, I don't care what you do, so long as you never
speak to me again. Go and tell them if you want to--tell. TELL, do you
hear? I don't want even the favor of your silence!" She dexterously
tucked the bundle of white under the uninjured arm, caught the loose
folds of her skirt up in her hands, and ran away up the path, not once
stopping to see whether he still followed her.

Grant did not follow. He stood leaning against the fence-post, and
watched her until her flying form grew indistinct in the shade of the
poplar hedge; watched it reappear in a broad strip of white moonlight,
still running; saw it turn, slacken speed to a walk, and then lose
itself in the darkness of the grove.

Five minutes, ten minutes, he stood there, staring across the level bit
of valley lying quiet at the foot of the jagged-rimmed bluff standing
boldly up against the star-flecked sky. Then he shook himself
impatiently, muttered something which had to do with a "doddering fool,"
and retraced his steps quickly through the orchard, the currant bushes,
and the strawberry patch, jumped the ditch, and so entered the grove and
returned to his blankets.

"We thought the spook had got yuh, sure." Gene lifted his head
turtlewise and laughed deprecatingly. "We was just about ready to start
out after the corpse, only we didn't know but what you might get excited
and take a shot at us in the dark. We heard yuh shoot--what was it? Did
you find out?"

"It wasn't anything," said Grant shortly, tugging at a boot.

"Ah--there was, too! What was it you shot at?" Clark joined in the
argument from the blackness under the locust tree.

"The moon," Grant told him sullenly. "There wasn't anything else that I
could see."

"And that's a lie," Gene amended, with the frankness of a
foster-brother. "Something yelled like--"

"You never heard a screech-owl before, did you, Gene?" Grant crept
between his blankets and snuggled down, as if his mind held nothing more
important than sleep.

"Screech-owl my granny! You bumped into something you couldn't
handle--if you want to know what _I_ think about it," Clark guessed
shrewdly. "I wish now I'd taken the trouble to hunt the thing down; it
didn't seem worth while getting up. But I leave it to Gene if you ain't
mad enough to murder whatever it was. What was it?"

He waited a moment without getting a reply.

"Well, keep your teeth shut down on it, then, darn yuh!" he growled.
"That's the Injun of it--I know YOU! Screech