently had never even heard her name. They had already forgotten her in those precincts of the Cove,—forgotten her as if she had been carried away to her lifeless grave in the little burying-ground instead of her living grave up on the mountain. A cynical sob rose into the throat of the exile. A forlorn yearning she experienced, very poignant, for all it was so pitiful a paradise from whose meagre joys she was excluded.

“I reckon yer folks will be back presently. I mus’ be a-goin’,” she said stiffly.

“I have no folks!” he exclaimed, his eyes once more wide with the terror of being deserted. “I have been shot—Baintree, Jake Baintree, shot me, and has gone. Nobody lives here,—nobody! He left me here to die.”

He could not account for the terror in Mrs. Bowles’s face. She turned very pale; she had backed toward the door. “I ’lowed ye talked sorter funny,—sorter like they say the valley folks do. I mought hev knowed ye warn’t from this kentry. I’m sorry fur ye, but I be ’feard o’ the moonshiners myself, an’”—

“I’m not a revenue officer!” Rathburn almost screamed, divining her thoughts, so well had he come to know the country people and their state of mind toward the officials of the Revenue Department. “I’m just a plain fool.”

She hesitated. Somewhere in her limited spiritual capacity there was conscience enough to rebel against passing by on the other side. She looked at him more wistfully than might have seemed possible to those bright, soulless eyes.

“We have been trying to find silver,” he gasped. “Baintree killed Samuel Keale in this same business, and now he has tried to kill me.” The significant name, the mysterious tragedy, the bootless search for the precious metal, were all long familiar to her, and coerced belief in any subsequent development that might be predicated upon them. He noted the change in her face. “I wonder you have heard nothing about my being here; everybody in the Cove knows it now.”

Mrs. Bowles winced to be found ignorant of what everybody knew. Nevertheless she was equal to the occasion. “I be sech a stay-at-home,” she said, her red lips parting over her fine teeth in a pleasant smile. “The mos’ o’ the news I know is what my chil’n air a-doin’ of, an’ how the pig-pen an’ the poultry air a-thrivin’.”

She is not the first woman of frustrated worldly ambitions who makes a boast of simple domesticity. But it was a sentiment eminently beguiling to the masculine mind.

She saw approval in his eyes; she saw, too, how handsome they were, albeit so hollow,—how intelligent. She relished an admiration calculated to be so discriminating. There was, however, nothing of the married coquette in Mrs. Bowles, and her manner was all that a discreet matron’s might be. The utterly dead and cold aspect of the fireplace struck her anew as she came forward into the room. She was not a logical reasoner, but the dislocation of the domestic situation was sufficiently marked to smite even her ill-developed appreciation of cause and effect. “Who gin ye yer breakfus’?” she demanded, pausing to look down from under the roseate brim of her pink sun-bonnet.

He pointed at the broken fragments on the floor, beside the overturned table. “The rats,” he said scornfully, but with tears in his eyes. “They have had a high old time dragging these scraps about the floor, and they were good enough to leave some in my reach.”

Mrs. Bowles’s shallow, round, shiny eyes looked from him to the bits he indicated, as if with difficulty she grasped the idea that a day could be begun, the light dawn, the sun go through the ceremony of rising, without the equally natural and essential phenomena of the getting of breakfast and the subsequent washing of dishes. “Waal, sir!” she exclaimed beneath her breath, coping at last with this revulsion of nature. “I’ll make some coffee fust thing,” she added aloud. “Leastwise,” she continued, her eyes dwelling with disfavor on the array of cooking utensils, “ef thar’s enny sech thing ez gittin’ some o’ the grime off’n that thar coffee-pot.”

