Micajah Green renewed his hollow protestations, discredited as before, and the blacksmith, shading his eyes from the sun with his broad blackened right hand, watched him ride away.
Even when he was out of sight, Gid Fletcher stood for a time silently looking at the spot where horse and man had disappeared. Then he shook his head, and went into the forge.
'Zeke,' he said to his humble striker, 'ye air a fool, an' ye know it. But ye air a smart man ter that loon, fur the hell of it air he dunno he air a loon.'
His warnings, nevertheless, had more effect than he realized. They served as a check on Micajah Green's speech with the few men that he met—all surly enough, however, to repel confidence, were there no other motive to withhold it.
He saw in this another confirmation of the Cayces' enmity, and their activity in weakening his hold on the people. He began to think it hard that he should be thus at their mercy; that his office should be wrested from him; that they should impose unexampled indignities of defeat; that he should not dare to raise his hand against them—nay, his voice, for even the reckless Gid Fletcher had cautions for so much as a word.
Some trifling errand which he had used as a pretext for his journey brought him several miles along the range, and when he was actually starting down the mountain, his vengeance still muzzled, his ingenuity at fault, his courage faltering, all the intention of his journey merged in its subterfuge, he found himself upon the road which led past the Cayces' house, and in many serpentine windings down the long jagged slopes to the base. Noontide was near. The shadows were short. He heard the bees droning. The far-away mountains were of an exquisite ethereal azure, discrediting the opaque turquoise blue of the sky. The dark wooded coves had a clear distinctness of tone and definiteness of detail, despite the distance. The harmonies of colour that filled the landscape culminated in a crimson sumach growing hard by in a corner of a rail fence. The little house was still. The muffled tread of his horse's hoofs in the deep, dry sand did not rouse the sleeping hounds under the porch. The vines clambering to its roof were full of tiny yellow gourds; he could see through the gaps Dorinda's spinning-wheel against the wall. A hazy curl of smoke wreathed upward from the chimney with a deliberate grace in the sunshine. He smelled the warm fragrance of the apples in the orchard at the rear, stretching along the mountain side. The corn that Dorinda had ploughed on the steep slope was high, and waved above the staked and ridered fence. There were wild blue morning glories among it, the blossom still open here and there under a sheltering canopy of blades; and there were trumpet flowers, too, boldly facing the blazing sun with a beauty as ardent.
He looked up at this still picture more than once, as he paused for his horse to drink at the wayside trough, and then he rode on down the mountain, speculating on his baffled mission.
He hardly knew how far he had gone when he heard voices in loud altercation. He could not give immediate attention, for he was in a rocky section of the road, so full of boulders and out-cropping ledges that it was easy to divine that the overseer had a lenient interpretation of the idea of repair.
Once his horse fell, and after pulling the animal up, with an oath of irritation, he came, suddenly, turning sharply around a jutting crag, upon another rider and a recalcitrant steed. This rider was a child, carried on the shoulders of a girl of twelve or so, who had a peculiarly wiry and alert appearance, with long legs, a precipitate and bounding action, a tousled mane, the forelock hanging in her wild, excited eyes.
He recognised at once the filly-like Miranda Jane, before either caught a glimpse of him, and he heard enough of her remonstrance to acquaint him with Jacob's tyranny in insisting that his unshod steed should keep straight up the rocky 'big road,' as he ambitiously called it, in lieu of turning aside in the sandy byways of a cow-path.