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Coincident with the snapping of the first toggle-pin, the branches of a gigantic, storm-blasted pine, whose earth-laded butt dragged heavily along the bottom of the river, became firmly entangled in the low-hanging limbs of a sweeper, and swung sluggishly across the current. Against this obstruction crashed the leaping, upending logs of the wrecked rollway.
They decided to skirt the entire shore, or at least such a portion of it as looked inviting, and then pick out a spot for a regular camp. They proceeded slowly, for there was no need to hurry and they did not wish to miss any spot that might be of especial advantage. It was not yet noon when they turned into a little cove, bordered by low-hanging bushes.
There were signs of a brooding storm. The low-hanging clouds they had noticed in the afternoon close to the western horizon might push up and cover the heavens. That would be a serious thing for them, under the present conditions.
That very night Grumpy Weasel stole back to the henhouse. And he was just about to creep up to the old rat hole, pausing first to take a searching look all around, when he saw a motionless figure sitting on a low-hanging limb of a tree near-by. It was Solomon Owl. And Grumpy could see that he was staring at the rat hole as if he were waiting for somebody.
The night was dark, rainy and cloudy; the horses stumbled over roots and logs in the imperfectly made road; the low-hanging branches spitefully cut the faces of the riders, and brought several hats to grief, and snatched the sheriff's pipe out of his mouth. And yet the sheriff seemed in excellent spirits.
But, unfortunately, the atmosphere was far too thick to render any observation possible; indeed, what with the black, low-hanging clouds, and the dense spindrift with which the air was filled, it was as dark at midday as it would have been, under ordinary circumstances, half an hour after sunset; and he was perforce obliged to content himself with the very unsatisfactory result obtained by dead reckoning.
That Desdemona was any relation of his own neither he nor she seemed for one moment to guess, though less than a couple of months had passed since he ceased to derive his sole nutriment and support in life from this same stately hound, at whose golden-brown fore legs and low-hanging dewlap he now sniffed so curiously.
So on the morrow Dorothy rode with the same cavalcade that had escorted her to Virginia, and near sunset a few days later, when low-hanging clouds were sifting down a thick veil of snow and the bare woods stood ghostly and white, Bas Rowlett lay numb with cold but warm with anticipation by the trail that led from the county seat in Virginia to the gap that gave a gateway into Kentucky.
He had had the forethought to gather as he went bits of wood, now a loose clapboard or piece of bark from low-hanging eaves, now a fragment of half-rotten puncheon from a doorstep, and as he groped into the dense darkness of the council-house with his steel and flint he set them alight on the hearth in the centre of the floor.
And the sight of the round bulk of the latter, huddled alone upon a baggage truck before the deserted Boltonwood station-shed, fully vindicated his judgment. It was still only a scant hour since daybreak. Heavy, low-hanging clouds in the east, gray with threatening rain, cut off any warmth there might have been in the rising sun and sharpened the raw wind to a knifelike edge.
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