ide their steps they searched the pasture.
There was no trace even of a scrap of the child's dress anywhere to be
seen on ground or fence.

At last someone said, "Could be a water witch might have knowing to find
a lost child!" And the frantic parents moaned, "Could be. Send for the
water witch."

It was after midnight that neighbors came bringing the water diviner.

"Give me a garmint of the lost child," Noah spoke with authority, "a
garmint that the little one has wore that's not been washed."

The mother tearfully produced a bedraggled garment.

The water witch took it in his hand, sniffed it, turned it wrongside
out, sniffed it again. "Now have you got a lock of the little one's
hair?" He looked at Norie, moaning on the shuck tick bed, then at Jake.
They stared at each other. At last Norie raised up on her elbow. They
did have a lock of the babe's hair. "Mind the time she nigh strangled to
death with croup"--the mother fixed weary eyes on the father of her ten
children--"and we cut off a lock of her hair and put it in the clock?"

In one bound Jake Mosley crossed the floor and reached the clock on the
mantel. Sure enough there was the little lock of hair wrapped around
with a thread. Without a word Jake handed it to the water witch.

Noah eyed it in silence. "I'll see what can be done," he promised at
last, "but, Jake, you and Norie and the children stay here. And you,
neighbors, stay here too. I'll be bound to go alone."

With a flaming pine stick in one hand and the child's dress and lock of
hair in the other, he set out.

Before morning broke, the water witch came carrying the lost child.

They hovered about him, the parents kissed and hugged their babe close
and everyone was asking questions at the same time. "How did it happen?"
"Where did you find the little one?"

"I come upon a rock ledge," said Noah with a great air of mystery, "and
then I fell upon my knees. I'd cut me a peach branch down at the edge of
the pasture. I gripped the lost child's garmint and the lock of her hair
on one hand with a prong of the peach branch clutched tight in fists
this way," he extended clenched hands to show the awed friends and
neighbors. "I'd already put out the pine torch for daylight was coming.
It took quite a time before I could feel the little garmint twitching in
my hand. Then the peach branch begun to bear down to the ground. First
thing I know something like a breath of wind pulled that little garmint
tow