An extreme surprise at the good fortune of another is an ungrateful
sentiment and must needs be warily expressed. It tends to the
suggestion that the reward exceeds the merits in the case, and Eugene
Binley by no means commended himself by the astonishment with which he
now heard for the first time the extraordinary fact, which Clotilda
detailed to him, that her singing and dancing had so entranced the
town-man that he had besought the Pinnott family to come to the Street
Fair without money and without price, and that there she was to sing
and dance for all the crowd to wonder at her gifts and grace.
"That ain't whut the Pinnott men-folks air goin' fur," he said bluntly;
"they air goin' ter sell whisky in that thar dry town." And he pointed
over his shoulder at a load of splint baskets which several were
bringing out of a remote recess, and which were always unused and
fresh, kept as a light disguise for a waggon otherwise laden. "It's
mighty dangerous," he added. But she made no comment. Presumably she
thought the men were able to take care of themselves.
He hesitated for a moment, then recurred to the subject important to
none but himself and her.
"Singin' with the stranger-man! I wondered why you uns war so long
a-comin' down."
He lifted one hand to that miracle of nature, the snowy stalagmite that
expressed the marvels wrought by time, that aggregated drops of water,
each with its charge of lime, falling and falling on the floor beneath
till the great pillar stood complete. As he leaned thus he looked down
reproachfully upon her.
It was hard for her to regain her wonted state of mind. So fluttered,
so elated she had been.
"It ain't much later than common," she said absently, fingering a red
bead necklace around her throat. He, who knew her simple gauds, was
aware that she rarely wore it and accounted it a treasure. He divined
that it had been donned to rejoice the eyes of an admiring stranger.
"I s'pose he war all streck of a heap?" he said craftily, his eyes
narrowing as he looked intently at her.
"I dunno 'bout that," she laughed coquettishly.
"What sort o' appearin' man war he?" Eugene demanded, arrogating the
prerogative of inquisition.
He was not altogether at ease amongst the men, and was sometimes
conscious of a disadvantage with them, owing to the anomaly of his
position, forced into a crime against the Federal law, of which he
became guilty to evade trial for a crime against the State law of which
he knew himself innocent. He had not demonstrated any great judgment
or capacity in this course, and he knew it affected their estimate.
Other men had done more heinous deeds who swaggered openly in the
coves. It was in the first rush of terror, the first ill-considered
impulse that he had come here, and once entrusted with the moonshiners'
secret he could not, he would not draw back. Ill luck might befall
them, and here indeed was a danger. The fate of the informer, real or
suspected, was a more inevitable terror than all else that menaced him.
But he felt all a man's ascendency over the feminine mind, and indeed
she divined naught as she replied to his questions.
"Waal, he is just a pretty boy--plumb beautiful! Mighty nigh ez
sweet-faced ez any gal."
"I say 'boy'!" he replied incredulously. "They tell me ez he laid Tawm
out flat with one lick. Tawm hev been lame in the shoulder ever sence."
"Waal--he is surely strong, though only middle-sized, but
mild-eyed--sorter babyfied."
"Shucks! I say babyfied. Waal--all you uns goin' ter the show, an' hyar
I be 'feared ter stir,--hid up hyar in a hole in the rocks like a wolf
or a painter an' ez ef thar war a bounty on my skelp."
"'Tain't but fur a week--less 'n a week," she urged.
"You uns don't keer--else ye wouldn't go," he said, dropping his voice,
and all his heart was in his eyes as he looked down at her.
She had her moments of perspicacity. "Then I won't go," she said, with
the facile self-abnegation of one who knows that the tendered sacrifice
will not be accepted.
He suddenly came from his negligent posture to the perpendicular, tense
and nervous. "Naw, naw--I don't want that nuther," he protested as she
had expected.
"I 'lows ye don't rightly know whut 'tis ye do want!" she declared with
an air of flouting impatience.
"Yes, I do too--but I couldn't abide ez ye should miss seein' the
show--an' mebbe later in the week I'll slip down, too."
