o Dorothy Thornton's eyes contentment had returned because gay and
hopeful young flags of green flew from every twig of the tree of augury,
and in her deep pupils dwelt the serene sweetness that broods on
thoughts of approaching motherhood.

Then one morning before dawn Uncle Jase Burrell and a neighbour woman,
versed in the homely practises of the midwife, came to the room where
Parish Thornton sat with tightly clenched hands before the ruddy
hearth.

"He's done been borned," said Uncle Jase, cheerily; "he's hale an'
survigrous an' sassy--an' he's a boy."

Sim Squires had not gone home that night, and now he rose from his chair
and picked up his hat. "I reckon I'll be farin' on," he announced,
"hit's all over now but ther shoutin'." At the door, though, he turned
back and from his coat pocket drew a roll of sheafed paper bound in a
limp cloth.

"I found this hyar thing layin' behind a barrel up thar in ther attic,"
he lied, as he restored the lost journal of the revolutionary
ancestress. "I 'lowed hit mout be somethin' ye prized."

* * * * *

One night, when June had come to her full-bosomed richness, young Pete
Doane did not return to his father's house and the old hunchback's face
darkened anxiously.

The warm night was a blue and moonlit glory of summer tranquillity and
from the creek bottom came the full-throated chorus of the frogs. Back
in the dark timber sounded the plaintive sweetness of the whippoorwills,
and from everywhere drifted an intangible blending of fragrances.

But Hump sat alone and morose in the house where no one dwelt but
himself and his son--save the neighbour woman who came in the daytime to
cook and clean house for the widower. He sat there until midnight had
passed and the moon was riding low to the west; he was still sitting in
the darkness that comes before dawn, and young Pete had not yet come.
Then when even June could not make gracious that dismal hour that brings
fog and reek before the first gray streaks the east, the old man heard a
voice outside his door and rose heavily to answer it.

He was a marked man, and should not have been so incautious, but in
these days death held no threat for Hump Doane. It was life that brought
him torture.

So he ignored those precepts of wariness which had been taught him by
years of experience, and when he stood unarmed in the doorway, against a
background of pale lamplight, he felt the thrust of a rifle muzz