'D'rindy,' her father commanded, 'make a mark on this hyar rifle-bar'l fur 'Cajah Green's word ter be remembered by.'
There was a flash in the faint moonbeams, as he held out to her a long, sharp knife. The rifle was in his hand. Other marks were on it commemorating past events. This was to be a foregone conclusion.
'No, no!' cried the girl, shrinking back aghast. 'I don't want him shot. I wouldn't hev him hurted fur me, fur nothin'! I ain't keerin' now fur what he said. Let him be—let him be!'
She had smarted under the sense of indignity. She had wanted their sympathy, and perhaps their idle anger. She was dismayed by the revengeful passion she had roused.
'No, no!' she reiterated, as one of the younger men, her brother Peter, stepped swiftly out from the shadow, seized her hand with the knife trembling in it, and, catching the moonlight on the barrel of the rifle, guided upon it, close to the muzzle, the mark of a cross.
The moon had weighed anchor at last, and dropped down behind the mountain summit, leaving the bay with a melancholy waning suffusion of light, and the night very dark.
II.
The summer days climbed slowly over the Great Smoky Mountains. Long the morning lingered among the crags, and chasms, and the dwindling shadows. The vertical noontide poised motionless on the great balds. The evening dawdled along the sunset slopes, and the waning crimson waited in the dusk for the golden moonrise.
So little speed they made that it seemed to Rick Tyler that weeks multiplied while they loitered.