She was still incredulous. But the moment supper was over, she ran up to examine the farmhouse afresh. The wind had “sobbed down”; the sky was sprinkled with stars, seen through frequent rifts in the clouds; and the moon, though only a crescent, emerging through a cloud-rack, shed a silver radiance over the watery waste, and cast over it black rippling bands of shadow from the bare elms and poplars rising from it in such unearthly beauty. And there in the region of Frog Farm, perceptible even to the naked eye, a mysterious reddish-yellow light, like some new star, threw its far-reaching beams upon the softened flood. A closer examination revealed that some of the trees of the fir-copse had been sapped and now lay heaving gently—the old man, she remembered, had alluded to fallen firs—and that the ruddy rays came from a farm bedroom, no longer shut out by the foliage. The smoke, too, was rising again. It was clear that the house was not uninhabited, and that her grandfather might very well have seen Elijah Skindle, while the absence of smoke all day might be traceable to the inability of the occupants to get a light earlier from sodden matches.
“But if they are starving and signalling,” she cried agitatedly, “we must tell people. We must send a boat.”
“We can’t get no boat,” he said philosophically.
“But you’ve seen plenty of boats,” she urged. “I saw two myself rowing over the five-acre field. And there’s that fowling-punt on the bank.”
“That! Oi seen that fleetin’ bottom up! Ye can’t goo out to-night. Ye’d be drownded. Why, look there! That’s a dead cow from the Farm meadow!”
“Where? I can’t see anything.”
“There! Bobbin’ near the copse.” He pointed and snatched the glass from her. “Why, that’s a hoss,” he shouted exultantly, “a black hoss! That should be Snowdrop, ef it ain’t Cherry-blossom!” He was on his feet now, quivering with excitement, his blanket falling from his shoulders.
“Why, how can you be sure in this light?” she said, trembling no less. “It may be a brown horse, or even a plough-horse.”
“That’s a black coach-hoss sure enough, black as his heart, the pirate thief. What did Oi tell ye? ‘Wengeance is mine, saith the Lord. Oi will repay.’ ” He looked so solemn in the moonlight, with his white beard, and his white-sleeved arm pointing starward, that she almost felt his standpoint had a prophetic justification. But she shook off the spell.
“Sit down, Gran’fer,” she pleaded, readjusting his blanket. “Mr. Flynt was in his right.”