Only the faintest hint of light showed in the east as the chilled horses stumbled awkwardly down the hill. A half hour they rode in a silence broken but once, and then only by Ben's hoarse threat to "learn" the off horse something needful but unspecified which it appeared not to know.
The light glowed from gray to rose and day was opened by the bark of a frantic squirrel that ran half-way down a tree trunk, threatening attack, in alarm for its store of spruce cones at the foot of the tree. A crested jay at the same moment mocked them harshly from a higher branch of the tree.
Ewing exhaled with gusto a breath of the warming, pine-spiced air.
"It's sunning up, Ben." Ben grunted unamiably.
A little distance ahead of them a doe and a half-grown fawn bounded across the road.
"She seemed to be in a hurry," Ewing again ventured.
"She wanted t' git that child away from here, 'fore some one stuffed its head full o' fool talk about goin' off to New York. Can't tell what notions a young deer might git." With this laborious surmise he shut his jaws together with repellent grimness.
Their road now wound down a hill and out of the woods to join the valley road.
"Yender's Beulah Pierce!" Ben snapped this out savagely. The wagon was half a mile ahead. Pierce was driving, and in the rear seat were two figures whom they knew to be Mrs. Laithe and her brother. As Ben had pointedly ignored these Ewing did not refer to them.
They came to a gate in a wire fence that stretched interminably away on either side, over brown, low-rolling hills. Pierce had left the gate open for them, and Ewing got out to close it after they had passed through.