The days dragged heavily for Plutina, after the departure of her lover. She endured the period of tense waiting as best she might, since endure she must, but this passive loneliness, without a word from the man of her heart, was well-nigh intolerable. She did not weep—after that single passionate outburst while yet her lips were warm from his kiss. She was not of the weak fiber to find assuagement in many tears, nor had she nerves that needed the chemical soothing of flooded eyes. She had, indeed, strength sufficient for the trial. She bore her sorrow bravely enough, but it pierced her through and through. She knew her lover, and she knew herself. Because of that knowledge she was spared the shameful suffering of a woman who fears, with deadly fear, lest her lover be untrue. Plutina had never a doubt as to the faith of the absent one. A natural jealousy sometimes leaped in her bosom, at thought of him exposed to the wiles of women whom she suspected of all wantonness. But she had no cowardly thought that the fairest and most cunning of them 63 could oust her from the shrine of Zeke’s heart. Her great grief lay in the failure of any word from the traveler. The days became weeks; almost a month had gone since he held her in his arms, and still no message came. This was, in truth, strange enough to justify alarm. It was with difficulty that she drove back a temptation to imagine evil happenings. She went oftener the six miles to the Cherry Lane post-office.

When she descended the trail toward Thunder Branch this morning, she saw Zeke’s mother standing in the doorway of the cabin on the far side of the stream. The bent figure of the old woman rested motionless, with one hand lifted to shade her eyes from the vivid sunlight, as she watched the girl’s approach.

“Mornin’, Tiny,” she said tenderly, as the girl crossed the clearing. “On yer way to the Lane, I reckon?”

“Mornin’, Mis’ Higgins,” came the cheery answer. “Yes, I ’lowed as how ye’d love to hear, an’ I c’d git away. The corn’s laid by; the sorghum cane’s done hoed. Alviry’s gone to he’p Gran’pap with a bee-tree. Hit’s a big yaller poplar, up ’twixt Ted Hutchins’ claim an’ the ole mine-hole. Gran’pap ’lows as how hit ’ll have to be cut an’ split, an’ wuth hit—over a hundred pounds, all sour-wood honey, ’cept ’bout ten pounds early poplar. Gran’pap’s 64 right-smart tickled. I told Alviry to watch out he don’t go an’ tote half of it up to thet-thar Widder Brown. You-all must come over an’ git what ye kin use o’ the honey, Mis’ Higgins, afore the widder gits her fingers in the jar.”

“Ye don’t opine thet-thar gran’pap o’ your’n aims to git hitched ag’in at his age, do ye, Tiny? Hit’d be plumb scand’lous—an’ him eighty past. At thet age, he’s bound to have one foot in the grave, fer all he’s so tarnation spry an’ peart in his carryin’s on.”

“Lord knows what he’ll do,” the girl replied, carelessly. “He’s allers been given credit fer havin’ fotchin’ ways with women. I hope he won’t, though. They say, folks what marry upwards o’ eighty is mighty short-lived.”

The topic led Zeke’s mother to broach apprehension of her own:

“Tiny, ye don’t have no idee thet our Zeke’s gone daffy on some o’ them Evish-lookin’ critters down below, like ye showed me their picters in the city paper oncet?”

“Naw, no danger o’ thet,” was the stout assurance. “Zeke’s got too much sense. Besides, he hain’t had no time to git rich yit. The paper done said as how them kind’s arter the coin.”

As she went her way, the girl’s mind reveled in thoughts of the days to come, when Zeke should be 65 rich in sooth, and his riches for her. She swung her sun-bonnet in vigorous slaps against her bare legs, to scatter the ravenous mosquitoes and yellow flies, swarming from the thickets, and she smiled contentedly.

“P’r’aps, them women’s got more edication ’n me,” she mused aloud, complacently, “but I kin fill them silk stockin’s plumb up.” Her face grew brooding with a wistful regret in the sudden droop of the tender red lips. “I ’low I jest orter ’a’ swung onto thet-thar neck o’ his’n an’ hollered fer Parson, and got spliced ’fore he went.” She shook her head disconsolately. “Why, if he don’t come back, I’ll be worse nor the widders. Humph, I knows ’em—cats. They’ll say: ‘Tiny Siddon didn’t never have no chance to git married—her disperzition an’ her looks wa’n’t compellin’ ’nough to ketch a man.’”

The great dark eyes were clouded a little with bitter disappointment, when, two hours later, the girl came swiftly down the steep slopes from Cherry Lane, for once again there had been no letter for her. Despite her courage, Plutina felt a chill of dismay before the mystery of this silence. Though faith was unshaken, bewilderment oppressed her spirit. She could not understand, and because she could not understand, her grief was heavy to bear. Then, presently, she chanced upon 66 a new mystery for her distraction—though this was the easier to her solving.

As she descended into a hollow by Luffman’s branch, which joins Thunder Branch a little way above the Higgins’ clearing, Plutina’s alert ears caught a sound that was not of the tumbling waters. Through all the noises of the stream where it leaped and sprayed in miniature falls over cluttering bowlders and fallen pines, she could distinguish the splashing of quick footsteps in the shallows. Some instinct of caution checked the girl’s advance. Instead of going forward openly, she turned aside and approached the bank where crowding alders and ivy formed a screen. Here, she parted the vines stealthily, and peered up the water-course.

