ow Walter Wyatt
saw in the distance the glimmer of a lantern, intimating homeward-bound
worshipers not yet out of sight.

"The saints kep' it up late ter-night," he commented.

He resolved to wait till the roll of wheels should tell of the return of
the moonshiners' empty wagon.

He crossed the river on the little foot-bridge and took his way
languidly along the road toward the deserted church. He was close to the
hedge that grew thick and rank about the little inclosure when he
suddenly heard the sound of lamentation from within. He drew back
precipitately, with a sense of sacrilege, but the branches of the
unpruned growth had caught in his sleeve, and he sought to disengage the
cloth without such rustling stir as might disturb or alarm the mourner,
who had evidently lingered here, after the dispersal of the
congregation, for a moment's indulgence of grief and despair. He had a
glimpse through the shaking boughs and the flickering mist of a woman's
figure kneeling on the crude red clods of a new-made grave. A vague,
anxious wonder as to the deceased visited him, for in the sparsely
settled districts a strong community sense prevails. Suddenly in a
choking gust of sobs and burst of tears he recognized his own name in a
voice 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 moonshining 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 co