In the limited interval when Leonidas—who had been supplied with another piece of meat, but still wept aloud with callow persistence because of the affronts offered by Tige—was fain to pause for breath, and between the alternate creaking of the treadle of the loom and the thumping of the batten, the man’s ear caught that unwonted stir in the air, the sound of consecutive rifle-shots.
“Look-a-hyar,” he cried, springing to his feet, “what’s that a-goin’ on down in the cove? Lethe, stop trompin’ on that thar n’isy treadle, so ez I kin listen! Quit yellin’, ye catamount!” with a vengeful glance at the small boy.
But the grief of Leonidas was imperative, and he abated nothing.
Jacob Jessup stood for an instant baffled. Then suddenly he put both hands to his mouth, and roused all the echoes of Wild-Cat Hollow with a ringing halloo.
“Who be ye a-hollerin’ at?” asked his mother from her nook in the chimney corner.
“I ’lowed I viewed a man up yander ’mongst them woods,—mought be one o’ the herders.”
Alethea’s foot paused on the treadle. Her uplifted hand stayed the batten, the other held the shuttle motionless. She turned her head and with a sudden rich flush on her cheek and a deep light in her lifted eyes looked up toward the forests that rose in vast array upon the steep slopes of the ridge until they touched the sky. Accustomed to the dusky shadows of their long avenues, she discerned a mounted figure in their midst. There was a tense moment of suspense. The man had wheeled his horse on hearing the halloo. He seemed to hesitate; then in lieu of response he took his way down the hill toward the cabin. The trees were fewer on the edge of the clearing. Before he drew rein by the rail fence she had turned back to the loom, and once more the shuttle winged its short, clumsy flights, like a fledgeling bird, from one side to the other, and the treadle creaked, and the batten thumped, and she spared not an instant from her work.
For it was only Ben Doaks dismounting, glad of a pretext, throwing the reins over a projecting rail of the fence, and tramping up to the house.
“Howdy,” he observed comprehensively. And the family, meditatively eying him, responded, “Howdy.”
“Keep yer health, Ben?” the old woman demanded. She had come to the door, and took a gourd of water from a pail which was on a shelf without. She drank leisurely, and tossed the surplus water from the gourd across the porch, where it spattered the half-grown pullet, which shunted off suddenly with a loud, shocked exclamation, as if it sported half a score of ruffled petticoats.