"He hed a chicken-bone acrost his throat," said his father. "No wonder he coughed."
Solomon rose and went out into the black night,—so black that he could not distinguish the sky from the earth, or the unobstructed air from the dense forest around.
He walked about blindly, dragging something heavily after him. The weight of concealment it was. He knew something that nobody knew besides.
At the critical moment of the altercation, he had stepped softly among the shadows to the warping-bars,—a strong push had sent the great frame crashing down. He was back in an instant among the others, and by reason of the excitement his agency in the sensation was not detected.
Like his biblical namesake, Solomon was no fool. Had he been reared in a cultivated community, with the advantages of education, he might have been one of the bright young fellows who manage other young fellows, who control debating societies, who are prominent in mysterious associations, the secret of which is at once guarded and represented by a Cerberus of three Greek letters.
But, wise as he was, Solomon was not a prophet. He had intended only to effect a diversion, and stop the quarrel. He had had no prevision of the panic of superstition that he had raised in the minds of these simple people; for the ignorant mountaineer is a devout believer in signs and warnings.
As Solomon wandered about outside, he heard his father stumbling from the door of the house to the barn to see if aught of evil had come to the cow or the horse. He knew how his grandmother's heart was wrung with fear for her heifer, and he could hardly endure to think of his mother's anxieties about Benny.
No prophetic eye was needed to foresee the terrors that would beset her in the days to come, when she would walk back and forth before the bars, warping the yarn to be woven into cloth for his and Benny's clothes; how she would regard the harmless frame as an uncanny thing, endowed with supernatural powers, and look askance at it, and shrink from touching it; how she would watch for the sign to come true, and tremble lest it come.
He turned about, dragging and tugging this weight of concealment after him, reëntered the house, and sat down beside the fire.
His uncle Jacob Smith had gone to his own home. The others were telling stories, calculated to make one's hair stand on end, about signs and warnings, and their horrible fulfillment.