so scorned the mountain, and who
owed to it his every breath. There was no sound, no suggestion of
human habitation. The shadowy woods stood dense about the little open
ledgy space on three sides; toward the very verge of the mountain the
rocks grew shelving and precipitous, and beyond the furthest which she
could see, the gray edge of which cut sharply against the base of a
distant dun-tinted range, she knew the descent was abrupt to the
depths of the valley. Looking up, she beheld the trembling lucid
whiteness of a star; now and again the great rustling boughs of an
oak-tree swayed beneath it, and then its glister was broken and
deflected amidst the crisp autumnal leaves, but still she saw it
shine. It told, too, that there was water near; she caught its radiant
multiplied reflection, like a cluster of scintillating white gems, on
the lustrous dark surface of a tiny pool, circular and rock-bound,
close beneath the ledge on which she sat. She leaned over, and saw in
its depths the limpid fading red sky, and the jagged brown border of
the rocks, and a grotesque moving head, which she recognized, after a
plunge of the heart, as her own sunbonnet. She drew back in dismay;
she would have no more of this weird mirror of the rocks and woods,
and looked up again at the shining of the star amidst the darkening
shadows of the scarlet oak. How tall that tree was, how broad of
girth! And how curiously this stranger talked! What was there to do
with all these trees! Would he cut down all the trees on the mountain?
A sudden doubt of his sanity crossed her mind. It was the first, and
her heart stood still for a moment. But as she slowly canvassed the
idea, it accounted for much otherwise impossible to comprehend: his
evident poverty and his efforts toward the purchase of lands; his
illness and his bluff insistence on his strength; his wild talk of
enterprise and his mysterious intimations of phenomenal opportunities.
Confirmations of the suspicion crowded upon her; above all, the mad
boast that with a match he could set the waters of a spring afire.

With a sad smile at the fatuity of the thing, in her idle waiting she
drew one of his matches from her pocket; then she struck it briskly on
the rugged rock, and cast it, blazing lightly, into the bubbling
waters of the spring.

The woods, the rocks, the black night, the fleering, flouting
witch-face, all with an abrupt bound sprang into sudden visibility. A
pyramid of yellow flame wa