After this shouted speech that awoke shrill echoes along the mountain side, there fell a moment of breathless silence, such a silence as is perhaps seldom felt save on a battlefield after the declaration of a truce.
Then, in a tone that told of deeper emotional struggle, there came from Ransom Turner’s lips:
“Are you shore, Miss Florence? Are hit all right?”
“Quite all right,” she said in as steady a tone as she could command. “See! I am coming down.”
Moving quietly, she passed the last tall pine, the last clump of rhododendrons within the gate, then the massive portals, and a moment later found herself among her own people, free.
Free! How good it seemed! And yet, as between two silent mountaineers she walked back to the settlement and the whipsawed house, she felt the burdens of these simple people come back to her shoulders like a crushing weight.
“To-morrow,” she whispered. “The trial and the election, and then what?”
Later that night, after a joyous reunion and a splendid supper in the whipsawed cabin, she lay once more in her own bed, staring up at the ceiling where the flashes of a dying fire played. Then it was that she noted something strange. The board they had once taken from the ceiling that they might get into the attic had been once more removed, then replaced. She knew this, for this time it had been put back with the ends reversed.
Vaguely her mind played with this thought. Who had been up there? What had they found? Georgia gold? Confederate gold?
She wondered about the election; her trial; Bud Wax. Wondered a little about Marion, who had gone down the branch to stay all night with Patience Madden, the oldest girl in their school. Was she sleeping safely in Patience’s cabin? In this strange community no one seemed quite safe.