A genuinely serious look usurped the feignings of her face. "Better
mind, Eujeemes," she admonished him, "ye mought meet the sher'ff face
ter face in the street. He be well acquainted with you uns--ye hev tole
me that!" She nodded her head with an expression of dreary foreboding.
"Waal," he said desperately, but evidently faint-hearted, "I could
leave it ter men."
She looked at him in rising irritation, half minded to withhold the
remonstrance that she knew he pined to hear. His own sense of prudence
made him yearn for an urgency of caution. But she was yet vibrating
with the unwonted excitements of the afternoon, yet aglow with the
realisation of an admiration all unaccustomed in its expression and its
subject. She was well aware that she had been considered a "powerful
pretty gal" throughout the countryside, and though the small distorted
surface of a cheap mirror afforded no adequate reflection of her
beauty, it was well-pleasing to her untutored eye, and was called into
frequent consultation. But this popular repute was an homage shared
by a dozen other mountain nymphs, and in more than one instance she
was surpassed in public esteem chiefly on account of the tint of her
red hair and the tiny freckles here and there marring the exquisite
fairness of her face, despite all that baths of buttermilk and May dew
could compass.
The incense that the manager offered at her shrine had a new and
intoxicating flavour. It was unique, for her alone. It was such as an
artist might feel at the first view of some fine example of a great
painter's work, or a virtuoso's joy in the discovery amongst refuse
lumber of a genuine Cremona. She could not, of course, discriminate
the quality of his feeling, but she had never seen a man's face kindle
with that impersonal fervour of delight which illumined his when he
looked at her dancing pose and listened to the tones of her voice. She
had begun to feel very kindly toward one who made her feel so kindly
toward herself. Since she had discovered that her father considered it
impossible that he could be an emissary of the revenue force seeking
the moonshiner's lair, for which she had mistaken him when she had so
jealously guarded him to the house that he might render an account
of himself to the head of the enterprise, she had given rein to her
interest in his personality; she had realised with a sort of wondering
pleasure the delicacy, the refinement of the beauty of his face; her
heart warmed to the look in his eyes. She had now no doubts of him;
that universal attraction which his candid nature seemed to exert on
all the world had too its influence on her. She had begun to entertain
a sort of veneration for him, his wide experience, his evident
singular knowledge of many things beyond her ken--with how few words
he had seemed to make her voice, even to her limited comprehension,
a different endowment, infinitely sweeter, stronger, with added
liberties of compass. She longed even now to try the phrases which he
had inculcated, telling her to sing them at short intervals and with
due care, to assume her natural beautiful dancing poses, which he had
taught her to accent for the greater effect.
The unknown vast world from which he had come had evolved a sudden
interest for her; heretofore she had not even bethought herself to be
aware of its existence, save as it now and again spewed out the revenue
force, with their sombre menace, to be presently lost again in its
unimagined turmoils.
Her mind was full of speculations concerning him. He was her first
illustration of the gradations of society; he seemed to her a person of
vast importance; she had a sort of reverence for the splendours of his
calling; he was a showman--a part owner of the great enterprise whose
"pictorial paper" he had spread upon the cabin floor, and he had opened
to her a world of wonders to contemplate. Her beautiful eyes grew soft
and bright with the thought of him.
Her mind longed to follow the trend of these new reflections. She
was tired all at once of Eugene Binley's woes. The injustice in his
incarceration here in the moonshiner's den was itself like the penance
of imprisonment for a crime of which he believed himself innocent.
Yet in putting the question to the test he risked more than his
liberty--his life itself was jeopardised. His hard case had appealed
to her woman's sympathy--the future was dim, veiled, he might not
divine the issue of a day. He had had a certain interest for her; he
was of a more dashing personality than the duller men she had known.
