'What war I a-tellin' you-uns? Satan's a-stirrin'—Satan's a-stirrin' on the Big Smoky!' interpolated old Hoodendin.
'Waal, I'd never hev been hankerin' fur sech,' drawled the moralist.
A number of other men had come out from the houses, and a discussion ensued as to the best plan to keep the prisoner until morning. It was suggested that the time-honoured expedient in localities without the civilization of a jail—a wagon-body inverted, with a rock upon it—would be as secure as the state prison.
'But who wants ter go ter heftin' rocks?' asked Nathan Hoodendin pertinently.
For the sake of convenience, therefore, they left the prisoner bound with a rope made fast around a stump, that he might not, in his desperation, roll himself from the crag, and deputing a number of the men to watch him by turns, the Settlement retired to its slumbers.
The night wore on; the moon journeyed toward the mountains in the west; the mists rose to meet it, and glistened like a silver sea. Some lonely, undiscovered ocean, this; never a sail set, never a pennant flying; all the valley was submerged; the black summits in the distance were isolated and insular; the moonlight glanced on the sparkling ripples, on the long reaches of illusive vapour.
At intervals cocks crew; a faint response, like farthest echoes, came from some neighbouring cove; and then silence, save for the drone of the nocturnal insects and the far blast of a hunter's horn.
'Jer'miah,' said Rick Tyler suddenly, as the boy crouched by one of the stumps and watched him with dilated, moonlit eyes—when Nathan Hoodendin's vigil came the little factotum served in his stead—'Jer'miah, git my knife out'n the store an' cut these hyar ropes. I'll gin ye my rifle ef ye will.'
The boy sprang up, scudded off swiftly, then came back, and crouched by the stump again.
The moon slipped lower and lower; the silver sea had turned to molten gold; the stars that had journeyed westward with the moon were dying out of a dim blue sky. Over the corn-field in the east was one larger than the rest, burning in an amber haze, charged with an unspoken poetical emotion that set its heart of white fire aquiver.