Moses, hearing his name, roused himself with an effort, looking over his shoulder frowningly, with a shrill little ill-tempered squeal, for he did not permit her to speak of him, and rarely to address him.
"Oh, oh, listen to the wind!" cried Adelaide, unheeding them all. "It sounds like the voice o' suthin' that can't rest in its grave."
"Waal," said Litt, sturdily, "I ain't 'quainted with that kind o' harnts myself, ez 'ain't got no better manners 'n ter go screechin' like the bad boys in the cove arter a day at the still—'thout the excuse o' bein' in liquor, too. We'd better make mo' stir ourselves, then we can't hear 'em. Baker, mebbe ye mought gin us a song—" she bent a beguiling smile upon him—he, who could not even talk, to be asked to sing! "I hev got a notion ez you-uns be a plumb sweet singer."
Her air of coquetry and the implied compliment were of that phase of her manners far more formidable to the callow youth than even her open ridicule. He could have sunk through the floor. He knew, however, that his blushes, his abashed and downcast eyes, were delightful to her. The indignation and resentment kindled by this reflection roused that more stalwart personality of self-respect within him, and gave him courage to mumble, a trifle surlily, that she had better sing a song herself if she hankered for singing. To this she replied, with a sudden swift transition to patently mocking glee:
"I think so myself, Baker, I do think so; but I didn't s'pose ye war so smart ez ter know it too."
And then, with the accompaniment of the musical whir of her wheel, and the sibilant fugue of the wind in the trees, and the blare of the fluctuating flames in the chimney, she began to sing in a voice low and sweet; and while she sang a strange thing happened.
As she drew the thread along, holding the end out in her hand with a graceful sweep of her arm, her blue eyes full of pensive lights, her lips parted, her tiny foot marking time on the treadle, she noted that one of the batten shutters, which had so regularly beaten in the blast against the window-frame, as the other did even now, had grown steady. All at once the fire-light leaped up with a keen glitter, and at the long narrow crevice between the shutter and the window she saw a face peering in so stealthily, a face so long and white and unrecognizable—seeming hardly human in the narrow section which the rift showed—that a sudden terror smote her heart, the words of the song rose to a scream, and, the wheel still whirling, the thread in her hand, she pointed to the window, exclaiming: "The face! the face! I'm feared o' the face!"
Adelaide had sprung wide-eyed and pale to her feet; the dog, vaguely apprehending the commotion, was fiercely growling. The clumsy boy had risen, overturning the chair with the motion, and at that instant the shutter slammed freely back and forth against the window-frame at the whim of the wayward gusts, and naught was there when the rifle was thrust to the crevice.
"Let him look down the muzzle o' that now," cried Baker Anderson, "ef he's so fond o' peekin'!"
"Don't shoot, Baker; don't shoot!" exclaimed Adelaide, her face still drawn and white. "I reckon Litt didn't see nuthin', nohow."