He paused to listen; there was a sound other than the tinkling of the little rill near at hand or the blare of the autumn wind. A stone came rolling down the path, dislodged by a cautious step,—then another. Hite drew a revolver from his pocket, and, holding it in his right hand, stepped out on the rugged little parapet and stood there, with the depths of the gorge below him, looking up the ascent with the moonlight in his face. He spoke in a low voice to some one approaching, and was answered in the same tone. He stepped back to give the new-comer space to enter, and as Jake Glenn came in held out his hand for the package the messenger bore.
"Let's see it, Nick," he said, tearing it open; "it's the money sure enough."
Old Persimmon Sneed turned his head with a certain alert interest. Perhaps he himself had doubted whether his wife would think him worth the money. There was a general flutter of good-natured gratulation, and it seemed at the moment only some preposterous mistake that Con Hite should put it into Persimmon Sneed's lean paw and close his trembling fingers over it.
"Now, scoot!" he bawled out at the top of his voice, the little den ringing with the echoes of his excitement, a second revolver drawn in his left hand. "I'll gin ye a day's start o' these fellers." He presented the muzzle of one pistol to Peters's head, and with the other he covered one of the two henchmen in the recess of the little rock house. The other sprang up from a barrel where he sat wiping his mouth with the back of his hand; but Jerry, suddenly realizing the situation, put out a dexterous foot, and the horse-thief fell full length upon the floor, his pistol discharging as he went down. In the clamor of the echoes, and the smoke and the flare, Persimmon Sneed disappeared, hearing as he went a wild protest, and a nimbleness of argument second hardly to his own, as Nick Peters cried out that he was robbed, his hard earnings were wrested from him, the money was his, paid him as a price, and Con Hite had let Mr. Persimmon Sneed run off with it, allowing him nothing for his trouble.
"It war his money," Con Hite averred, when they had grown calmer, and Jake Glenn had returned from a reconnoissance with the news that Hite's father had lent the fleeing Persimmon a horse, and he was by this time five miles away in the Cove. "He could have paid you for yer trouble in ketchin' him ef he had wanted ter."
"It war not his money," protested Peters, with tears in his eyes. "It war sent ter me willingly, fur a valid consideration, an' ye let him hev the money, an' his wife hev got the valid consideration—an' hyar I be lef' with the bag ter hold!"
It may be that Peters had absorbed some of the craft of argument by mere propinquity to Persimmon Sneed, or that Con Hite's conscience was unduly tender, for he long entertained a moral doubt touching his course in this transaction,—whether he had a right to pay the ransom money which Nick Peters had extorted from Persimmon Sneed's wife to Persimmon Sneed himself, thereby defrauding Nick Peters of the fruit of his labor. Perhaps this untoward state of dubitation came about from Narcissa's scornful comment.
"Ye mought hev known that old man Persimmon Sneed would have made off with the money," she said, remembering his reproving glare at her. "I wouldn't hev trested him with a handful o' cornfield peas."
"But I expected him ter make off with it," protested the amazed Con; "that's why I gin it ter him."
"Then ye air jes' ez bad ez he is," she retorted coldly.