sider'ble s'prised ez she war so easy put
out."

She laughed a little, but he did not respond. With his sensibilities all
jarred by the perfidious insinuation of Ozias Crann, and his jealousy
all on the alert, he noted and resented the fact that at first her
attention had come back reluctantly to him, and that he, standing before
her, had been for a moment a less definitely realized presence than the
thought in her mind--this thought had naught to do with him, and of that
he was sure.

"Loralindy," he said with a turbulent impulse of rage and grief; "whenst
ye promised to marry me ye an' me war agreed that we would never hev one
thought hid from one another--ain't that a true word?"

The wheel had stopped suddenly--the silver thread was broken; she was
looking up at him, the moonlight full on the straight delicate
lineaments of her pale face, and the smooth glister of her golden hair.
"Not o' my own," she stipulated. And he remembered, and wondered that it
should come to him so late, that she had stood upon this reservation and
that he--poor fool--had conceded it, thinking it concerned the
distilling of whisky in defiance of the revenue law, in which some of
her relatives were suspected to be engaged, and of which he wished to
know as little as possible.

The discovery of his fatuity was not of soothing effect. "'T war that
man Renfrow's secret--I hearn about his letter what war read down ter
the mill."

She nodded acquiescently, her expression once more abstracted, her
thoughts far afield.

He had one moment of triumph as he brought himself tensely erect,
shouldering his gun--his shadow behind him in the moonlight duplicated
the gesture with a sharp promptness as at a word of command.

"All the mounting's a-diggin' by this time!" He laughed with ready
scorn, then experienced a sudden revulsion of feeling. Her face had
changed. Her expression was unfamiliar. She had caught together the two
ends of the broken thread, and was knotting them with a steady hand, and
a look of composed security on her face, that was itself a flout to the
inopportune search of the mountaineers and boded ill to his hope to
discover from her the secret of the _cache_. He recovered himself
suddenly.

"Ye 'lowed ter me ez ye never keered nuthin' fur that man, Renfrow," he
said with a plaintive appeal, far more powerful with her than scorn.

She looked up at him with candid reassuring eyes. "I never keered none
fur him," she protested.