A man was descending the run with hurried strides, wading with bare feet, or springing from rock to rock where were the deeper pools. A Winchester nestled in the crook of his left arm; two huge bear-traps, the jaws wickedly fanged, were swung from a rope over his right shoulder; a short-helved ax was thrust within his belt. He wore only a cotton shirt open at the neck, dirty throughout, patched jeans trousers, and a soft hat, green from long use. Beneath the shading brim showed a loutish face, the coarse features swollen from dissipation, the small black eyes bleared, yet alert and penetrating in their darting, furtive glances. It 67 was Dan Hodges, a man of unsavory repute. The girl, though unafraid, blessed the instinct that had guided her to avoid a meeting.

There were two prime factors in Plutina’s detestation of Hodges. The first was due to his insolence, as she deemed it, in aspiring for her favor. With little training in conventional ideas of delicacy, the girl had, nevertheless, a native refinement not always characteristic of her more-cultured sister women. There was to her something unspeakably repugnant in the fact that this bestial person should dare to think of her intimately. It was as if she were polluted by his dreaming of her kisses, of her yielding to his caresses. That he had so aspired she knew, for he had told her of his desire with the coarse candor of his kind. Her spurning of the uncouth advances had excited his wrath; it had not destroyed his hopes. He had even ventured to renew his suit, after the news of an engagement between Plutina and Zeke had gone abroad. He had winced under the scourge of the girl’ scorn, but he had shown neither penitence nor remorse. Plutina had forborne any account of this trouble to her lover, lest, by bad blood between the two men, a worse thing befall.

The second cause of the girl’s feeling was less direct, though of longer standing, and had to do with the death of her father. That Siddon, while 68 yet in his prime, had been slain in a raid on a still by the revenue officers, and that despite the fact that he was not concerned in the affair, save by the unfortunate chance of being present. Plutina, though only a child at the time, could still remember the horror of that event. There was a singular personal guiltiness, too, in her feeling, for, on the occasion of the raid, her grandfather had been looking out from a balcony, and had seen the revenue men urging their horses up the trail, the sunlight glinting on their carbines. He had seized the great horn, to blow a warning to those at the secret still on the mountain above. Plutina could remember yet the grotesque bewilderment on his face, as no sound issued—then the wrath and despair. The children, in all innocence, had stuffed the horn with rags. The prank had thus, in a way, cost two lives—one, that of “Young” Dick Siddon. The owner of the raided still had been Dan Hodges, and him Plutina despised and hated with a virulence not at all Christian, but very human. She had all the old-time mountaineer’s antipathy for the extortion, as it was esteemed, of the Federal Government, and her father’s death had naturally inflamed her against those responsible for it. Yet, her loathing of Hodges caused her to regret that the man himself had escaped capture thus far, though twice his still had been destroyed, once within the year.

A high, jutting wall of rock hid the stream where it bent sharply a little way from Plutina’s shelter. Presently, she became aware that Hodges had paused thus beyond the range of her vision, and was busy there. She heard the blows of the ax. General distrust of the man stirred up in her a brisk curiosity concerning the nature of his action in this place. On a previous day, she had observed that the limpid waters of the brook had been sullied by the milky refuse from a still somewhere in the reaches above. Now, the presence of Dan Hodges was sufficient to prove the hidden still his. But the fact did not explain his business here. That it was something evil, she could not doubt, for the man and his gang were almost outlaws among their own people. They were known, though unpunished, thieves, as well as “moonshiners,” and there were whispers of more dreadful things—of slain men vanished into the unsounded depths of the Devil’s Cauldron. The gorge of the community—careless as it had been of some laws in the past, and too ready to administer justice according to its own code—had risen against the vicious living of the gang that accepted Hodges as chief. It seemed to Plutina that duty conspired with curiosity to set her spying on the man.

The espionage, though toilsome enough, was not otherwise difficult. Toward the bend, the banks 70 rose sharply on both sides of the stream, forming a tiny caÑon for the channel. The steep slope on the east side, where the girl now ascended, was closely overgrown with laurel and little thickets of ground pine, through which she was hard beset to force her way—the more since she must move with what noiselessness she might. But her strength and skill compassed the affair with surprising quickness. Presently, she came to the brim of the little cliff, and lying outstretched, cautiously looked down. Already, a hideous idea had entered her mind, but she had rejected it with horror. What she now saw confirmed the thought she had not dared to harbor.

Within this bend of the brook, the lessening volume of the channel had left a patch of rich soil, heavily overgrown with lush grasses and clusters of flowering weeds. A faint trace of passing steps ran across the bit of dry ground, the path of those that followed the stream’s course. Fair in this dim trail, near the center of the plot, a stake had been driven deep. At the moment, Hodges was driving into the ground a similar stake, a yard further down. It was evident that the stakes had been previously left here in readiness, since he had not carried them in his descent, and the iron rings bound to them must have been attached in a forge. The two massive traps were lying half-hidden in 71 the luxuriant growth close by. As Plutina watched with affrighted intentness, the man finished driving the second stake. He lifted one of the traps, and carried it to the upper stake. With the aid of a stone for anvil, he succeeded in clumsily riveting the trap’s length of chain to the ring on the stake. The like was done with the other trap at the lower stake. Then, the man undertook the setting of the traps. The task was accomplished very quickly for both, though the strength of the jaws taxed his muscles to their utmost. Finally, he strewed leaves, and bent grass, until no least gleam of metal betrayed the masked peril of the trail. Plutina, sick with the treacherous deviltry of the device, heard the grunt of satisfaction with which Hodges contemplated his finished work. Forthwith, he picked up his rifle, thrust the ax-helve within his belt, and set off up the gulch.