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Dixie had reached the farthest end of one of her longest cotton-rows, and was turning to work homeward on another, when the branches of the bushes of a near-by coppice parted and Bradley, with a fowling-piece on his arm, appeared. "Good gracious, you are a queer girl!" he laughed, as he advanced to the low fence and climbed to a seat upon it.
Mary Bush was one of the old women who lived at the end of the coppice; and, being a good woman, Mr. and Mrs. Fairchild were not afraid of trusting their children with her.
At the far side of the coppice, the operation of hewing down the underwood was still proceeding, and the sharp strokes of the axe and the bill, softened by distance, came across the monotonous jar of the never-ceasing saw. The surface of the ground was prettily tumbled about, comprehending as pleasant a variety of hill and dale as could well be comprised in some thirty acres.
On Thursday Choti, T'yonni, and I accompanied Raiere to the place of the tii, where the preparations for the sorcery were beginning. We went through a continuous forest of many kinds of trees, a vast, climbing coppice, in which all the riches of the Tahitian earth were mingled with growths from abroad.
Successfully resisting a temptation to glance behind, I entered the cover of the coppice, and, now invisible to any one who might be dogging me, stood and looked back upon the moon-bright road. There was no living thing in sight, the road was empty as far as the eye could see.
The eye wanders delighted down long vistas and over sunlit glades. It is caught by the flashing of gaudy plumage, the golden green of the paroquet, the blue of the jay, and the orange wing of the oriole. The red-bird flutters lower down in the coppice of green pawpaws, or amidst the amber leaflets of the beechen thicket.
On a June day in 1637, as the girl sat beside the cascade that bears her name, twining flowers in her hair and watching leaves float down the stream, she became conscious of a pair of eyes bent on her from a neighboring coppice, and arose in some alarm.
Then Tom's thoughts came back to earth, and Pete Warboys' hole under the great pine-tree, and he was still busy over that, and the great gipsy-like boy's habits, poaching, probably stealing, and making himself a nuisance to everybody, when he caught sight of the lad himself peering into a patch of coppice evidently watching something, that something proving to be the dog, which soon after leaped out into the road.
But he did not insist, resolving to watch her at the opportune time; and he asked her, for he had not yet been told all the details: "Then it's not known what became of Daubrecq?" "No. Of course, one of the Growler's bullets struck him. For, next day, we picked up, in a coppice, a handkerchief covered with blood.
Cuckoos shouted in the wind-riven larches, green beyond imagining, at the back of the chapel. A blackbird meditated aloud in high rhapsody, very leisured, but very tireless, on matters deeper than the Coppice Pool far below, deep as the mystery of the chipped, freckled eggs in his nest in the thorn.