windows, so as to be themselves in sole possession, a sound was heard in
the room below, where your meal is now ready, like a panther skipping
and lashing his tail; and, before the men could breathe, old Ebenezer
Johnson was up the stairs and laying about him. His eyes were full of
murder. One man jumped right through that window and rolled off the
porch; another he pitched down the stairs; the third was a boy, Joe
King, barely grown--he lives not far from this house now--and Ebenezer
Johnson dashed him down the stairs, too, and started after him. All his
life the boy had been taught to dread that terrible man, and now he was
in his hands, or flying before him; and, as he reeled through the room
below, out of the door that opens on the back porch, the boy's eyes, in
the agony of the fear of death, beheld a rifle leaning there."

"Mighty good thing if it was thar now!" Jimmy inwardly remarked,
finishing the chicken, and still hungry.

"Oh, there _is_ a noise somewhere in this house," the voice exclaimed;
"I never tell this story but it makes me startled at every sound. The
boy, as he whirled past, grasped the long rifle, drew it to his
shoulder, and, with a young volunteer's skill--for he had been drilling
to fight the British--he put the two balls in that old man's brain. Both
balls entered over the left eyebrow, and one passed through the head and
was found in the wall; the other never was found.[3] The lawless giant
gave a trembling motion through his frame, his eyes glazed, and he sank
dead upon the floor without a sound--the wicked had ceased from
troubling! Aunt Betty, Aunt Patty, and Aunt Jane, three sisters shaped
by him in soul, fell on his body and wept and almost prayed, but it was
too late. They buried him near Aunt Betty, in the field behind the
pound."

Undertaking to rise from his chair, Jimmy Phoebus made a loud scraping
on the floor, and the table-knife fell with a ringing sound.

"Who's there?" cried a voice, and added, "I knew the dogs ought to be
loose."

"Who's there?" also asked the other voice, with something very familiar
to Phoebus in its sounds.

"E-b-e-n-e-z-e-r John-son!" answered Jimmy, in his deepest bass tones,
mentally considering that a ghost might carry more terror than a robber,
after that tale.

A little scream followed, and a whispered consultation, and then a
girl's bare feet, beautifully moulded, slowly descended the steep
stairway, and next a slender, graceful body came int