were more susceptible to a quaver of doubt than that redoubtable
endowment called his hard head.

"Somebody hev jes' sot out fire in the woods,--though powerful wet,"
he muttered, his intellectual entity seeking to quiet that inward
flutter of his mere bodily being. "But I'm a-goin' on," he protested
obstinately, "ef it be bodaciously kindled by the devil!"

And as he spoke, his heart failed, his limbs seemed sinking beneath
him, his pulses beat tumultuously for a moment, and then were
abruptly still; he had emerged from the woods in a great flickering
glare which pervaded an open, rocky space shelving to a precipice, and
beheld a tall, glowing yellow flame rising unquenched from the
illuminated surface of a bubbling mountain spring. His senses reeled;
a myriad of tawny red and yellow flashes swayed before his dazzled
eyes. He had heard all his life of the wild freaks of the witches in
the woods. Had he chanced on their unhallowed pastimes in the
solitudes of these untrodden mountain wildernesses? Was this
miraculous fire, blazing from the depths of the clear water,
necromancy, the work of the devil?

The next moment his heart gave a great throb. He found his voice in a
wild halloo. Among the fluttering shadows of the trees he had caught
sight of the figure of a man, and, a thousand times better, of a face
that he knew. The man was approaching the fire, with a stare of blank
amazement and fear as his distended eyes beheld the phenomenon of the
blazing spring. Their expression changed instantly upon the sound. His
face was all at once alert, grave, suspicious, a prosaic anxiety
obliterating every trace of superstitious terror. His right hand was
laid upon his hip in close proximity to a pistol-pocket, and Persimmon
Sneed remembered suddenly that his own pistol was in its holster on
his saddle, he could not say how far distant in these wild, trackless
woods, and that this man was a notorious offender against the law,
sundry warrants for his arrest for horse-stealing having been issued
at divers times and places. There had been much talk of an organized
band who had assisted in these and similar exploits in secluded
districts of the county, but Persimmon Sneed had given it scant
credence until he beheld several armed men lagging in the rear, their
amazed, uncouth faces, under their broad-brimmed hats, all weird and
unnatural in the pervasive yellow glow. They had, evidently, been led
to the spot by the strange flare in