A starving man lay on the floor, but the coffee-pot in question was scoured outside with ashes, as well as inside, before the coffee was ground and set to boil; even the coffee-mill came in for energetic discipline of this sort, Mrs. Bowles merely replying to Rathburn’s insistence that he did not care, and that she need not be so particular, by the tart inquiry, “Don’t ye know dirt is pizen?” which choice axiom of toxicology he was at liberty to add to his store of scientific lore at his leisure. The reclaimed coffee-pot shone very cheerful as it sat, somewhat battered as to shape, upright on a trivet over the live coals; and it began almost straightway to gurgle and to sing, and to give out a most refreshing fragrance. The fire seemed lean, somehow, after all its beds of ashes had been removed, for Mrs. Bowles sharply announced that she “warn’t used to no such slack-twisted ways of keepin’ a h’a’th-stone,” and wondered that he was not worse off than he was, being evidently of the opinion that the surplus of ashes was as pernicious to the health as Jake Baintree’s bullet. The spare brightness of the flames illumined all the room; the radiance cheered him; the warmth was a luxury; and as he drank the coffee she brought him in a cup, also chastened with severe applications of soap and water, he looked at her with great gratitude, and declared that he could never thank her.

“Waal, now, don’t ye _do_ it!” she said, flashing her bright dark eyes at him, and showing all her fine teeth. She sat in one of the rickety chairs beside the hearth, resting from her culinary exertions; the tint of her crisp pink dress here and there deepened and paled as the glow of the fire rose and fell; her face, still shaded by the pink sun-bonnet, was a trifle flushed, and its plump curves were illumined by the glancing light. A placid content rested upon her features. A cultured criticism could never have deemed her beautiful, but she seemed a well-favored creature, pleasing to look upon, and of the kindliest expression. She had not at first impressed Rathburn thus, and he wondered at it as he lay comforted and tended, and enjoying the fire, and the cleanly aspect of things, and the good coffee, and the cheerful sight of her. In truth a change had been wrought in Mrs. Bowles’s outlook at life within the last hour. It is a truism that all is for the best, but we accept it in exactly the proportion in which the dispensation adjusts itself to the requirements of our scheme of things. Mrs. Bowles found it easier to recognize the utility in Rathburn’s misfortunes than the sufferer himself might have readily been brought to do. The fact that her benign ministrations to the wounded man, at the brink of starvation, would be noised abroad throughout Broomsedge Cove, the excitement and sensation that so unusual an incident as her discovery of Baintree’s victim in the nick of time would necessarily rouse, must serve to mitigate any harsh criticism of her conduct to the fugitive Bob, if not altogether to nullify it. Possibly her absence from home in the guise of good Samaritan would suffice to explain any commotion in the deserted domestic sphere, even Bob’s flight itself. No one need know which had first left the roof. Her eyes, full of forecast, were on the floor. Her lips were adjusted primly as the words were dumbly fashioned upon them. “I reckon Bob mus’ hev strayed off through sarchin’ fur me,”—she fancied herself thus accounting for the incident. What more natural to say and to credit? Rathburn’s self-esteem had been grievously cut down of late, but even in its reduced estate he could never have dreamed that the chief significance of Baintree’s crime and his own deep wounds could be to any one merely the means of innocuously accounting for the small Bob Bowles’s flight from his home. He had not yet finished his coffee. He was too feeble to take more than a few swallows at long intervals. Mrs. Bowles fixed her eyes upon him from time to time, evidently expecting that he would hand back the cup, and waiting to wash it. In the mean while she renewed her canvass of the place. “I ’low ez Jake Baintree mought hev been sati’fied ’thout turnin’ the furniture topsy-turvy,” she commented upon the overturned table. She rose as she spoke and righted the article in question, gathering up the fragments of bread and the broken crockery, and going to the door to throw them out. “I’d like ter sweep this hyar floor. I reckon the dust wouldn’t choke ye much.” She spoke in a tone that curiously partook of a demand as of a right, and yet of a request as for a favor. She gazed searchingly into the corners. “Laws-a-massy!” she cried, her voice striking the high key of mingled surprise and ridicule. “I don’t believe the man hev so much ez got a broom!”

