"When I was getting well I began to wonder why Mary Hathaway never came to see me. Mother put off telling me as long as she could that she and a younger sister had been killed in a moment by the falling of their house, and that Mrs. Hathaway was crippled for life. None of us had been hurt but me. Mother had got beyond the track of the worst part of the storm, but her horse was killed by the lightning. Father lost his barns, most of his stock, and nearly all his crops.
"That's the story of the terrible tornado. Its path was not more than half a mile wide, and it was all over in less than half an hour. Mother says I grew five years older on that day, and I think she is right."
"MOONSHINERS."
BY E. H. MILLER.
Chapter I.
CONNY LOSES HIS FATHER.
Dr. Hunter was riding leisurely on his morning rounds among the few people who managed to be sick at Dunsmore in spite of the clear sweet air that carried the balmy scent of the forests into all its pleasant valleys. Under the seat of his sulky was his little old-fashioned box of medicines, and close at his hand a tin box containing what was in the doctor's eyes quite as valuable—a specimen of a rare plant which he had discovered in a cleft of gray rock, and secured at the cost of some pretty hard climbing. The road upon which he was driving wound along the mountain-side, and he could look down upon the tops of the trees below, noting here and there the scattered buildings and stacks of feed that marked some little farm in a clearing, and from the very densest spot of all a faint thread of blue smoke rising above the trees. He had often noticed it, and more than once had asked about it, but no one gave him any satisfactory answer. You would have supposed that of all the men and women in Dunsmore not one had even chanced to see that smoke until the doctor's eyes had spied it.
"Smoke, sor?—so it be," said old Timothy, with a great pretense of straining his eyes to see it. "It's a fire in the woods, belike. Some tramping fellows on a hunt."
"It is always in one spot," said the doctor, "though sometimes it disappears for weeks. Is there any road that way?"