A Romany of the Snows, vol. 3 / Being a Continuation of the Personal Histories of "Pierre and His People" and the Last Existing Records of Pretty Pierre

by Gilbert Parker

He knew now the meaning of the bonfire the night before.

THE FINDING OF FINGALL

"Fingall! Fingall!—Oh, Fingall!"

A grey mist was rising from the river, the sun was drinking it delightedly, the swift blue water showed underneath it, and the top of Whitefaced Mountain peaked the mist by a hand-length. The river brushed the banks like rustling silk, and the only other sound, very sharp and clear in the liquid monotone, was the crack of a woodpecker's beak on a hickory tree.

It was a sweet, fresh autumn morning in Lonesome Valley. Before night the deer would bellow reply to the hunters' rifles, and the mountain-goat call to its unknown gods; but now there was only the wild duck skimming the river, and the high hilltop rising and fading into the mist, the ardent sun, and again that strange cry—

"Fingall!—Oh, Fingall! Fingall!"

Two men, lounging at a fire on a ledge of the hills, raised their eyes to the mountain-side beyond and above them, and one said presently:

"The second time. It's a woman's voice, Pierre." Pierre nodded, and abstractedly stirred the coals about with a twig.

"Well, it is a pity—the poor Cynthie," he said at last.

"It is a woman, then. You know her, Pierre—her story?"