It has been said that Mr. Carson set an example for the people at Lee which many were tempted to follow. And partly it was the spring calling them; partly it was an itching desire to find the Disbrows. Lee was pretty well disgusted with itself as time went on, for not starting after the absconding undertaker and his family immediately after their disappearance, and they told themselves they certainly would have done it if Mr. Carson hadn’t been so dead set against it. And he was put up to acting the way he did, they knew, by Annie Laurie, who was too soft-hearted altogether.

It was a little surprising, all things considered, that the Reverend Absalom Summers should have been the next after Hi and Jim to yield to the temptation to take to the hills. Resisting temptation, as his little wife pointed out to him, ought to be his specialty. But he contrived to down her argument.“You don’t seem to understand my noble soul at all, Barbara,” he said. “My real reason for taking to the hills is that I want to visit my two uncles back on Longstreet Mountain.”

“But why should you visit them, Absalom, dear? Do you really care about seeing them? Aren’t they two quarrelsome old men?”

“Well, they are some quarrelsome, Barbara, and that’s why I think I ought to see them, carrying a dove of peace on my shoulder.”

“They’d kill a dove of peace and eat it, wouldn’t they?” she asked laughingly. “Don’t they shoot everything in sight?”

“Pretty nigh,” agreed Absalom. “They certainly do have nervous dispositions. They own a lot of land up there on Longstreet Mountain, and the two of them used to live side by side. But their chickens were so inquisitive about what was doing in the next yard, and they got so mixed up running through the fence and forgetting which place was home, that there was a row on early and late between my uncles. It was the same with the calves. If they wanted to break into a field and eat up the corn, they always picked out the field of the next door neighbor. And that made the brothers just dancing mad. Then once Uncle Ephriam shot a hound of Uncle Aaron’s—said he thought it was a timber wolf.

“And so it went. There was always trouble. When they heard I’d become a preacher they sent for me to come up and straighten things out. I stayed up there a month and talked things over and I couldn’t get either old stiff-neck to give an inch. So I worked out a plan. Aaron had a likely building site for his house, but Uncle Ephriam’s was on a slope and water ran into the cellar when it rained. Well, just in front of them was a deep ravine—mighty pretty it is too. I proposed that Ephriam should move across to the other side of that gulley. I told him if he would, I’d stay and help him put up his house. So Aaron bought Ephriam’s old house to use for a barn, and Ephriam moved—chickens, stock, truck and all—across the gulley. We got him a nice sizable house there, and settled him and his wife as comfortable as you please. It was altogether too much work for the calves and the chickens to get across that crack in the earth, and so everyone lived in peace.”

“That was fine. But why should you leave Jonathan and me to go to see them if they’re doing so well?”

“They aren’t doing so well as you might think, wife. No sooner had I got those families separated, by a convulsion of nature, so to speak, than they took to pining for each other.”

“Nonsense, Absalom.”

“It’s a fact, my dear. They were as lonely as owls. Said they didn’t have anyone to talk to, and that it wore them all out plunging up and down that gulley.”

“Well, what can you do about that? You don’t propose moving Uncle Ephriam back again, do you?”

“Not at all, Barbara, not at all. I merely propose making conversation easy and simple for them.”

“With a telephone?”

“Not at all. A telephone would be out of place in the hands of my reverend uncles. I can’t precisely tell you why, but you’ll have to take my word that it would. No, what I propose to do is to carry them megaphones.”

“Megaphones, Absalom!”

“Certainly. Megaphones will become them. They are sturdy, seafaring sort of men—”“Why, they’ve never seen the sea!”

“Don’t be so literal, dear. They are sturdy, space-roaming, wilderness-faring men in whose hands megaphones will be appropriate. I shall strap one on each side of my horse and set forth—to-morrow.”

“But will you get your sermon prepared?”

“I shall prepare it while I’m riding. Seriously, Barbara, the wild man in me is uppermost. You have tried to civilize me. Our young son has labored to do the same thing. But you scratch a Russian and find a Tartar; and you scratch a mountain man and you find a rover.”

“And you’ve been scratched, wild man?”

“I have. I’m off to-morrow. Bear with me, dear. I’ll come back as tame as a house cat.”

Barbara looked at him with shining eyes.