Albeit this praiseworthy intention was thus frustrated, she still dwelt upon the incidents of the floor. “Air that Baintree’s shootin’-iron?” she asked, with knitted brows, as she noted the revolver.

“No, mine,” said Rathburn.

“Did you-uns shoot back?” demanded Mrs. Bowles judicially, evidently not to be prejudiced against the absent Baintree.

“I?” exclaimed Rathburn. “I was asleep.”

Mrs. Bowles turned suddenly pale. “Ye warn’t a-fightin’?” she asked, amazed.

“I tell you I was asleep,” said Rathburn angrily, the blood rising to his face. “We had had a quarrel”—

“What about?” interrupted Mrs. Bowles, eagerly relishing gossip so highly flavored, so fraught with danger, as this.

Rathburn was nothing loath. His attack upon Baintree seemed so small a matter in comparison with the dastardly crime which his enemy had committed that he had lost all the sense of humiliation, of repentance, that had so oppressed him. “Why, I made him tell me where that man Samuel Keale lost his life. That’s where I believe silver is to be found.”

Mrs. Bowles glanced over her shoulder with a gleam of scornful laughter. All unmindful, Rathburn went on:—

“I choked him till he told me. He wouldn’t tell me till I had half choked the life out of him.”

“They say they can’t try him no mo’ fur that nohow,” she said. “I dunno what ails him ter be so tongue-tied ’bout’n it now. Whar war the place?” she queried, in sheer curiosity. She evidently attached little importance to his answer. She cared naught for justice in the abstract, and she had no special enmity toward Baintree. She leaned forward after she had spoken, and mended the fire, which was beginning to show a tendency to smoke.

“That’s the queerest turn of all,” said Rathburn. A gleam of excitement shone in his eyes. “He tracked this man Keale to a cave; he never saw him again. There were the prints of feet about the place, and the cave was on Teck Jepson’s land.”

The half-burned fagot fell from Mrs. Bowles’s hand with a sharp crash upon the hearth; the smoke curled out into the room unheeded. Still bending over the fire, she turned her head and fixed upon him excited eyes, in which suspicion smouldered. “Teck Jepson!” she cried. “His bones hid in a cave on Jepson’s land! No wonder the jury floundered an’ the law failed! Jepson! ah—h!” Her eyes narrowed and her lip curled. “I’ll be bound Teck Jepson hed a hand in Keale’s takin’-off; ennybody mought hev suspicioned it—ah—h!”

“I never said that,” stipulated Rathburn warily, animated by that reluctance felt by all civilized men to unnecessarily assume responsibility. “I only know that I forced Baintree to tell where the place was,—fairly choked the words out of him; and because I declared that I would search that cave of Jepson’s he shot me while I was asleep, and left me for dead—with my own revolver. Why, this old thing,” he said, clasping its handle, “I couldn’t tell when it has been discharged. He had to clean it—rusty old”—

“Put it down,—put it down!” cried Mrs. Bowles, with an unwonted show of timidity, and shrinking back against the jamb of the chimney. “I can’t abide them bob-tailed shootin’-irons,—I can’t place no dependence in ’em like rifles; they look ter me ez ef they’d ez soon go off ez not, an’ a leetle ruther.”

Rathburn had ceased to meddle with the “bob-tailed shootin’-iron,” and went on: “He not only shot me twice, so determined was he to have me silenced and dead and out of the way, but long afterward—the next day, or the next—he came there to that slit in the window, to look in and make sure that he had done his work thoroughly.”

Mrs. Bowles turned half-way round in her chair, and fixed her dilated, startled eyes upon the crevice, as if she expected to see the long, keen, narrow face, with its furtive, crafty glance, peering through. “I lay as stiff and as rigid as a corpse could,” Rathburn went on. “I’ll bet you there was a glaze on my eyes, half shut I held ’em— What’s the matter? Where are you going?” he broke off suddenly.

