t me to wait for him here.
Dead or alive, he will come back to me here."

He was glad to get Lillian out of her sight and hearing. With every
muscle relaxed, almost collapsed, curiously ghastly in her gay gown, she
was lifted bodily into the vehicle, repeating constantly with bloodless
lips and a strange, false, mechanical voice, "Take me to my dead child!"

Once as they spun swiftly through the misty sheen and dewy shadow, the
moisture-laden boughs that thrust across the narrow roadway now and again
filliping them on the cheeks with perfumed showers, she turned that
death-smitten face toward him and said in her natural, smooth tones, "You
have your revenge at last. It couldn't be a heavier blow!"

"I want you to be still!" he cried with vehement rudeness. "I can't drive
straight if you rattle me. I am taking you to your child."

And once more broke forth the eerie shrilling anew: "Take me to my child!
Take me to my dead child!"

At the first house that Bayne roused, he was encumbered and harassed by
her strange intolerance that they should speak of Briscoe at all; for the
summer sojourner was a favorite with his humble neighbors, and a great
tumult of concern ensued on the suggestion that he had encountered
disaster in some sort.

It all seemed to the jealous mother-heart to minimize her own sacred
grief. "But he had my child with him, my dead child!" she would shrill
out. And the slow rustic's formulation of a suggestion or a plan must
needs tarry in abeyance as he gazed awestruck at this ghastly apparition,
decked in trim finery, mowing and wringing her hands, shown under the
hood of the phaeton in the blended light of the moon and the
mountaineer's lantern, while his household stood half-clad in the doorway
and peered out, mute and affrighted, as at a spectre.

The scanty population of the district turned out to the last man. The
woods of the vicinity were pervaded with exploring parties, now and again
hallooing their signals, till the crags rang with the melancholy
interchange of hail and hopeless response. In fact, the night was nearly
spent before a hunter, roused by the echoing clamors, joined the search
with the statement that he had been at a "deer stand" in the valley
during the afternoon, and had noted at a distance some object crash down
from the summit of a certain crag. He had fancied it only a fragment of
the rock falling, and had not the curiosity to leave his occupation and
go so far to investig