"Good Lord, S'phiry Ann! they're right down there a-hitchin' they horses an' a-gittin' ready ter creep up. I'm er-goin' ter leave here."
S'phiry Ann sprang across the fence, and the next moment stood in the door.
"The raiders! the raiders air a-comin'!" she cried, not loudly, but with startling distinctness; her torn dress, wild, loose hair, and brilliant, excited eyes, giving her a strangely unfamiliar aspect. The warning cry thrilled through the room and brought every man to his feet in an instant.
"Whar? which way?" exclaimed young Jeems Allen, staring first up among the smoke-blackened rafters, then at the solid log wall.
"'Tain't the time fer axin' questions, but fer runnin', boys," said Jeff Ward, making a dash toward the back door, closely followed by his comrades. Gabe Plummer had made a step toward S'phiry Ann, but she vanished as she appeared, and he escaped with his friends into the fastnesses of the woods. There was a shout from the raiders, creeping stealthily around the house, a disordered pursuit, and over the cabin the stillness following a sudden whirlwind seemed to fall.
S'phiry Ann crept cautiously out from the chimney-corner, slipped over the fence, and knelt down in the edge of the bushes, to watch and wait. The officers soon returned with torn clothes, scratched hands and faces, but without a prisoner. They were swearing in no measured terms at being baffled of their prey.
Old man Whitaker and his wife had quietly remained in the house, apparently not greatly moved from their usual placidity. Once the old woman dropped the ball of coarse yarn she was winding, and rose to her feet, but the old man motioned her down again. They were questioned by the officers, but what reliable information could be expected from an imbecile old man and a deaf old woman? The girl could overlook the whole scene from a crack in the fence—the officers stamping about the room, the scattered chairs, the old people with their withered yellow faces, dim eyes, and bent, shrunken forms, and the dancing flames leaping up the wide sooty chimney. Satisfied that the distillers were safe, she softly rose and started across the road. One of the men caught a glimpse of her, the merest shadowy outline, and instantly shouted:
"There goes one of 'em now!"
She heard him—heard the rush of feet over the threshold and the bare yard, and without a backward glance, fled like a wild thing through the woods, home.
One afternoon, a week later, S'phiry Ann drew the wheel out into the middle of the kitchen floor, tightened the band, pulled a strip of yellow corn-husk from a chink in the logs to wrap the spindle, and set herself to finish spinning the "fillin'" for the piece of cloth in the loom. Her mother and sister were out in the garden sowing seeds, Eph was cutting bushes in the new ground, and she could hear the loud, resonant "geehaw" with which her father guided the ox drawing his plow. It was a serenely still day—the heat of mid-summer in its glowing sunshine, with only a fleck of cloud here and there along the horizon, and mountains wrapped in a fine blue haze.