“You’ll have a wonderful sermon,” she said. “I know you, dear. Go to your hills—”

“From whence,” broke in the Reverend Absalom, his voice changing, “cometh help.”

So away he went in the early morning, knapsack well filled, blankets rolled, and a megaphone dangling from each side of his excellent horse.

Yes, he was glad to leave domesticity and towns behind him; glad to be away from the sound of voices and from the need of proprieties. He was a hill man, after all, he told himself, and lifting his face to the sky he thanked God that he was. They satisfied him, these ancient mountains which once had been lofty peaks and which through all the changing centuries had crumbled and shrunken till they were the friendly little mountains that he knew. They were so old—so old and so full of secrets. And they satisfied his restless, longing, laughing, dreaming soul, the curious soul of Absalom Summers, which differed from all the other souls on earth. Yes, he mused, each soul must differ from another, as the stars in heaven differ.

On he rode through the long day, thinking, dreaming, living a deep and silent life. At night he made his meal, fed his horse, smoked his pipe and thought of his sermon. The stars rolled over him in their silent and majestic courses, and beneath them he knelt to pray for his wife and babe, those inestimably dear treasures of his, those lovely creatures of the hearth-side. They liked their roof; he liked his sky. Well, blessings on them, and might he be forgiven if he harbored too wild a nature in his bosom! It was not a silent prayer that the Reverend Absalom put up. Far from it. He shouted to the whispering pines; he addressed the distant stars; he felt as if he must send his voice beyond the barriers of silence and reach his God. For that was the kind of man the Reverend Absalom was.

Then, as trusting as a child in his mother’s arms, he laid him down to sleep. For he felt the “Everlasting Arms” about him.

The next morning he arose at sunup and went singing on his way. He breakfasted at about seven o’clock, and stimulated by his powerful cup of coffee—which, truth to tell, was a fearsome liquid—he pushed onward. The road he had chosen was difficult to keep and hard to traverse. There were, of course, easier ways of reaching Longstreet Mountain, but in order to reach them he would have had to take a train, and nothing was further from his inclination at present than riding by steam. He wanted just what he was having, the heave of good horseflesh beneath him.

The day passed without events other than the sort he desired: the lift of a bird from a bush, the rippling of a stream across his path, the nosing of the horse at the ford, a burst of laurel blossoms in a sunny path. He went on, whistling and singing. Oftenest it was his old, best-loved hymn: “A mighty fortress is our Lord.”

Along late in the afternoon a mist began to gather over the mountain. It blurred everything delicately; it put a soft, filmy veil over the face of the landscape and enhanced its beauty by so doing. But after a while it began to be a bit eerie. As the wanderer cooked his evening meal it seemed as if shadowy white figures drew near, bending over him, and then flitting away as he arose. It did no more than amuse him, of course. He knew the tricks of the mountain mist. But he couldn’t help remembering how terrified he had been once as a child when he had been out on a night much like this, and had had a five mile walk alone with a lantern in his hand, which seemed to summon ghostly figures from the roadside.

“It would be a bad night for a man with a bad conscience,” he said aloud. “He would think there were avenging spirits on his track, sure enough. Come to think of it, I’ve plenty of things to have a bad conscience about myself. I’d better be watching out or the goblins will get me. And whatever would wife Barbara and baby Jonathan do then, poor things!”

The place where he had lighted his camp fire was in a little hollow and the mist gathered very thickly there, so he concluded that it would be better to go on farther up the mountain. It was possible that he might find an airier place where the draft would keep the heavier clouds away. So once more he put his horse to the path and went on silently, rather weary, and heartily wishing that the night were fair.

He was very far from the beaten road, in a place so solitary that he could not hope to meet anyone, so it was with no little surprise that he found himself, suddenly, almost upon a group of human beings. They were sitting, three of them, around a fire, well wrapped from the chill. There was a sort of rude hut beside them, fashioned of saplings and thatched with pine boughs. Here, apparently, they slept. They were not then like himself, wanderers, but campers. Well, it was a quiet place for a camp, and no doubt a sightly one—

His thoughts broke off like a thread that is snapped. He recognized the persons at whom he was looking. They were the Disbrows! They were the fugitives. At first he thought of going right up to them, but something withheld him. He could hear Mrs. Disbrow’s voice, and he slid from his horse and having tied him, crept nearer with as much stealth and skill in silence as an Indian, that he might listen. There were things he felt that he must know, and that as Sam’s friend he had a right to know.

