The clouds parted just enough to let through a rift of gray light, but it fell not upon the brink of the black gap in the path.It showed for an instant the whirlpool, with fragments of tree trunks, of ghastly likeness to drowned human bodies, eddying dizzily around.
"Come on," called out Fortner, impatiently.
Harry stepped out desperately.For a mental eternity he hung in air.
His hands relaxed and his gun dropped with a crash and a splash.
Then his foot touched the other side with nervous doubtfulness.
It slipped, and he felt himself falling--falling into all that he feared.Fortner grasped his collar with a strong hand, and dragged him up against the rocky wall of the path.
"Thar, yer all right," he said, panting with the exertion, "but hit wuz a mouty loud call for ye.Gabriel's ho'n couldn't've made a much mo' powerful one.""I've lost my gun," said Harry, regretfully, as soon as he could compose himself.
"Cuss-an'-burn the blasted ole smooth-bore," said Fortner, contemptuously."Don't waste no tear on that ole kick-out-behind.
We'll go 'long 'tween Wildcat an' the Ford, an' pick up a wagon-load uv ez good shooters ez thet clumsy chunk o' pot-metal wuz.Shake yourself together.We've on'y got a mile or so ter go now."In Harry's condition, the "mile or so" seemed to be stretching out a long ways around the globe, and he began to ask himself how near he was to the much-referred-to "heart of the Southern Confederacy."At length a little fading toward gray of the thick blackness, to that they had emerged from the heavy woods into more open country.
Harry thought they were come to fields, but he could see nothing, and without remark plodded painfully after his leader.
Suddenly a large pack of dogs immediately in front of them broke the stillness with a startling diapason, ranging from the deep bass of the mastiff to the ringing bark of the fox-hounds.Mingled with this was the sound of the whole pack rushing fiercely forward.
Fortner stopped in his tracks so abruptly that Glen stumbled against him.The mountaineer gave the peculiar whistle he had uttered at the Ford.The rush ceased instantly.The deep growls of the mastiffs and bull-dogs stopped likewise; only the hounds and the shrill-voiced young dogs continued barking.
The darkness was rent by a long narrow lane of light.A door had been opened in a tightly-closed house, just beyond the dogs.
"Down, Tige! Git out, Beauty!" said Forstner, imperiously."Lay down, Watch! Quiet Bruno!"The clamors of the gang changed to little yelps of welcome.
"Is that you, Jim?" inquired a high-pitched but not unpleasant voice, from the door.
"Yes, Aunt Debby," answered Fortner, "an' I hev some one with me."As the two approached, surrounded by the fawning dogs, a slender, erect woman appeared in the doorway, holding above her head, by its nail and chain, one of the rude iron lamps common in the houses of the South.
"Everything all right, Aunt Debby?" asked Fortner, as, after entering, he turned from firmly securing the door, by placing across it a strong wooden bar that rested in the timbers on either side.
"Yes, thank God!" she said with quiet fervor.She stepped with graceful freedom over the floor, and hung the lamp up by thrusting the nail into a crack in one of the logs forming the walls of the room."An' how is hit with ye?" she asked, facing Fortner, with her large gray eyes eloquent with solicitude.
"O, ez fur me, I'm jes ez sound ez when I left heah last week, 'cept thet I'm tireder 'n a plow mule at night, an' hongrier nor a b'ar thet's lived all Winter by suckin' hits paws.""I s'pose y' air tired an' hongry; ye look hit," said the woman, with a compassionate glance at Harry, who had sunk limpy into a chair before the glowing wood-fire that filled up a large part of the end of the room.
"Set down by the fire," she continued, "an' I'll git ye some pone an' milk.Thar's nothin' better ter start in on when yer rale empty." She went to a rude cupboard in the farther part of the room, whence the note of colliding crockery soon gave information that she was busy.
Fortner took a bunch of tow from his pouch, and with it wiped off every particle of dampness from the outside of his rifle, after which he laid the gun on two wooden hooks above the fireplace, and hung the accouterments on deer horns at its breech.
"Pull off yer shoes an' toast yer feet," he said to Harry."The fire'll draw the tiredness right out."Harry's relaxed fingers fumbled vainly with the wet and obstinate shoe-strings.Aunt Debby came up with a large bowl of milk in each hand, and a great circular loaf of corn-bread under her arm.She placed her burden upon the floor, and with quick, deft fingers loosened the stubborn knots without an apparent effort, drew off the muddy shoes and set them in a dark corner near the fireplace before Harry fairly realized that he had let a woman do this humble office for him.The sight and smell of food aroused him from the torpor of intense fatigue, and he devoured the homely fare set before him with a relish that he had never before felt for victuals.As he ate his senses awakened so that he studied his hostess with interest.Hair which the advancing years, while bleaching to a snowy white had still been unable to rob of the curling waves of girlhood, rippled over a broad white brow, sober but scarcely wrinkled; large, serious but gentle gray eyes, and a small, firm mouth, filled with even white teeth were the salient features of a face at once resolute, refined and womanly.Long, slender hands, small feet, covered with coarse but well-fitting shoes, a slight, erect figure, suggestive of nervous strength, and clad in a shapely homespun gown stamped her as a superior specimen of the class of mountaineer woman to which she belonged.
