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The sound of slow strolling feet in the brick-paved hall was monotonous and somnolent. Squire Quimbey sat in his place among the justices. Despite his pride of office, he had not the heart for business that might formerly have been his. More than once his attention wandered.
They could not dissuade her. And after a time it came to pass that the Quimbey and Kittredge feuds were healed; for how could the heart of a grandfather withstand a toddling spectacle in pink calico that ran away one day some two years later, in company with an adventurous dog, and came down the mountain to the cabin in the Cove, squeezing through the fence rails after the manner of his underfoot world, proceeding thence to the house, where he made himself very merry and very welcome?
Old Joel Quimbey, putting on his spectacles, with a look of keenest curiosity, to read a paper which the deputy-sheriff of the county presented when he drew rein by the wood-pile one afternoon some three weeks later, had some difficulty in identifying a certain Elnathan Daniel Kittredge specified therein. He took off his spectacles, rubbed them smartly, and put them on again.
"It don't 'pear edzacly right fur three men ter fire on one." Old Joel Quimbey, in his arm-chair in the chimney-corner, suddenly lifted his head a thin head with fine white hair, short and sparse, upon it. His thin, lined face was clear-cut, with a pointed chin and an aquiline nose.
The dogs lifted their heads to look, and one soft-stepping old hound got up with the nimbleness of expectation, and, with a prescient gratitude astir in his tail, went and sniffed at it. His aspect drooped suddenly, and he looked around in reproach at Stephen Quimbey, as if suspecting a practical joke. But there was no merriment in the young mountaineer's face.
And once more only the sounds of the night that vague stir in the windless woods, as if the forest breathes, the far-away tinkle of water hidden in the darkness and the moon is among the summits. The men remained within, for Absalom avoided the chill night air, and crouched over the smouldering fire. Peter's wife sedulously held aloof from the ostracized Quimbey woman.
That afternoon it was close upon nightfall Stephen Quimbey, letting down the bars for the cows, noticed through the slanting lines of rain, serried against the masses of sober-hued vapors which hid the great mountain towering above the Cove, a woman crossing the foot-bridge. He turned and lifted down another bar, and then looked again. Something was familiar in her aspect, certainly.
He could only stroll about and hear himself praised for this thing that he had done, and wonder how he should meet Evelina with his conscience thus arrayed against himself for her father's sake. "Plumb turned Quimbey, I swear," he said, in helpless reproach to this independent and coercive moral force within.
Don't cry, Eveliny; it's jes' the same." A sudden babbling intruded upon the conversation. The youthful Kittredge, as he sat upon the wide flat stones of the hearth, was as unwelcome here in the Cove as a Quimbey had been in the cabin on the mountain. The great hickory fire called for his unmixed approval, coming in, as he had done, from the gray wet day.
His hands trembled; he wanted to lay hold on a younger man, to replace this aesthetic revenge with a quarrel more wholesome in the estimation of his own conscience. But the Quimbey sons were not in town to-day.
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