She was as silent, as stern, as listless as ever. And but for the sheer futility of it, he might have fallen to upbraiding her and protesting and complaining as of yore, and repudiated the mythical 'gal at the Settlemint.'
All the leaves were falling. Crisp and sere they carpeted the earth and fled before the wind. They seemed in some wise to illumine the slopes as they lay in long yellow vistas under the overhanging black boughs. Many a nest was revealed—empty, swinging on the bare limb.
The mountains near at hand were sad and sombre, the stark denuded forests showing the brown ground among the trees, and great jutting crags, and sterile stretches of out-cropping rocks, and fearful abysmal depths of chasms—and streams, too, madly plunging. All the scene was stripped of the garb of foliage, and the illusion of colour, and the poetry of the song birds and the flowers.
More distant ranges were of a neutral vagueness, and farther still they seemed a nebulous grey under a grey sky. When the sun shone they were blue—a faint, unreal blue, a summer souvenir clinging to the wintry landscape like some youthful trait continued in a joyless age.
For it was November, and the days were drear.
About this time an excited rumour suddenly prevailed that Parson Kelsey had returned to the Great Smoky Mountains.
It was widely discredited at first, but proved to be authorized by Gid Fletcher, who was himself just back from Shaftesville, where he had been to testify in the trial for the rescue of Rick Tyler. A story of discomfiture he retailed, and he seemed ill at ease and prone to lay much blame on Rick, whose perverse circulation of diverse accounts of the escape had greatly unnerved him before his journey, and prevented the prosecution from summoning Rick as a witness, if indeed he would have permitted himself to be served with the subpœna.
The judge was testy during the trial, and charged the jury in favour of the prisoner; after the verdict of acquittal, he stated indignantly that there had been practically no evidence against the defendant, and that it was a marked instance of the indifference or ignorance of the committing magistrate and the grand jury that such a case of flagrant malice could get beyond them and into the jurisdiction of the court.
Gid Fletcher solaced himself by telling how Green played the fool on the stand when the judge snarled at him, and contradicted himself and cut a 'mighty pore figger.'
'Though ez ter that, the pa'son riz up an' reviled both me an' 'Cajah in open court,' said Fletcher. ''Pears like he hed read the Bible so constant jes' ter l'arn ev'y creepy soundin' curse ez could be called down on the heads o' men. An' somebody said ter the jedge arterward ez he oughter fine pa'son fur contempt o' court. An' the jedge 'lowed he warn't a statute; he hed some human natur in him, an' he wanted me an' 'Cajah ter hear the truth spoke one time.'