The discovery of his fatuity was not of soothing effect. "'T war that man Renfrow's secret—I hearn about his letter what war read down ter the mill."
She nodded acquiescently, her expression once more abstracted, her thoughts far afield.
He had one moment of triumph as he brought himself tensely erect, shouldering his gun—his shadow behind him in the moonlight duplicated the gesture with a sharp promptness as at a word of command.
"All the mounting's a-diggin' by this time!" He laughed with ready scorn, then experienced a sudden revulsion of feeling. Her face had changed. Her expression was unfamiliar. She had caught together the two ends of the broken thread, and was knotting them with a steady hand, and a look of composed security on her face, that was itself a flout to the inopportune search of the mountaineers and boded ill to his hope to discover from her the secret of the cache. He recovered himself suddenly.
"Ye 'lowed ter me ez ye never keered nuthin' fur that man, Renfrow," he said with a plaintive appeal, far more powerful with her than scorn.
She looked up at him with candid reassuring eyes. "I never keered none fur him," she protested. "He kem hyar all shot up, with the miners an' mounting boys hot foot arter him—an' we done what we could fur him. Gran'daddy 'lowed ez he warn't 'sponsible fur whut the owners done, or hedn't done at the mine, an' he seen no sense in shootin' one man ter git even with another."
"But ye kep' his secret!" Kinnicutt persisted.
"What fur should I tell it—'t ain't mine?"
"That thar money in that box he buried ain't his'n, nuther!" he argued.
There was an inscrutable look in her clear eyes. She had risen, and was standing in the moonlight opposite him. The shadows of the vines falling over her straight skirt left her face and hair the fairer in the silver glister.