The impulsive temperament that had lured him to his doom had a quality
that struck her fancy in dearth of other attractions. He was quick,
keen, fiery, and he had a spark of imagination that imparted warmth to
others, bare and cold of mental attributes. He had added to his more
definite and obvious troubles the æsthetic grief of falling desperately
in love, and in a cautious and dubious way she had responded. This was
a sentimental result of the privilege of shelter which Shadrach Pinnott
had not anticipated, and which he by no means favoured. He had secured
for the bare boon of subsistence an additional stalwart worker at the
still, and one whose secrecy was pledged for the best of reasons.
That Eugene Binley could not venture freely forth like the others,
that he was not subject, therefore, to disclose by inadvertence in
casual conversation the secrets of the trade, since he saw no one not
concerned in the illicit manufacture, gave him an added value to his
employer which Shadrach was not slow to appreciate. More countenance
than shelter and subsistence he had no mind to afford him. Shadrach
had taken no steps, however, to balk the romance thus far. He had some
knowledge, perhaps, of the inconstancy of the feminine heart, and
relied on this to furnish in due time the solution of the problem, or
perhaps like many other people he merely postponed to a more convenient
season the guessing of the difficult riddle which circumstance had
propounded. Hence, though he now and then glanced askance at the lovers
as they stood half in the shadow of the stalagmite, and half in the
thin white light of the tallow dip, he said naught to discourage the
"fool chin-choppin'" as he denominated their talk, thinking it the
course least calculated to do harm. "Lovyers let alone will quar'l
enough tharselves ter fling 'em apart. A peaceable disposed person
needn't 'sturb hisself ter start a contention jes' ter separate 'em,"
he argued within himself.
"Leave it ter men?" she was echoing Binley's words dully. "I'd hate
powerful ter leave anythink ez I war took up with ter sech ez men."
She gazed speculatively about the place, suddenly illumined with a
preternatural brilliancy as Daniel Pinnott flung open the furnace door.
All the white colonnades were a-glister with myriads of sparkling
points of light. Far, far down the shadowy reaches of the cave they
were visible now, with stately arches marking the confines of other
and further chambers, unexplored perhaps and of an undemonstrated
vastness. The light brought into evidence that peculiar incrustation of
the walls of limestone caverns which takes the semblance of flowers,
the rough projections seeming roses, lilies wrought in the rock, the
similitude being so exact that here and there a flower can be found as
perfect of symmetry as if carved by the chisel of a cunning workman.
Glimpsed through one of the lofty arches the depending stalactites
in a heavy group might have suggested to a cultivated imagination a
great chandelier of imposing proportions and thus have heightened the
semblance to some stately hall, the audience chamber of a sovereign,
the throne-room of the buried splendours of some forgotten magic
monarchy. The limitations of Clotilda's experience and mental scope
forbade the fancy, but the uncouth forms of the distillers with their
slouching shadows, their big hats, their bent postures, their dull
lack-lustre faces, their grotesque gestures, gnome-like at their work,
seemed indeed at variance with this scene of weird beauty, and little
suggestive of those higher attributes of justice, of acumen, of
perspicacity. "I'd sure hate ter leave it ter men."
It was the subject in all the world of paramount importance to him,
and he was eagerly ready for the discussion of its phases anew. Every
point they had often canvassed together with the keenness of a vital
mutual interest, and there was naught new to urge. But as he shifted
his weight, though still leaning against the pillar, and brought his
brows together in a dubitating frown and began, "Waal, now,"--she
suddenly revolted from the theme. Her mind, her heart were elsewhere.
She hastily interrupted--"Of course, though, it's jes' ez ye think.
Mebbe it would be best, arter all, ter leave it ter men."
