If Pete Cayce had possessed an acute discrimination in the reading of faces, he might have interpreted Kelsey's look as a pondering dismay; the choice offered him was to do murder or to die! As it was, Pete only noted the relinquishment of the parson's design when he sat down silent and abstracted before the fire.
But for his deep grudge, it might have seemed that Kelsey had intended to forewarn Micajah Green of the danger in the path, and to turn him back. Pete did not feel entirely reassured until after he had said:
'I 'lowed ez ye s-s-swore ye fairly de-spise 'Cajah G-G-Green, an' r-raged ter git even with him.'
'I furgits it sometimes,' rejoined Kelsey.
And Pete did not apprehend the full meaning of the words.
'An' don't do no more o' yer prophesyin' ter-night, Hiram,' said the old man irritably. 'It fairly gins me the ager to hear sech talk.'
The night wore on. The fire roared; the men, intently listening, sat around the hearth.
Now and then a furtive glance was cast at Hiram Kelsey. He seemed lost in thought, but his eye glittered with that uninterpreted, inscrutable light, and they were vaguely sorry that he had come among them.
They took scant heed of his reproach. It has been so long the unwritten law of moonshiners that the informer shall perish as the consequence of his malice and his rashness, that whatever normal moral sense they possess is in subjection to their arbitrary code of justice and the savage custom of the region.
The mysterious disappearance of a horse-thief or a revenue spy, dramatically chronicled, with a wink and a significant grin, as 'never hearn on no more,' or 'fund dead in the road one mornin',' affects the mountaineers much as the hangman's summary in the Friday evening papers impresses more law-abiding communities—shocking, but necessary.