“By gravy! I tell Brother Silas on you, Tom-Jeff?  You show me the man ’at says I done any such low-down thing as that, and I’ll frazzle a fifty-dollar hawsswhip out on his ornery hide—­I will, so.  Say, boy; you don’t certain’y believe that o’ me, do ye?”

“I don’t want to believe it of you, Japhe,” quavered Tom, as near to tears as the pride of his eighteen years would sanction.  “But somebody saw and told, and made it a heap worse than it was.”  He leaned over the top of the wall and put his face in the crook of his elbow, being nothing better than a hurt child, for all his bigness.

“Well, now; I wouldn’t let a little thing like that gravel me, if I was you, Tom-Jeff,” said Pettigrass, turned comforter.  “Nan’s a mighty pretty gal, and you ort to be willin’ to stand a little devilin’ on her account—­more especially as you’ve—­”

Tom put up his arm as if to ward a blow.

“Don’t you say it, Japhe, or I’ll go mad again,” he broke out.

“I ain’t sayin’ nothin’.  But who do you reckon it was told on you?  Was there anybody else in the big woods that mornin’?”

“Yes; there were three men testing the pipe-line.  We both saw them, and Nan was scared stiff at sight of one of them; that’s why I put her up in that hole.”

“Who was the man?”

“I don’t know.  I didn’t recognize any of them—­they were too far off when I saw them.  And afterward, Nan wouldn’t tell me.”

“Did any of ’em see you and Nan?”

“I thought not.  Nan was sitting on the flat rock where you stood and looked into the cave, and when she began to whimper, I flung her over into the leaves and ran with her to the hole.”

“H’m,” said Japheth.  “When you find out who that feller is that Nan’s skeered of, you can lay your hand on the man that told Brother Silas on you.  But I wouldn’t trouble about it none, if I was you.  You’ve got a long ways the best of him, whoever he is, and—­”

But Tom had turned to go home, feeling his way by the wall because the angry tears were still blinding him, and the horse-trader fell back into his star-gazing.

“Law, law,” he mused; “‘the horrible pit an’ the miry clay.’  What a sufferin’ pity it is we pore sinners cayn’t dance a little now and ag’in ‘thout havin’ to walk right up and pay the fiddler!  Tom-Jeff, there, now, he’s a-thinkin’ the price is toler’ble high; and I don’t know but it is—­I don’t know but what it is.”

The dinner at Woodlawn that night was a stiff and comfortless meal, as it had come to be with the taking on of four-tined forks and the other conventions for which an oak-paneled dining-room in an ornate brick mansion sets the pace.  Caleb Gordon was fathoms deep in the mechanical problems of the day’s work, as was his wont.  Silas Crafts was abstracted and silent.  Tom’s food choked him, as it had need under the sharp stress of things; and the convalescent housemother remained at table only long enough to pour the coffee.