Adversity is said to be of vast moral value in the discipline of the
heart; it is a whetstone to the wits as well. Eugene Binley caught
all the sense of dismissal that was in her mind as it unconsciously,
insistently reached out for the new thoughts that surged upon it. He
was cut to the soul. All that he had was at stake, his liberty, his
life, or--if this unavailing seclusion were gratuitous--his restoration
to the free, independent, open walks of existence. A terrible doubt
beset him. Did she indeed care no longer? Had she ever cared--or was
it but an idle whim in default of more serious interest that had lured
his heart from him? He could not judge. His head was in a whirl. But
remonstrance might avail naught. It was the fact that impressed his
mind. He had surprised the revolt of her sentiment--it had been a
momentary illumination like that of the open furnace door, now clashed
close again, leaving the cave to its dull shadow, the far reaches of
dense blackness through distant arches, the dim pure white radiance
of the tallow dip, the subdued scintillations of the stalagmitic
colonnades, the dull rotund glister of the copper still, the vermicular
suggestions of the worm coiled up in the condenser, the intense line
of vivid white light that defined the lower edge of the furnace door,
the metal fitting ill to the masonry, and thus giving a glimpse of the
roaring fire within. Clotilda had turned her face upward toward Eugene
Binley, as if waiting for him to speak, but there was within it no
light of interest, only dull attention.
He tried the experiment deliberately. "Oh, we uns can't make no
decision now, short off; we uns hev been along that road many a time;
but we don't often hev news in the mountings. Tell me su'thin' more
'bout the show an' that thar showman."
Her face was suddenly irradiated.
"You uns never hearn the beat in all yer life," she said, her eyes
dilated and her head nodding to one side, with pride and delight. "He
sung sweeter than any mawkin' bird, but he said ter me, 'Lydy, ef
ye'll permit me ter say it,'"--she imitated Lloyd's grave, circumspect
manner, "'it's a monstious pity fur yer rare voice an' yer 'strodinary
grace in dancin' ter be wasted hyar in this wilderness--would ye
consider a proposition ter puffawm in public?'"
She bent forward in such a pretty reverential bow that Tom Pinnott,
lying on a pile of sacks of grain,--his shoulder was still lame, and he
rested it at close intervals,--called out to the others:
"Look-a-yander at Clotildy. She air mawkin' the stranger-man. It's the
very moral o' the critter."
Binley had a vague realisation of the grinning of half a dozen sets
of great tobacco-browned teeth among the group that sat around the
furnace, perched on kegs or inverted baskets, or sacks of grain. His
head was unsteady. His heart beat tumultuously. He hardly knew what was
this obsession that had enthralled him. Jealousy he had felt ere this
in minor matters, but he had so little conception of the strength of
the passion that now, when it grappled with him, he did not recognise
it.
"I went straight an' axed dad ef I mought," Clotilda resumed, a little
thread of continuous laughter trickling through her words, like a
rivulet that cannot stay its joyous course. "I tuk dad out on the porch
'cause he blates so loud whenst he talks--an' fust he said naw, and
then when he 'membered 'bout sellin' whisky ter the crowd on the quiet
in that dry town, and that folks would 'low ez the family war thar jes'
ter view me sing an' dance an' not ter sell moonshine, it 'peared ter
him a powerful good excuse ter go."
"Hop light, ladies," sang out Tom, who had a powerful organ in his own
deep chest.
But Clotilda put her hands to her ears with a grimace of pain. "I never
wants ter hear no other man sing--that stranger's voice was like--like
honey. 'Twar so--sweet--soundin'."
Her pensive lids drooped above her great bright eyes and she gave a
shuddering little sigh, as if the ecstatic remembrance were fraught
with an appreciated pain.
Old Shadrach Pinnott had a sudden monition of business. "That's a fac',
boys," he said, taking his pipe from his mouth, "every durned imp of ye
mus' be at the tent ter hear Clotildy puffawm--'tis the reason folks
mus' understand why we uns all waggon down ter Colb'ry. Mam'll go,
an' A'minty an' the baby, all o' we uns will go, an' nobody on yearth
would suspicion ez we uns kem fur ennything else than ter hear an' see
Clotildy sing an' dance in a public puffawmance."
He puffed his pipe for a few minutes while the others gave varying
growls of more or less reluctant acquiescence as they accorded or
disagreed with his view of the importance of their appearance as
spectators on the occasion. He possibly discriminated this note of
dissent, for he remarked presently--"It air sure a powerful oncommon
happening--I reckon Clotildy will be the fust mounting gal that ever
sung an' danced in a show tent."
