es all a-swaying like
glistening arms flung upward, as if some bevy of dryads sped up the hill
in elusive rout through the fastnesses.

*****

The next day ushered in a tumult and excitement unparalleled in the
history of the little log-cabin. When Leander's absence was discovered,
and inquiry of the few neighbors and search of the vicinity proved
fruitless, the fact of his flight and its motive were persistently
forced upon Ne-hemiah Yerby's reluctant perceptions, with the
destruction of his cherished scheme as a necessary sequence. With some
wild craving for vengeance he sought to implicate Sudley as accessory to
the mysterious disappearance. He found some small measure of solace in
stumping up and down the floor before the hearth, furiously railing at
the absent host, for Sudley had not yet relinquished the bootless quest,
and indignantly upbraiding the forlorn, white-faced, grief-stricken
Laurelia, who sat silent and stony, her faded eyes on the fire,
heedless of his words. She held in her lap sundry closely-rolled knitted
balls--the boy's socks that she had so carefully made and darned. A pile
of his clothing lay at her feet. He had carried nothing but his fiddle
and the clothes he stood in, and if she had had more tears she could
have wept for his improvidence, for the prospective tatters and rents
that must needs befall him in that unknown patchless life to which he
had betaken himself.

Nehemiah Yerby argued that it was Sudley who had prompted the whole
thing; he had put the boy up to it, for Leander was not so lacking in
feeling as to flee from his own blood-relation. But he would set the law
to spy them out. He would be back again, and soon.

He may have thought better of this presently, for he was in great
haste to be gone when Tyler Sudley returned, and to his amazement in a
counterpart frame of mind, charging Nehemiah with the responsibility of
the disaster. It was strange to Laurelia that she, who habitually strove
to fix her mind on religious things, should so relish the aspect of Ty
Sudley in his secular rage on this occasion.

"Ye let we-uns hev him whilst so leetle an' helpless, but now that he
air so fine growed an' robustious ye want ter git some work out'n him,
an' he hev runned away an' tuk ter the woods tarrified by the very sight
of ye," he averred. "He'll never kem back; no, he'll never kem back; fur
he'll 'low ez ye would kem an? take him home with you; an' now the Lord
only knows whar he