“I don’t mean to go on, pa,” Mrs. Disbrow was saying. “What’s the use of going on? Whatever would it mean for me but another house to look after, and me lacking the strength to do it? Hannah would drudge and drudge, and that’s all there’d be to it. Living like this there aren’t any pantry shelves to clean or doorsteps to scrub. That’s a great point to a woman with no elbow grease. You understand, pa, it’s been pretty dull for me these last few years back. You can’t tell what it is to lie awake all night wondering if the morning will ever come, and when the morning comes, hating it because the light tears your eyes out and the noise splits your ears.”

“But you seem to stand the light and the noise here well enough, ma.”

“So I do. That’s why I want to stay. The only noise is what the crickets and birds make, with now and then a bee humming or an owl screeching. And the light is green, coming through the trees. Why, it’s as if a thousand years had rolled off my back. There’s no one around wondering about me, and trying this trick and that to get a sight of me.”

“No one ever did that, ma,” cried out the shrill voice of Hannah. “That was just your imagination. It was your being sick made you think that way.”

“Well, however that may be, out here we’re free. Now I propose, since you’ve got some money, pa, that we move around here and there, like a nice family of bears—the father, and the mother and the baby bear.”

She gave a curious, unaccustomed laugh. Then suddenly she turned toward her husband, and Mr. Summers could see her wild eyes gleaming in the firelight.

“But what I can’t make out, Hector,” she said, “is where you got that money. Why don’t you talk out the way a husband should to a wife? Here we’ve been living so close to the wind that we hadn’t enough to satisfy us, and Hannah’s been going without enough to clothe her decently. Now, of a sudden, your pockets are full of money! What does it mean, Hector? And why did you clear out of Lee in the night? When you gave the word to go I was feeling so dull in my head that I didn’t care whether the thing was right or wrong. But now I seem to have come to life. I’ve got to thinking again, like I was a real human being. And Hector—”

Her voice carried on the air with the wild note of a loon.

“Hector!”

“Well, ma, go on, for goodness sake.”

“How did it come that you got that money just when Simeon Pace’s money disappeared? Tell me that, husband! Tell me you didn’t have anything to do with it! My life’s been queer and dark, but it’s been honest. You’ve turned out a different man from what I thought you’d be. I hoped on and on for you, but you didn’t get anywhere, and I got worn out and took to my bed and meant never to get out of it. But even when you’d taken all the spunk out of me I never thought you was anything but honest. Are you, Hector? Are you honest—or a thief?”

It wrung Summers’ heart; yet he knew that the time had come for judgment. He had been a boy of wild pranks and he loved a prank still. An idea came flashing into his head. He crept back to his horse, loosened one of the megaphones and put it to his mouth, and in that voice which had electrified great camp meetings, magnified many times by the horn, he bellowed into the mist:

“Disbrow, thief! Give back the money you stole! Make restitution! Return the money of the orphan! Simeon Pace is in his grave, and his orphan’s money is in your pocket! Disbrow, thief!”

The great megaphone waved up and down in the air, and the accusing voice was borne to the group around the fire, as if carried on winds from the furthermost heaven. In the white gloom, with the wreathing wraiths of the mist dancing about them, the dark cavern below, the sighing trees above, the monstrous voice, like that of an angry angel, besieged their ears. Summers was too far from them to see them cower, and he could not see their stricken faces. His heart secretly misgave him for what he might be doing to the woman and the girl, but he did not flinch for all that. He gave out one last call:

“Make restitution! To-morrow at sunrise set out upon your journey. Do not pause till wrong has been made right. This is the first warning. Beware the second!”

The mountain echoes caught it up and shouted the words back, while up and down the chasm below the roadway the mist figures writhed and climbed. Summers mounted his horse and stole back the way he had come till he reached the bottom of the gulch, then taking the path on the other side of it, he proceeded on his way. It was almost dawn when he drew rein, tethered his horse, and laid him down to sleep.

“I hope,” he said to his horse, “that I haven’t scared those poor women to death. But it had to be, you see—nothing else for it.” And then suddenly he burst into a wild torrent of laughter. It rolled out of him in waves; it shook him like a convulsion. And having eased his soul, he lay down and slept.