As the girl stared at this fantastic ceiling it seemed to her that these tracings should mean something, that they led to an important truth, a truth that she should know, and one of vast importance.
Then of a sudden it struck her all of a heap. This cabin had an attic. Mrs. McAlpin’s whipsawed cabin must have one, too. There was no entrance from below. She was sure of that, but the attic was there all the same.
“Confederate gold,” she whispered. “It must be hidden there.”
So intense were her convictions on this subject that she found herself unable to sleep.
At last, having wrapped a homespun blanket about her, she stepped into the crisp air of the night.
The moon was just rising over Big Black Mountain. It was lighting up the scenes of another entrancing mystery, which Florence had stumbled upon a few days before.
“Who lives at the head of Laurel Branch?” she had asked Ransom Turner.
“I don’t rightly know.”
“Don’t know!” she exclaimed.
“I reckon there ain’t nobody that rightly knows except them that lives there.”