"An' she ought ter be the las'," said Daniel Pinnott sourly. He was
the conservative one of the sons, a settled married man, and he had the
married man's insistent convictions as to the propriety of demeanour
and decorous home-abiding fitting for the female sex. He remembered,
too, the reach of the long arm of the Revenue Department. Though a
volcano may be silent, sleeping, the hot heart of the crater burns
with an inextinguishable fire. He did not venture to openly oppose the
determination of the paternal autocrat, but he had done his utmost to
dissuade the enterprise.
The elder man made no direct rejoinder, but he nevertheless combated
this spirit of negation. "Colb'ry hev been mighty dry--sence it's been
a dry town," he said significantly, speaking with his pipe in the
corner of his mouth. "I reckon folkses' throats thar air about ez dry
ez a lime-burner's kiln."
The younger moonshiners eyed the dissentient Daniel with a degree of
rancour. "I'll be bound they'll nose out our waggon powerful quick,"
said Tom. "We'll sell a deal o' liquor, else I'm mightily s'prised."
Old Shadrach nodded assentingly.
"It'll take a heap o' liquor ter git a prohibition town soaked through
an' through. We uns hev got a week though ter finish the business. The
Street Fair will show fur a week."
"An' I'm ter sing an' dance twict every day," cried Clotilda
delightedly. She had listened to the colloquy of the group around
the still with a very definite anxiety lest from Daniel's doubts and
remonstrances a final abandonment of the project ensue. She now leaned
her fluffy auburn head back against the great stalagmite and laughed
with a renewal of zest and cheer as she cast up her eyes at Eugene
Binley, who still stood beside her looking loweringly down at her.
There was something so aloof, so smitten, yet so menacing in his eyes
that her elated spirits suddenly collapsed. It suggested the frightful
pathos of a savage animal, sorely wounded and suffering, yet with an
unabated ferocity. The very look numbed her joy.
"I be powerful sorry ez you uns can't be thar ter see me," she declared
falteringly, suddenly drawn back from her soft conceits of anticipation
to this sullen reality.
"Oh, I'll be thar," he protested with a forlorn lame joviality.
"Eujeemes will be afeared ez Clotildy will be gittin' merried ter some
o' them town men whilst he be hid out in the mountings. I reckon other
folks will be streck all of a heap with her puffawmin' jes the same ez
that thar stranger-man," Tom observed as he lay at length.
Tom had but the primitive processes of mind and feeling. He possessed
no cultivated sensibilities either for himself or for others, and even
his perceptions of policy were rudimentary. The old man, the exemplar
of all the distillers, by virtue of his age, his experience, his
patriarchal position, struck in abruptly with a sharp reproof.
"Ain't you uns got no better sense an' showin', Tawmmy, than ter be
settin' out so brash ter talk 'bout things that ye dunno nuthin' 'bout?
Clotildy ain't goin' ter be allowed ter marry nobody till she's twenty,
an' she hev now jes' turned eighteen."
"_Twenty!_" exclaimed Clotilda with a sudden revival of interest. "Why,
I'll feel so old whenst I'm twenty that I reckon I'll hev ter walk with
a stick by then."
"Like the stranger-man do now," cried Tom, the irrepressible. He
sprang up and took a few erratic steps along the aisle of the arcade,
twirling an imaginary cane, now flinging it jauntily up into the air,
now striking it with emphasis on the ground, but a sudden twinge in his
lame shoulder gave him pause. He stopped short, with a grimace of pain,
seeking to put his hand to it, and then he came heavily enough back to
the furnace and sank down on his improvised couch of sacks of grain.
"He air a better man than you uns--he downed you uns, Tawmmy," Clotilda
exclaimed with such obvious pleasure and pride in the stranger's
prowess that Shadrach Pinnott was minded to take reluctant account of
the cloud that lowered on the brow of Eugene Binley.
