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The raconteur suddenly stopped short, while the group remained silent in expectancy. The camp-fire, with its elastic, leaping flames, had bepainted the darkening avenues of the russet woods with long, fibrous strokes of red and yellow, as with a brush scant of color. The autumnal air was dank, with subtle shivers. A precipice was not far distant on the western side, and there the darksome forest fell away, showing above the massive, purple mountains a section of sky in a heightened clarity of tint, a suave, saffron hue, with one horizontal bar of vivid vermilion that lured the eye. The old mountaineer gazed retrospectively at it as he resumed:

“Waal, sirs, that town-man had never consorted with sech ez skellingtons. He lit out straight! He made tracks! He never stopped till he reached Colbury, an’ thar he told his tale. Then the sheriff he tuk a hand in the game. Skellingtons, he said, didn’t grow on trees spontaneous, an’ he hed an official interes’ in human relics out o’ place. So he kem,–the tree is ‘twixt hyar an’ my house thar on the rise,–an’, folks! the tale war plain. Some man chased off ‘n the face of the yearth, hid out from the law,–that’s the way Meddy takes it,–he hed clomb the tree, an’ it bein’ holler, he drapped down inside it, thinkin’ o’ course he could git out the way he went in. But, no! It monght hev been deeper ‘n he calculated, or mo’ narrow, but he couldn’t make the rise. He died still strugglin’, fer his long, bony fingers war gripped in the wood–it’s rotted a deal sence then.”

“Who was the man?” asked Seymour.

“Nobody knows,–nobody keers ‘cept’ Meddy. She hev wep’ a bushel o’ tears about him. The cor’ner ‘lowed from the old-fashioned flint-lock rifle he hed with him that it mus’ hev happened nigh a hunderd years ago. Meddy she will git ter studyin’ on that of a winter night, an’ how the woman that keered fer him mus’ hev watched an’ waited fer him, an’ ‘lowed he war deceitful an’ de-sertin’, an’ mebbe held a gredge agin him, whilst he war dyin’ so pitiful an’ helpless, walled up in that tree. Then Meddy will tune up agin, an’ mighty nigh cry her eyes out. He warn’t even graced with a death-bed ter breathe his last; Meddy air partic’lar afflicted that he hed ter die afoot.” Old Kettison glanced about the circle, consciously facetious, his heavily grooved face distended in a mocking grin.

“A horrible fate!” exclaimed Seymour, with a half-shudder.

“Edzac’ly,” the old mountaineer assented easily.

“What’s her name–Meggy?” asked the journalist, with a mechanical aptitude for detail, no definite curiosity.

“Naw; Meddy–short fer Meddlesome. Her right name is Clementina Haddox; but I reckon every livin’ soul hev forgot’ it but me. She is jes Meddlesome by name, an’ meddlesome by natur’.”

He suddenly turned, gazing up the steep, wooded slope with an expectant mien, for the gentle rustling amidst the dense, red leaves of the sumac-bushes heralded an approach.

“That mus’ be Meddy now,” he commented, “with her salt-risin’ bread. She lowed she war goin’ ter fetch you-uns some whenst I tol’ her you-uns war lackin’.”

For the camp-hunt had already been signalized by divers disasters: the store of loaves in the wagon had been soaked by an inopportune shower; the young mountaineer who had combined the offices of guide and cook was the victim of an accidental discharge of a fowling-piece, receiving a load of bird-shot full in his face. Though his injury was slight, he had returned home, promising to supply his place by sending his brother, who had not yet arrived. Purcell’s boast that he could bake ash-cake proved a bluff, and although the party could and did broil bacon and even birds on the coals, they were reduced to the extremity of need for the staff of life.

Hence they were predisposed in the ministrant’s favor as she appeared, and were surprised to find that Meddlesome, instead of masterful and middle-aged, was a girl of eighteen, looking very shy and appealing as she paused on the verge of the flaring sumac copse, one hand lifted to a swaying bough, the other arm sustaining a basket. Even her coarse gown lent itself to pleasing effect, since its dull-brown hue composed well with the red and russet glow of the leaves about her, and its short waist, close sleeves, and scant skirt, reaching to the instep, the immemorial fashion of the hills, were less of a grotesque rusticity since there was prevalent elsewhere a vogue of quasi-Empire modes, of which the cut of her garb was reminiscent. A saffron kerchief about her throat had in its folds a necklace of over-cup acorns in three strands, and her hair, meekly parted on her forehead, was of a lustrous brown, and fell in heavy undulations on her shoulders. There was a delicate but distinct tracery of bine veins in her milky-white complexion, and she might have seemed eminently calculated for meddling disastrously with the peace of mind of the mountain youth were it not for the preoccupied expression of her eyes. Though large, brown and long-lashed, they were full of care and perplexity, and a frowning, disconcerted line between her eye-brows was so marked as almost to throw her face out of drawing. Troubled about many things, evidently, was Meddlesome. She could not even delegate the opening of a basket that her little brother had brought and placed beside the camp-fire.