Even as she spoke, and before her words could possibly have influenced him, she saw a change come over him.  The signs of fear, which had so displeased her, faded from his actions and his facial play.  Placed in unusual, unexpected circumstances, for a second he had been bewildered, but, as soon as opportunity had come for gathering of wits, he found composure, coolness, nerve.  She did not even finish out her sentence.  Instead, her thoughts turned to that acme of breeding, nerve, endurance and high spirit dear to all Kentuckians, the race horse.  “He’s found his feet!” she thought.

The man impressed her, now, even more than when, with courtesy, such as she had never known, tact which had maintained her comfort when she might have felt humiliated, learning which to her seemed marvellous, he had offered her the key to learning’s mysteries upon the log.  She saw that he had quickly won a mighty victory over self.  She thought of tales which she had heard by mountain fireplaces about “bad men,” who, when they first had heard a bullet’s song, had dodged and whitened, only to recover quickly and be nerved to peril evermore thereafter.  Her doubt of Layson fell away completely.  Instead of thinking of him as of one whose manhood is inferior to that of the rough mountaineers she knew, perforce she saw in him superiorities.  There was not the least sign of bragadocio, of counterfeit, about his new-found calm.  It was, she recognized at once, entirely genuine.  “Rattled for a minute,” she thought, wisely, again amending her first judgment, “but cooler, now, than cucumbers.”

She looked gravely at him as he moved about investigating, not excitedly, alertly, full of the necessary business of escape.  “Looks bad, don’t it?” she said gravely.  “Like powder, them thar pine-tops.”

“Oh, we’ll get out all right,” he answered, easily, and now she felt a comfort in the fact that he was intentionally minimizing danger to give confidence to the supposed weakness of her sex.

“Maybe so an’ maybe not,” said she, discovering, to her disgust, that it was hard, now that he was showing strength, to keep the panic tremolo from her own voice.

The fire had, by this time, encircled them completely, and from a hundred points was running in toward them on tinder lines of dry pine-needles and old leaves, flashing at them viciously along the crisp, dry surface of old moss and lichens on the rocks.  A wind had suddenly arisen, born, no doubt, of the fire’s own mighty draft.  Bits of blazing light wood, small, burning branches, myriads of flaming oak leaves and pine-cones were swept up from the ring of fire about them, in the chimney of the blaze, to lose their impetus only at a mighty height, and then fall slowly, threateningly down within the burning ring.  So plentiful were these little, vicious menaces, that, within another minute, they were dodging them continually.

He now took his place close by her side and gazed upon the spectacle, calm-eyed, as if he found it interesting rather more than terrifying.