"Shucks," he said contemptuously, "that war jes' sleight o' hand. Them
show folks hev l'arned tricks that take the eye. He ain't no spunky
fighter sech ez--sech ez--waal, sech ez Eujeemes thar fur instance."
There was a momentary pause, broken only by the muffled roar of the
flames of the furnace fire and the trickle of the doublings dropping
down from the worm into the keg below.
"You boys mus' be powerful cautious," Shadrach Pinnott presently
remarked with a serious thought. "You uns mus'n't talk foolish an'
wild. Course Eujeemes ain't got no notion, sure enough, o' goin' ter
Colb'ry ter see the show." He hesitated, then spoke plainly and to the
point. "I don't want no man along o' me that the sher'ff air lookin'
fur." He paused expectant of reassurance.
"I knows that," Eugene Binley answered with a lowering brow.
Shadrach Pinnott expected him to say more. His face, with the pallor
that is the concomitant of red hair, bleached yet more by his indoor
occupation, was turned with ghastly effect toward the young man who
still stood with the girl beside the column. The moonshiner's eyebrows
were insistently raised; his eyes had a pointed interrogation; his lips
had fallen apart in the stress of immediate anticipation, his mouth
showing like a dark hollow in the midst of his great red beard. The
pause continued unbroken.
The sound of gentle purling was distinct in the silence. The dripping
of the ardent spirits from the worm was hardly to be distinguished from
the ripple of the rill of water in the troughs led down from one of
the subterranean springs to its mission of utility in the condenser and
the big burly mash-tubs, or the occasional irregular trickling from the
roof of the drops with their solution of lime charged with the building
of the fantastic architecture of the cavern.
"The sher'ff hain't got no call ter meddle with moonshine," Shadrach
Pinnott was forced to resume at length. "But ef he war ter hev reason
ter s'arch my outfit fur law-breakers agin the State he'd find the
liquor an' word would be tuk ter the marshal."
Eugene had his own sullen grievances. He was still a free agent, but at
that moment no vague intention of sharing the moonshiners' venture into
Colbury had entered his mind. To him it seemed like putting his head
into the lion's jaws. He had nevertheless winced from the perception of
their carelessness as to his safety, when he had remonstrated against
the risks of the expedition which might rebound upon him, and almost
equally from their wanton taunts. Now he was indisposed to reassure
them in their turn, to set their minds at rest as to the dangers which
his presence in Colbury might bring down on them. He said naught, and
for the nonce Shadrach Pinnott was at a loss.
By some filial intuition Clotilda divined the emergency, for she was
hardly so versed in the exigencies of the hazardous law-breaking
vocation as to appreciate it of her own initiative.
"I dunno whut you uns mean by sayin' ye would see me at the show," she
said in a low voice. "Jes' now ye war tryin' ter torment me by talkin'
'bout being hid out like a wolf or su'thin' wild."
A casual conversation was in progress amongst the group beside the
furnace. Binley lowered his voice to the key of her own. "Do that
torment you uns, Honey-sweet?" he asked, lured anew.
She silently cast a glance of reproach at him. Her face was so
beautiful with this expression of upbraiding protest--it needed
but this touch of sentiment to lift it into the grade of the truly
exquisite. He should have been touched by the embellishment which a
thought of grief for him had wrought upon it. But he remembered in
that moment the stranger's admiration. Doubtless as she looked at him
she was conscious of its charm; she gauged its power upon his poor
unstable melting heart. All the fascination of her youthful loveliness
was no longer a sealed book to her. She had been apprised of its worth
even for a public performance. She was now exerting it consciously to
make and keep him subject, not to her whim alone, but to bend him to
the iron rule of the crafty Shadrach. Eugene Binley loved her after
his fashion, but it was not that high, sacrificial passion that annuls
self, and fosters faith, and blinds sober reason. If, as he suspected,
she loved him no longer; if so soon, so lightly he was supplanted in
her heart; if no more his great and troublous trials absorbed her pity
and her sympathy, the consciousness would work a metamorphosis in his
sentiment. His tenderness would be replaced by revenge; his admiration
would resolve itself into contumely; his mistaken faith would evolve
deceit. Already on the mere suspicion he was meeting craft with craft.
