Yates nodded his head.
"I dun'no' ez I hev hearn the Leetle People named fur thirty year an' better. My gran'mam tole me 'bout 'em whenst I war a boy. What ailed you-uns ter git a-goin' 'bout 'em?"
"Jes' thinkin' 'bout home. Thar buryin'-groun' ain't more'n haffen mile from my house," replied Yates, casually. "Ye hev hearn tell how they coffins the dead in stone boxes, two feet undergroun', an' I reckon that fool talk 'bout Mis' Beamen's tombstone bein' like a stone box reminded me of 'em."
Cheever held his pipe in his hand. The coal had dwindled to an ash as he listened. A thought was astir in his crafty brain. Dull at scheming as Yates was, he could almost divine its processes.
"I dun'no' when I hev hearn the Leetle People named afore," Cheever said, meditatively.
"The old folks used ter talk 'bout 'em sometimes," rejoined Steve, apparently inadvertently, "though few knows now they ever lived, nor whar they lie. One grave air right on the south side o' that thar laurel bush—the only laurel on the slope; I know, fur the ground sounds hollow thar; I sounded it one day."
He cast a covert glance at Cheever. The robber's eyes, opened widely for once, were full of light as they glanced swiftly and searchingly at the sleeping men, all unconscious, about them. Then he said, in a casual tone, "I reckon thar's a heap o' lie in all that thar talk 'bout the Leetle People." And his earnest, intent, breathless face belied his words as he spoke them.
Yates sank back upon the improvised pillow of saddle and blanket, breathing quick, feeling alive once more. He had relied on Cheever's ignorance of Shattuck's intention—known, indeed, to few, and infinitely unimportant in their estimation—since the horse-thief's protective seclusion debarred him from much gossip. To this spot beneath the laurel Yates himself had directed Shattuck's attention. Now if the treasure should be concealed there, and Shattuck's enthusiasm should not fail, the discovery would be made and noised abroad, and some right at last would blossom out of all this wrong.
VII.
The "falling weather" came hard upon its prophecy. All that day the clouds mustered. Films, lace-like and fretting the roseate heavens, thickened as the light gradually dawned, and were dense before the sun rose—dense, but white and semi-translucent, and a certain focus of opaque glister, slowly mounting and mounting the sky, gave token how the great chariot of the sun fared along the celestial highways to the zenith. No fierce monitions in this noiseless eclipse of the diurnal splendors of the rich summertide; the landscape lay in a lethargic shadow, and time seemed to wait somewhere and to drowse dully, so long the hours loitered, so little did they change; the leaves hung still; a breathless, sultry pause bated the pulses of the world. In the afternoon—one who judged of time by the sun might hardly know were it the impending cloud or the approach of night—this long monotony of the atmosphere was broken by a gradual darkening, and presently an almost imperceptible rain was gently falling. The air was dank, the lungs expanded to longer and longer respirations, and the clouds were coming down the mountain-side—coming in fleecy ranks along the dark purple indentations which marked the ravines, the vanguard with broken flakes that suggested woolly leaders of flocks.