"The idee jes' streck me ter-day whenst I viewed him along about that road. Whenst that thar dead man tuk yer han' an' tried ter find a word of speech— Why, hullo, Narcissa!"
With a short cry she had struggled to her feet. The gathering gloom, the recollection of the tragedy, the association of ideas, bore too heavily on her nerves. She struck petulantly at his astounded face.
"Why air ye always remindin' me?" she exclaimed, with a sharp upbraiding note. And then she began to cry out that she could see again the coroner's jury pressing close about the corpse, with a keen ravenous interest like the vile mountain vultures, and then colloguing together aside, and nodding their heads and saying they had found their verdict, when they had found nothing, not even the poor dead man; and she saw them here, and she saw them there, and everywhere in the darkling mountain woods, and she would see them everywhere as long as she should live, and she wished with all her heart that they were every one at the bottom of the black mountain river.
And the slow Ben wondered, as he sought to soothe her and take her home, that a woman should be so sensitive to the mention of one dead man, and yet given to such wishes of the wholesale destruction of the harmless coroner's jury, because their appearance struck her amiss, and they collogued together, and nodded their heads unacceptably, and found their verdict.
V.
Except in so far as his sedulously cultivated fraternal sentiments were concerned, the peculiar domestic training to which Ben Hanway had been subjected had had slight effect in softening a somewhat hard and stern character. To continue the canine simile by which his mother had described him, his gentleness and watchful care toward his sister were not more reassuring to the public at large than is the tender loyalty of a guard-dog toward the infant of a house which claims his fealty; that the dog does not bite the baby is no fair augury that he will not bite the peddler or the prowler. The fact that the traveler had borne letters addressed to Alan Selwyn, and no other papers, and yet Alan Selwyn could not or would not identify him, had already furnished Hanway with an ever-recurrent subject of cogitation. It had been the presumption of the coroner's jury, since confirmed by inquiry of the postmaster, that, going for some purpose to Alan Selwyn's lodge in the wilderness, the unknown traveler had, in passing, called for his prospective host's mail at the Cross-Roads, some fifteen miles distant and the nearest post-office, such being the courtesy of the region. A visitor often insured a welcome by thus voluntarily expediting the delivery of the mail some days, or perhaps some weeks, before its recipient could have hoped to receive it otherwise. Hanway had long been cognizant of this habit of the Cross-Roads postmaster to accede to such requests on the part of reputable people, but he was reminded forcibly of it the next morning. A neighbor, homeward bound from a visit to the valley, had paused at Hanway's house to leave a letter, with which he had charged himself, addressed to Selwyn.
"I 'lowed ye mought be ridin' over thar some day, bein' ez ye air toler'ble nigh neighbors," he said.
And Hanway the more willingly undertook the delivery of the missive since it afforded him a pretext for the reconnoissance which he had already contemplated.
Rain-clouds had succeeded those fine aerial flauntings of the sunset splendors, and he set out in the pervasive drizzle of a gray day. Torn and ragged with the rain and the gusts, the white mist seemed to come to meet him along the vistas of the dreary dripping woods. The tall trees that shut off the sky loomed loftily through it. Sometimes, as the wind quickened, it deployed in great luminously white columns, following the invisible curves of the atmospheric current; and anon, in flaky detached fragments, it fled dispersed down the avenues like the scattered stragglers of a routed army. The wind was having the best of the contest; and though it still rained when he reached the vicinity of Alan Selwyn's lonely dwelling, the mist was gone, the clouds were all resolved into the steady fall of the torrents, and the little house on the slope of the mountain and all its surroundings were visible.
A log cabin it was, containing two rooms and the unaccustomed luxury of glass windows; so new that the hewn cedar logs had not yet weathered to the habitual dull gray tone, but glowed jauntily red as the timbers alternated with the white and yellow daubing. A stanch stone chimney seemed an unnecessary note of ostentation, since the more usual structure of clay and sticks might serve as well. It reminded Ben Hanway that its occupant was not native to the place, and whetted anew his curiosity as he looked about, the reins on his horse's neck in his slow approach. It was a sheltered spot; the great mountain's curving summit rose high toward the north and west above the depression where the cabin stood; across the narrow valley a still more elevated range intercepted the east wind. Only to the south was the limited plateau open, sloping down to great cliffs, giving upon a vast expanse of mountain and valley and plain and far reaches of undulating country, promising in fair weather high, pure, soft air, a tempered gentle breeze, and the best that the sun can do.