Her upbraiding eyes encountered a look as languishingly adoring as if
no divination of her motive informed it, as if this restive, alert,
exacting creature were wholly and hopelessly her own. "I 'lowed I'd see
you uns--I never said nuthin' ez I knows on 'bout you uns seein' me."
He pushed his hat back on his long, chestnut hair and looked down at
her with his large brown eyes luminously watchful as if to minutely
descry the effect of his words.
The fascination of the new vista opening in her restricted life, so
wide, so long, so variously flowered to one who knew naught heretofore
but the wood-pile and the cow pen and the treadle of the loom, filled
her every faculty. She longed to be still, to think; she could scarcely
affect interest in the distinction he made in his speech--that he
should see her but she should not see him--she was eager to have the
preparations for the sortie to the cove fairly under way. Nevertheless
with the realisation of furthering the moonshiner's plans she kept the
wily fish in play.
"What be you uns talkin' 'bout? I reckon I could see you uns ef ye
could see me?" she asked, pulling at the strings of dark red beads
falling down over the bosom of her light blue cotton gown.
As he shook his head to and fro smiling enigmatically she was so
weary of him and his mysteries that the listlessness of her effort at
interest could not be kept from her face, and might in itself have
intimated her state of mind had he not already suspected it. She bent
her face downward as if to escape too close a scrutiny while still,
fixedly smiling, he studied its contour.
"I 'lowed ef ye went off an' lef me 'twould plumb kill me,
Puddin'-pie," he averred.
"Oh, shucks," she exclaimed, bending her head to pleat a fold of her
gown with affected embarrassment.
"An' I 'lowed I'd follow ye, ef I war dead, ez I would of choice while
alive; I'd follow ye--an' though ye wouldn't see me my ghost would see
you uns."
Her fingers were suddenly still; she looked up at him with a sort of
surprised repulsion. His smile was as if petrified on his face.
"Oh, don't," she cried with a chilly disgust. "Ef you uns war dead
'twould be the eend of all on yearth fur you uns."
"How so?--thar is more than we kin see right hyar in this cave."
He took a sort of perverse pleasure in her start of trepidation, in her
shuddering doubtful glance over her shoulder down the dim unexplored
recesses of the cavern. The furnace door was open now; the fire was to
be let to die out, preliminary to the stoppage of the work incident on
the trip to Colbury. The beds of live coals cast a wide suffusive light
through the spacious, lofty hall wherein they stood; the troglodytic
group of distillers still sat by the dwindling fire. Through several of
the great arches she could see other vast apartments, all dimly white
and with a subdued glister in the far-reaching light. Further still
were vague spaces, shadowy and grey, and at the vanishing point of the
perspective dusky corridors led to densely black recesses, harbouring
who might know what, besides bats by millions and night birds that
crept in through some crevice for shelter from the glare of the day.
Even now a screech-owl was beginning to send forth its shrill cry ere
it sought the outer air and the dim night, and the keen, quavering
notes of ill-omen roused all the weird suggestions of the echoes.
"You needn't be afeared, Honey-sweet," he said absently, "Ye won't see
me, but I'll see you uns."
There was a pause in which she hardly canvassed what to say--so
doubtful, so ill at ease was she.
And in that interval a strange possibility had revealed itself to him
which he canvassed swiftly with flying thoughts. His cheeks glowed;
his wild, restless eyes were ablaze; his breath was quick; he still
gazed steadfastly at her as she gazed half affrighted at the familiar
subterranean environment dulling gradually as the coals faded and the
ash gathered, dulling like the vanishing scene of a dream. He hardly
saw her; his every faculty was enlisted in a new theme. It was only
mechanically that he repeated thickly, slowly, like the ill-fashioned
words of a somnambulist, "You uns needn't be feared. Ye won't see me,
but I'll see you uns."