ll'--or 'Blatch Turrentine,'--to me,
I vow I'll hit ye," she warned shrilly. "I ain't never raised hand on ye
yet sence ye was a woman grown, but do it I will!"

"I wasn't goin' to say nothin' about nothin'," asserted Huldah
sweepingly. "I was jest goin' to ax did ye want any huckleberries, and
git a pail to pick some."

She sought out a small tin lard bucket as she spoke, and Iley's silence
presumably assenting, within twenty minutes was picking away eagerly on
the Bald above the bluff.

Below her stretched meadows drunk with sun--breathless. A rain crow
called from time to time "C-c-c-cow! cow! cow!" The air was still heavy
with faint noon-day smells, the sky tarnished with heat.

"I wonder where in all creation them boys has got theirselves to," she
ruminated as she peered about, dragging green berries and leaves into her
bucket, for which Mrs. Jim Cal would afterward no doubt scold her
soundly. "'Pears to me like I hearn somebody talkin' somewhars."

She pushed cautiously down to the edge of the rocks where the bushes grew
scatteringly, pretending to herself that she wanted a bit of wild
geranium that flourished in a crevice far below the top. Setting down her
pail she threw herself on her face, her arms over the edge, and reached.
But the fingers hung suspended, opened in air, her mouth open too, and
she listened greedily to faint sounds of men's voices.

"I'll bet it's old Ab Foeman's hideout that nobody but him and the
Cherokees knowed of," she muttered to herself. "Some one's found it
and--Lord, look at that!"

From the bushes below her, coming apparently out of the living rock
itself, crept Andy, and then Jeff Turrentine. Now she could see the
narrow, door-like opening of the cave which had given them up, and
realised how, from below, it passed for a mere depression in the rock.

Huldah drew back silently, inch by inch, and instinctively pulled her
black calico sunbonnet over her red curls as she crouched down among the
huckleberry bushes. When she looked again Andy and Jeff had disappeared,
but she could see the head and shoulders of a man who still lay at the
cave's mouth--and that man was Blatch Turrentine!

At first she shuddered, thinking that she had come upon the dead body;
then she noted a tiny trail of smoke, and, by craning a little farther
around, saw that Blatchley lay at ease with a pipe in his mouth,
smoking.

"The triflin', low-down, lyin' hound!" she muttered to herself. "I'm
a-goin'