"Starbuck, any fool can be game—I thought I know'd all about you, but I never know'd befo' that you was so cool."
"Cool," Jasper repeated, "I ain't half as cool as you air keerless. I could kill you with that axe an' you couldn't help yo'se'f. That pistol won't shoot. Look! When you cocked it the cap fell off."
CHAPTER XVIII.
DOWN THE ROAD.
With his old pistol useless in his hand the ruffian walked away, shaking his head and muttering that a time was coming soon. "And with help from off yander," Jasper heard him shout from the road. "I have cut down the tree whar that bullet lodged and burnt it with a slow fire, and the fire that's to burn another tree, a scrub oak, may be slow but it is a comin'. Do you hear me over thar?"
"A man has to be mighty deaf not to hear a wolf howl," Jasper replied, and took his way back to the mill where Laz and Margaret were waiting for him.
"Was it Peters you saw goin' into the yard?" Margaret inquired, and the old fellow answered: "Looked mighty like him—fur a time I thought it was, but my eyes ain't as good as they was."
In the meantime Jim was fighting his way through the briars and over the rough ground of the short cut from the little county town. And when he reached the road he saw Mrs. Mayfield coming to meet him. "The preacher wasn't at home," he said, as he came near to her, "but I left word for him and he will be here soon. Do the folks know anything about it yet?"
"I told your uncle, but he seemed already to know." She gave a tender account of the scene in the yard, of Tom and Lou, and he said that like his uncle he had already known. "Fate got out of the wagon when you drove up to the gate, ma'm—honey," he said; "and I am thankful to the Lord that in no wise was it cruel onesidedness. I couldn't tell that Tom loved Lou, but I knew she loved him."