uation. Ridicule is always
of unfriendly intimations, and the sound served to put Nehemiah on his
guard anew. He noticed that the glow in Hilary's pipe was still and
dull: the smoker did not even draw his breath as he looked and listened.
Yerby did not dare avow the true purpose of his presence after his
representations to the moonshiners, and yet he could not, he would not
in set phrase align himself with the illicit vocation. The boy was too
young, too irresponsible, too inimical to his uncle, he reflected in a
sudden panic, to be intrusted with this secret. If in his hap-hazard,
callow folly he should turn informer, he was almost too young to
be amenable to the popular sense of justice. He might, too, by some
accident rather than intention, divulge the important knowledge so
unsuitable to his years and his capacity for guarding it. He began to
share the miller's aversion to the introduction of outsiders to the
still. He felt a glow of indignation, as if he had always been a
party in interest, that the common safety should not be more jealously
guarded. The danger which Leander's youth and inexperience threatened
had not been so apparent to him when he first heard that the boy had
been here, and the menace was merely for the others. As he felt the
young fellow's eyes upon him he recalled the effusive piety of
his conversation at Tyler Sudley's house, his animadversions on
violin-playing and liquor-drinking, and Brother Peter Vickers's mild and
merciful attitude toward sinners in those un-spiced sermons of his,
that held out such affluence of hope to the repentant rather than to
the self-righteous. The blood surged unseen into Nehe-miah's face.
For shame, for very shame he could not confess himself one with these
outcasts. He made a feint of searching in the semi-obscurity for the
rickety chair on which he had been seated, and resumed his former
attitude as Leander's voice once more rang out:

"What air ye a-doin' hyar, Uncle Nehemiah?"

"Jes a-visitin', sonny; jes a-visitin'."

There was a momentary pause, and the felicity of the answer was
demonstrated by another chuckle from the group. His senses, alert to the
emergency, discriminated a difference in the tone. This time the laugh
was with him rather than at him. He noted, too, Leander's dumfounded
pause, and the suggestion of discomfiture in the boy's lustrous eyes,
still widely fixed upon him. As Leander stooped to pick up the violin he
remarked with an incident