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Updated: June 5, 2025
Morpher was waiting anxiously at the door when the young people arrived. As the master entered the rooom, M'liss called him to her. "Bend down your head" she said, "and I'll whisper. But mind, now, I don't say I know for truth where Risty is, I only reckon." The master bent down his head.
Still her great black eyes, her coarse, uncombed, lusterless black hair falling over her sun-burned face, her red arms and feet streaked with the red soil, were all familiar to him. It was Melissa Smith Smith's motherless child. "What can she want here?" thought the master. Everybody knew "M'liss," as she was called, throughout the length and height of Red Mountain.
Something in the tone of her voice startled the prisoner from the reverie. He raised his head and glanced quickly, and with his old sinister expression, at the child. "What's that to you?" he asked, with the grim lines setting about his mouth again, and the old harshness of his voice. "Didn't I tell you he wouldn't stand any of your nonsense, M'liss?" said the guard testily.
M'liss met his suggestion to return to the Pocket with alacrity, and the two started away in that direction. It was late in the afternoon when Mr. Gray returned. His heightened color and eager inquiry for Dr. Duchesne provoked the usual hope from the people that he met "that it was nothing serious."
With an instinct of genius, M'liss, pointing to the open window, shouted hoarsely in his ear: "Waters has escaped!" A cry of fury from the guard was echoed from the stairs, even now crowded by the excited mob, who feared the devastating element might still cheat them of their intended victim.
Her ordinary pace on such occasions was a kind of Indian trot; to his surprise she was walking slowly, with her apron thrown over her head, an indication of meditation with M'liss and the usual way in which she excluded the outer world in studying her lessons. When she was within a few feet of him he called her by name. She started as she recognized him.
"So," he muttered, "black and blue; no bones broken, though no fault of yours, eh? my young cherub, if it wasn't. There why, what are you looking at in that way, M'liss, are you crazy? Hell's furies, don't hold the light so near! What are you doing; Hell ho, there! Help!" Too late, for in an instant he was a sheet of living flame.
A column of smoke and a licking tongue of flame leaped from the open window at the same moment, and the cry of fire was reechoed from a hundred voices in the street. But scarcely had M'liss closed the open door against Waters, when the guard from the doorway mounted the stairs in time to see a flaming figure leap from the window. The room was filled with smoke and fire.
The history of all pioneer settlements has this legendary basis, and M'liss may live to see the day when her father's connection with the origin of the settlement shall become apocryphal, and contested like that of Romulus and Remus and their wolfish wet-nurse.
He had been missed from the settlement for the past fortnight, and the master had credited the rumors of the townsfolk that Smith had "struck something rich" on the "North Fork," about ten miles from the village. As they neared the settlement, the master gathered from M'liss that the rumor was untrue, and that she had seen her father that day.
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