For Mrs. Bowles had risen so precipitately, with so wild an aspect, that despite the stiff neatness of her starched pink skirts and sun-bonnet she seemed suddenly disheveled. Her face was blanched, her eyes moved restlessly about. “Oh, my Lord!” she exclaimed, “I mus’ be a-goin’—I mus’ be a-gittin’ away from hyar—I—I—I’m ’feard o’ Jake Baintree.”

“One minute,—wait one minute!” cried Rathburn, lifting himself upon his elbow, dismayed by the result of his graphic description of Baintree’s visit. “He only came once,—that is, so far as I know; he isn’t likely to come again; he has probably left the country.”

“Shucks!” Mrs. Bowles summarily and contemptuously disposed of his logic, her suave graces and benign ministering disposition dispersing in thin air before the approach of personal danger. “Ef what he hev told ’bout that thar cave on Teck Jepson’s land be wuth killin’ you-uns ’bout, it air wuth killin’ me too, an’ his comin’ back shows he air powerful partic’lar ’bout’n his job. Leastwise I ain’t goin’ ter resk his comin’ back agin an’ murderin’ me hyar.” As her roving eye fell upon him, seeing his pain, his terrible straits, all expressed in his face, she recoiled a trifle before their dumb, unconscious, pallid reproach. “I have got a fambly dependin’ on me,” she said justifying her care for personal safety. She spoke with flabby white lips, and her eyes still maintained their hasty, restless movements.

“Oh, you’re all right,” Rathburn made haste to stipulate; the touch of satire in his voice was so light as to be almost unappreciable. “Altogether a matter of choice. Each for one’s self, and devil take the hindmost.”

“I’ll put this bread an’ water whar ye kin git it, an’ pile up some wood hyar so ez ye kin make a fire.”

“When I am able,” he seemed to assent.

“An’”—she turned upon him her disingenuous eyes—“I’ll tell the folks in the Cove whar ye be, an’ send some of ’em after ye.”

He could not have explained how he knew it so definitely, he pretended to no gift of forecast, but he was sure that her lips would be sealed so far as the tragedy in the deserted mountain hut was concerned; that she would not dare to overtly frustrate Baintree’s vengeance, since he was at large and bent upon it, or to aid to fix his crime upon him. She would send no help. She would ostensibly hope that he might recover, but feel that it was the solution of a dangerous perplexity if he should die, realize how much she had done for his comfort, and reflect that in no event was it any affair of hers.

“If it would take no more time, I’d thank you instead to buckle the girth of the saddle about that gray mare of mine, and hitch her bridle to the ring at the door. I may take a little ride to-day. Oh, I’m a great deal stronger than you think.” He smiled affably to meet her dismayed glance.

She stood motionless, doubting and deliberating. He looked like death; but he was a physician,—he had told her this,—and he was a better judge of his strength than she. She could not retrieve the fact that she had been here and become cognizant of Baintree’s crime, thereby incurring danger from him, and this Rathburn might detail whenever liberated. If perchance he should ride boldly down into the Cove,—it seemed impossible,—the story of her desertion of him in such a time of need would furnish a terrible supplement as well as convincing proof of any deductions of cruelty to the fugitive Bob. Without this incident, indeed, Bob’s flight could hardly be innocuously passed over.

He could not understand the change in her face; it brightened with sudden resolution.

“Why, to be sure I kin,” she said cordially. “An’ mebbe ye kin kem right along down the mounting arter me inter the Cove. I’d wait fur ye, ’ceptin’ I be ’bleeged ter look arter that leetle boy o’ mine; it pesters me mightily ter hev ter leave ye, an ef ’twarn’t ez I be bound ter go down inter the Cove I’d ax ye ter kem an’ bide at my house.”

It assuaged her discontent in some sort to be able to go through this form of hospitality, meaningless as it was, for nothing could have induced her to harbor a man with a dangerous secret like this, and whose death Jake Baintree, already red-handed, sought.

