a sudden darting red
flame, had unrecognizable significance and was of sinister intent. For
Pete was detailed to attend to the boiling; the grinding was done, and
the old white mare stood still in the midst of the sorghum stubble and
the moonlight, as motionless and white as if she were carved in marble.
Job Grinnell sat and smoked on the porch.

Presently he got up suddenly, knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and
looked at it carefully before he stuck it into his pocket. He went,
without a word, down the rocky slope, past the old drowsing mare, and
across the foot-bridge. Two or three of the dogs, watching him as he
reappeared on the opposite bank, affected a mistake in identity. They
growled, then barked outright, and at last ran down and climbed the
fence and bounded about it, baying the vista where he had vanished,
until the sleepy old mare turned her head and gazed in mild surprise at
them.

Augusta sat alone on the step of the porch.

She had various regrets in her mind, incipient even before he had quite
gone, and now defining themselves momently with added poignancy. A woman
who, in her retirement at home, charges herself with the control of a
man's conduct abroad, is never likely to be devoid of speculation upon
probable disasters to ensue upon any abatement of the activities of her
discretion. She was sorry that she had allowed so trifling a matter to
mar the serenity of the family; her conscience upbraided her that she
had not besought him to avoid the blacksmith's shop, where certain
men of the neighborhood were wont to congregate and drink deep into the
night. Above all, her mind went back to the enigmatical message, and she
wondered that she could have been so forgetful as to fail to urge him
to forbear angering Purdee, for this would have a cumulative effect upon
all the rancors of the old quarrels, and inaugurate perhaps a new series
of reprisals.

"I ain't afeard o' no Purdee ez ever stepped," she said to herself,
defining her position. "But I'm fur peace. An' ef the Purdees will leave
we-uns be, I ain't a-goin' ter meddle along o' them."

She remembered an old barn-burning, in the days when she and her husband
were newly married, at his father's house. She looked up at the barn
hard by, on a line with the dwelling, with that tenderness which
one feels for a thing, not because of its value, but for the sake of
possession, for the kinship with the objects that belong to the home.
A cat was sitting