"My child!"
"I am, father! I suppose I am wicked for feeling it, but I wish him all the harm in the world. The Foggs may be thieves and liars and a hundred other dreadful things. The worst of them is a saint compared with him."
"We will let that pass. I promised once never to speak of that day again. I beg your pardon, my dear," said the father, gravely. There was no use in arguing against the girl's prejudice, in which, to tell the truth, he was beginning to share. "I was about to say that some strong measures must be taken to find out if the Foggs are really the ring-leaders of this gang, with the negroes to help them, or if this wretched family do all the stealing themselves. They have been tolerably quiet since the cabin was cleared out and pulled down, but this dairy business looks as if they were beginning business again. If we meet the Major on the road, I will speak to him about it. I wish now I had looked him up in the swamp when we saw Nell."
They relapsed into silence. The country was stilling into the hush of a summer noon. But for the indescribable consciousness of the growth of green and flowering things that fills June days and nights—something which is not motion and surely is not rest, and is, most of all, like the full, slow, contented breathing of the world on which we live and that lives with us—everything except themselves and their horses seemed to be asleep as they passed into the grass-grown swamp road.
"The day is getting hot," observed Mr. Grigsby, presently, "if the breeze should die away entirely we may expect a thunder-storm this afternoon."
At that instant the neigh of a horse, clear and prolonged, pierced the noon-tide; another moment brought them again in sight of the low-hung gig and mare they had seen in the same spot an hour and a half ago. Nell had not stirred from her tracks, except to paw up the earth about her front right foot in anxiety or impatience. She looked around and neighed piteously.
"Nell is getting hungry, poor thing!" said the overseer, stopping to pat her glossy neck. "The flies are troubling her, too. That is the worst of a blooded horse. The skin is as thin as a baby's. So, old lady!" and she threw her head down and up, and again whinnied. He went on brushing off the flies from her head and sides while he talked. "These swamp-flies bite sharply. Any other horse would try to get away. She is the best-broken beast in the State. If a cannon were fired off at her ear she would jump, but she'd never run. The Major broke her himself. It's odd where he is all this time."
A vague uneasiness took hold of him. He looked about him anxiously.
A large spruce-tree lay within ten feet of the gig. The branchy top had bent saplings and bushes down in its fall; the ground for many yards around was strewed with leaves and twigs. Flea glanced idly at the lower end of the trunk. She did not wish to meet Major Duncombe with the memory of the encounter with his daughter fresh in her mind. Still, if her father meant to wait for him, she had no choice. She could never tell how she chanced to notice that the trunk was hollow, and had been partly cut through by the axe. Beyond the cut the wood and bark were splintered roughly.
"Do you suppose he could have been here when that tree fell?" she said. "Could that have been what we heard as we came through the woods this morning? Oh, father!"