“Thank you very much,” Rathburn said civilly, but glad to show his independence. “I reckon I had better go to the Cove, to some friends I have there,—the Strobe family. I know they will take me in.”

She once more remembered his ecstatic cry of “Marcella!” when she first stood in the door. She grudged a guest of this quality to the Strobes, albeit she had no wish to open her own house. She supposed it possible that they had made his acquaintance through Eli’s machinations with the strings of government. She had always believed that there was much social advantage in politics. Being so debarred, she was keener of perception in this regard, and quicker to appraise such opportunities than most of the mountaineers.

She carried these thoughts with her while she buckled the saddle-girth about the mare, glancing fearfully ever and anon over her shoulder at the gray solitudes glooming round. If he were strong enough to reach the Cove, he would compass this without her aid, and would have much of her dereliction to report. If he were not strong enough, he would die by the way, and thus would tell no secrets, either of the crime that Jake Baintree had committed, or of the knowledge of it that she reluctantly possessed. The mare was a tall beast, frisky and fat, and unused to being handled by women. She lowered her head and flung up her heels as the pink skirts swayed about her hoofs, but bridled and saddled she was at last, and the hitching rein was slipped through the ring on the door.

Mrs. Bowles was a little hasty in her leave-taking. “I’ll tell the Strobes they mought ez well look out ter see ye, eh?” she called through the half-open door.

“If you will oblige me,” he responded in turn.

There was naught of offense in the tone and the words, but her face was lowering beneath her jaunty pink-head-gear as she once more slipped her foot in the stirrup, glad enough to feel it there again, and mounted into her worn old sidesaddle. “Perliteness is on his lips, but not in his heart,” she said bitterly, for there are none who so resent insincerity as the insincere.

As she jogged off down the bridle-path, she noted the threatening aspect of the day. All above the circling sombre purple mountains, on every side, darkening clouds hung in sinister abeyance. Below in the Cove, the stretches of the broomsedge flared, in its tawny ruddy tint the only suggestion of sunshine in the landscape; where the forests intervened, the thickly massed myriads of bare boughs, even the heavily draped branches of the pines, were null as to color, and lurked darkling in the valleys, intensifying the great gloom of the scene. Only far away could she see lighter tints, albeit of a gray diffusiveness, and this was along the summit of a distant range, where the nebulosity of the cloud had been resolved into vague slanting lines intimating rainfall. The weather could hardly be more unpropitious for her journey to the Cove, but with the recent events in the forlorn little shanty in mind, with the terror of the possible propinquity of the murderous Baintree lurking in the wintry woods somewhere, she did not hesitate, she had no wish to linger. Only once she looked back: when she had progressed so far down the descent, at a thumping, lunging walk,—for her horse had a gait unique in its way, especially adapted to these precipitous descents and slippery verges of the Great Smoky,—that another turn amongst the leafless wands of the undergrowth would conceal the house from view, she halted for a moment, and glanced over her shoulder. The ragged, bare slope of the mountain stretched high above; amongst the leafless boughs of the gnarled old trees, imposed in definite lines against the slate-tinted sky, she saw the wreathing blue smoke of the fire she had made, and beneath the branches at the end of the vista, the little hut, the oblique line of the gray roof cut sharply against the sombre purple masses of a neighboring mountain visible across the valley. The door was shut, and there rode down the path, mounted upon the gray mare, an emaciated figure, with a face all pallid and ghostly in the dim light of the day; and Mrs. Bowles, although unimaginative, received a terrible suggestion of the Biblical Death upon the pale horse, as the rider came swaying in the saddle between the slate-colored clouds and the purple-black mountains in those forlorn altitudes, where solitude possessed the wilderness and the storm impended.

“He can’t keep the saddle fur haffen the way,” she said to herself.

Then she turned, and urged her horse down and down the descent, losing as she went, being considerably in advance, the sound of the hoofs that followed.