'I hain't gin it up, though,' said Micajah Green, still turning the clods with his foot. 'I'll be held responsible by the court fur the escape, I rackon, ef the gran' jury remembers ter indict me fur it, ez negligence. An' ef I kin lay my hands on Rick Tyler yit I'll be mighty glad ter feel of him.'
The blacksmith, without changing his attitude, looked hard at his visitor for a moment. Something rang false in the speech. He could not have said what it was, but his moral sense detected it, as his practised ear might have discovered by the sound a flaw in the metal under his hammer.
'Ye ain't kem up the Big Smoky a-huntin' fur Rick Tyler?' he said at length.
'Naw,' admitted Micajah Green; 'it's jes' 'bout some onsettled business o' the county. But ef I war ter meet up with Rick in the road I wouldn't pass him by.'
He said this with a satirical half-laugh, still turning the clods with his foot, the vivid white light illuminating his figure and his face beneath his straw hat. The next moment the sighing bellows was silent, and Gid Fletcher and his striker had the red-hot metal between them on the anvil, and were once more forging that intricate metallic melody, with its singing echoes, that seemed to endow the little log cabin with a pulsing heart, that flowed from its surcharged chamber out into the grey night, to the deeply purple mountains, to the crescent golden moon, to the first few stars pulsating as if in rhythm to the clinking of the hand-hammer and the clanking of the sledge—forging this, and as its incident the durable skene which should enable Euralina and her parent to leave the Settlement shortly.
'I hopes ter git home 'fore daybreak, Gid,' he said desperately, standing in the door, and looking wistfully at the iron in process of transformation upon the anvil.
He turned out again presently, and Micajah Green paused, leaning against the window, and looking doubtfully from time to time at the striker. This was an ungainly, heavy young mountaineer, with a shock of red hair, a thick neck, and unfinished features which seemed not to have been accounted worthy of more careful moulding. There was a look of humble pain in his face when the blacksmith angrily upbraided him. His perceptions were inefficient to accurately distribute blame; he was only receptive, poor fellow! and we all know that in every sense those who can only take, and cannot return, have little to hope from the world. He was evidently not worth fearing; and Micajah Green disregarded him as completely as the presence of the anvil.
'Talkin' 'bout Rick Tyler, did you-uns go sarchin' that night—the dep'ty's party—ter the still they say old man Cayce runs?'
'Naw'—Gid Fletcher paused, his hammer uplifted, the red glow of the iron on his meditative face and eyes; the striker, both hands upholding the poised sledge, waited in the dusky background—'naw. We met up with Pete Cayce, an' he 'lowed ez he hedn't seen nor hearn o' Rick Tyler.'
'Ef I hed been along I'd have sarched the still, too.'