ed to
the same agency. With these thoughts upon them, they did not linger
long at the spot where he had met so mysterious a fate. Their ringing
halloos, with which the woods were enlivened, took on vaguely appalled
cadences; the echoes came back to them like mocking shouts; and they
were glad enough to ride away at last through the quiet moonlit
glades, their faltering voices silent, leaving that mystic fire slowly
dying where it had blazed so long on the face of the water.

* * * * *

A more extended search, later, resulting as fruitlessly, the idea that
Persimmon Sneed had been in some way lured bodily within the grasp of
the devil prevailed among the more ignorant people of the community;
they dolorously sought to point the moral how ill the headstrong fare,
and speculated gloomily as to the topic on which he had ventured to
argue with Satan, who in rage and retaliation had whisked him away.
But there was a class of citizens in Colbury who hearkened with elated
sentiments to this story of the burning spring. A company of
capitalists was promptly organized, every inch of attainable land on
the mountain was quietly bought, and machinery for boring for oil was
already at the spring when the news was brought to Selwyn by Hanway,
who, not having seen the young stranger for the past week or so,
feared he was ill. The flakes of the first snow of the season were
whirling past the windows--no more on autumn leaves they looked, no
more on far-off bare but azure mountains, feigning summer. The distant
ranges were ghostly white. The skeleton woods near at hand were stark
and black, and trembled with sudden starts, and strove wildly with the
winds, and were held in an inexorable fate, and cried and groaned
aloud.

Hanway was right in his surmise, for Selwyn was ill, and lay on the
lounge wheeled up to the fire. His cheeks seemed still touched with
color, the reflection from the ragged red smoking-jacket which he
wore, but a sort of smitten pallid doom was on his brow and in his
eyes. His gaze dwelt insistently on the doctor, the tall, thin
practitioner of the surrounding country, who had just finished an
examination and was slowly returning his spectacles to their case as
he stood before the fire. It seemed as if the patient expected him to
speak, but he said nothing, and looked down gravely into the red
coals.

Then it was that Hanway narrated the sensation of the neighborhood. It
roused Selw