"I 'lowed ef ye went off an' lef me 'twould plumb kill me, Puddin'-pie," he averred.
"Oh, shucks," she exclaimed, bending her head to pleat a fold of her gown with affected embarrassment.
"An' I 'lowed I'd follow ye, ef I war dead, ez I would of choice while alive; I'd follow ye—an' though ye wouldn't see me my ghost would see you uns."
Her fingers were suddenly still; she looked up at him with a sort of surprised repulsion. His smile was as if petrified on his face.
"Oh, don't," she cried with a chilly disgust. "Ef you uns war dead 'twould be the eend of all on yearth fur you uns."
"How so?—thar is more than we kin see right hyar in this cave."
He took a sort of perverse pleasure in her start of trepidation, in her shuddering doubtful glance over her shoulder down the dim unexplored recesses of the cavern. The furnace door was open now; the fire was to be let to die out, preliminary to the stoppage of the work incident on the trip to Colbury. The beds of live coals cast a wide suffusive light through the spacious, lofty hall wherein they stood; the troglodytic group of distillers still sat by the dwindling fire. Through several of the great arches she could see other vast apartments, all dimly white and with a subdued glister in the far-reaching light. Further still were vague spaces, shadowy and grey, and at the vanishing point of the perspective dusky corridors led to densely black recesses, harbouring who might know what, besides bats by millions and night birds that crept in through some crevice for shelter from the glare of the day. Even now a screech-owl was beginning to send forth its shrill cry ere it sought the outer air and the dim night, and the keen, quavering notes of ill-omen roused all the weird suggestions of the echoes.
"You needn't be afeared, Honey-sweet," he said absently, "Ye won't see me, but I'll see you uns."
There was a pause in which she hardly canvassed what to say—so doubtful, so ill at ease was she.
And in that interval a strange possibility had revealed itself to him which he canvassed swiftly with flying thoughts. His cheeks glowed; his wild, restless eyes were ablaze; his breath was quick; he still gazed steadfastly at her as she gazed half affrighted at the familiar subterranean environment dulling gradually as the coals faded and the ash gathered, dulling like the vanishing scene of a dream. He hardly saw her; his every faculty was enlisted in a new theme. It was only mechanically that he repeated thickly, slowly, like the ill-fashioned words of a somnambulist, "You uns needn't be feared. Ye won't see me, but I'll see you uns."