ice of which every inflection
was familiar. For a moment his heart seemed to stand still. His brain
whirled with a realization of this unforeseen result of the fantastic
story of his death in Eskaqua Cove, which the moonshiners, on the verge
of detection and arrest, had circulated in Tanglefoot as a measure of
safety. They had fancied that when the truth was developed it would be
easy enough to declare the men drunk or mistaken. The "revenuers" by
that time would be far away, and the pervasive security, always the
sequence of a raid, successful or otherwise, would once more promote
the manufacture of the brush whisky. The managers of the moon-shining
interest had taken measures to guard Wyatt's aged father from this
fantasy of woe, but they had not dreamed that the mountain coquette
might care. He himself stood appalled that this ghastly fable should
delude his heart's beloved, amazed that it should cost her one sigh,
one sob. Her racking paroxysms of grief over this gruesome figment of a
grave he was humiliated to hear, he was woeful to see. He felt that he
was not worth one tear of the floods with which she bewept his name,
uttered in every cadence of tender regret that her melancholy voice
could compass. It must cease, she must know the truth at whatever cost.
He broke through the hedge and stood in the flicker of the moonlight
before her, pale, agitated, all unlike his wonted self.

She did not hear, amid the tumult of her weeping, the rustling of the
boughs, but some subtle sense took cognizance of his presence. She half
rose, and with one hand holding back her dense yellow hair, which
had fallen forward on her forehead, she looked up at him fearfully,
tremulously, with all the revolt of the corporeal creature for the
essence of the mysterious incorporeal. For a moment he could not speak.
So much he must needs explain. The next instant he was whelmed in the
avalanche of her words.

"Te hev kem!" she exclaimed in a sort of shrill ecstasy. "Te hev kem so
far ter hear the word that I would give my life ter hev said before. Te
knowed it in heaven! an' how like ye ter kem ter gin me the chanst ter
say it at last! How like the good heart of ye, worth all the hearts on
yearth--an' _buried hyar!_"

With her open palm she smote the insensate clods with a gesture of
despair. Then she went on in a rising tide of tumultuous emotion. "I
love ye! Oh, I _always_ loved ye! I never keered fur nobody else! an' I
war tongue-tied,