is demise."

"I reckon ye kin make out ter meet the wagin kemin' back from the
cross-roads' store. It went out this evenin' with that coffin full of
jugs that ye lef' las' night under the church-house, whenst 'Gene seen
you-uns war suspicioned. They will hev time ter git ter the cross-roads
with the whisky on' back little arter midnight, special' ez we-uns hev
got the raider that spied out the job hyar fast by the leg."

The mere mention of the young prisoner rendered Wyatt the more eager
to be gone, to be out of sight and sound. But he had no agency in
the disaster, he urged against some inward clamor of protest; the
catastrophe was the logical result of the fool-hardiness of the officer
in following these desperate men with no backing, with no power
to apprehend or hold, relying on his flimsy disguise, and risking
delivering himself into their hands, fettered as he was with the
knowledge of his discovery of their secret.

"It's nothin' ter _me_, nohow," Wyatt was continually repeating to
himself, though when he sprang through the door he could scarcely draw
his breath because of some mysterious, invisible clutch at his throat.

He sought to ascribe this symptom to the density of the pervasive fog
without, that impenetrably cloaked all the world; one might wonder how a
man could find his way through the opaque white vapor. It was, however,
an accustomed medium to the young mountaineer, and his feet, too, had
something of that unclassified muscular instinct, apart from reason,
which guides in an oft-trodden path. Once he came to a halt, from no
uncertainty of locality, but to gaze apprehensively through the blank,
white mists over a shuddering shoulder. "I wonder ef thar be any other
harnts aloose ter-night, a-boguing through the fog an' the moon," he
speculated. Presently he went on again, shaking his head sagely. "I
ain't wantin' ter collogue with sech," he averred cautiously.

Occasionally the moonlight fell in expansive splendor through a rift in
the white vapor; amidst the silver glintings a vague, illusory panorama
of promontory and island, bay and inlet, far ripplings of gleaming
deeps, was presented like some magic reminiscence, some ethereal replica
of the past, the simulacrum of the seas of these ancient coves, long
since ebbed away and vanished.

The sailing moon visibly rocked, as the pulsing tides of the cloud-ocean
rose and fell, and ever and anon this supernal craft was whelmed in
its surgings, and