She had an accurate knowledge of his springs of action. He hardly cared for the loss, but as her detail progressed, the wantonness of the waste, the possible motive of spite, called a flush into his cheek and a spark into his eye. The moment the last words passed her lips, and the fact was made patent to his mind that his name was not a terror to protect his property, his whole consciousness was resolved into fire.
He stood for one instant motionless, a terrible oath upon his lips. Then he sprang off like an unleashed hound, with her exultant laugh harshly ringing through the dusky shades behind him.
"I knowed it. Fee'll lay 'em low enough!" she cried, with the satisfaction of a Bellona, as she towered above them all, her stern, lined, dark old face so repellently triumphant that both her visitors felt a sense of recoil. "Felix will tame 'em—he'll tame them wolves. He air ekal ter it." She nodded her head, with a look promissory of horrors, and then fell to rubbing her left arm, which had been partially paralyzed of late years.
Rhodes gazed wistfully into the dense umbrageous tangle whence his host had disappeared. "Now I don't think it's sensible to send Fee off that way. He might get hurt," he said.
"He ain't one o' that kind," replied the old woman, with a fierce pride in the spirit that had tamed even hers. "The Guthries—ye hev hearn them called 'the fightin' Guthries'—air a survigrous tribe. An' my step-son Felix air knowed ter be the bravest o' all the 'fightin' Guthries.' Whenst ye see him a-crawlin' out'n the leetle eend o' the horn, ye let me know."
A quick thud of hoofs, the deep-mouthed, joyous baying of a fierce hound that galloped after the horseman, gave notice to the party, whose vision was all cut off by the heavy woods, of the departure of the master of the house. Mrs. Guthrie looked at the two visitors with a smile as she listened, then fell again to softly rubbing her arm.
Rhodes and Shattuck, although from diverse points of view, could hardly have been more disconcerted than by the turn affairs had taken. The candidate was without recourse. He had allowed the golden opportunity of electioneering with Felix to evade him while he lounged under the tree in the barley field with the unimportant younger brother. He conceived a repugnant hatred of this unconscious factor in his discomfiture as he glanced at Ephraim, who stood gazing dully and blankly in the direction whence the sound of the hoofs had come, now faint in the distance. With his elastic faculty for regret, Rhodes was upbraiding himself anew, taking account of the wasted day, the long ride, and the fact that electioneering in this quarter was estopped, since the visit could not be decorously repeated; presently he was seized by forebodings that the waste of time was not at an end, for Shattuck's project was not so easily concluded. As the candidate's attention returned to the matters more immediately in hand, he became aware that his friend was declining to take luncheon with Mrs. Guthrie, on the score that he should hardly have time to get to the foot of the mountain and accomplish before sundown an errand upon which Felix had promised to accompany him.
"Ephraim, however, will do as well," he said, genially, turning to the younger brother, who instantly signified his acquiescence, and made off with alacrity for the pickaxe and spade. "But as I'll leave you Mr. Rhodes, I am sure I shall not be missed," Shattuck saw fit to add to his own excuses.
"No," Rhodes said, somewhat curtly; "if you go, I shall go too. I don't want my visitors"—he added, recovering his smile in a meagre degree, and bending it upon Mrs. Guthrie's forbidding countenance as she looked from one to the other—"to go about the mountains breaking their necks, and then putting the blame on me for not being along to advise and point out the way."
"Jes' ez yer please," she retorted, tartly, still looking from one to the other. "We ain't never considered our Ephraim plumb smart like Felix. But I never did expec' ter hear ez he warn't even fit fur a guide-post. But jes' ez ye two gentlemen feel disposed." And she reseated herself in her chair upon the porch, and resumed her knitting.