Westerfelt walked on.  It was plain to him that none of the neighbors knew the secret of Sally Dawson’s death, but he was beginning to think that the mother of the girl might half suspect the truth, and that she was his enemy for life he did not doubt.

Chapter IV

The cornfields had grown to their full height and turned from green to yellow.  The stalks, stripped of their tops and blades, were bent by the weight of their ears.  There was a whispering of breezes in the sedge-fields, in the long rows of brown-bolled cotton plants, among the fodder-stacks, and in the forest that stretched from the main road up the mountain-side.  It was the season in which the rugged landscape appeared most brilliant; when the kalmia bloomed, the gentian, the primrose, the yellow daisy, the woodbine, and the golden-disked aster still lingered in sunny spots.  It was the season in which the leaves of the maple were as red as blood.

John Westerfelt was leaving home, to take up his abode in the adjoining county over the mountain.  As he sat upon his horse and slowly rode along, one who had known him six months before would scarcely have recognized him, so great had been the change in his appearance.  His face was thinner; at the temples his hair had turned slightly gray, and an ineffable expression of restless discontent lay about his eyes.  A sum of money had come to him from his father’s estate, and with it he had purchased a livery-stable at the village of Cartwright.  Ever since Sally Dawson’s death, he had wanted an excuse to get away from the spot where the tragedy had occurred, and his leaving his farm to the management of his uncle now caused no particular comment among his neighbors.

Reaching the highest point of the mountain, the village in question lay in the valley below.  Here he paused and looked behind him.

“God being my helper, I’m going to try to begin a new life over here,” he said, almost aloud.  “Surely, I have repented sorely enough, and this is not shirking my just punishment.  A man ought to make something of himself, and I never could, in my frame of mind, with that poor, silent old woman constantly before my eyes, and knowing that she will never forgive my offence, and is perhaps constantly praying for some calamity to strike me down.”

At the first house in the outskirts of the village he dismounted.  A woman hearing his approach announced by a couple of lean dogs, which sprang from under the porch, came to the door.  She smiled and spoke, but her voice was drowned in the yelping of the dogs, which were trying to climb over the fence to get at the stranger.

There was something admirable, if slightly discourteous, in the fearless manner in which Westerfelt leaned over the fence and, with the butt of his riding-whip, struck the animals squarely in the face, coolly laughing as he did so.

“You, Tige! you, Pomp!” cried the woman, running to them and picking up sticks and stones and hurling them at the animals, “down thar, I say!”