He saw nothing.  There was no sound save the roar of the wind, the dash of the rain, and the commotion among the branches of the trees.

He went on once more, absorbed in his dreary reflections and the fierce anger that burned in his heart.

“I’ll git even with Nate Griggs,” he said, over and again.  “I’ll git even with him yit.”

CHAPTER VII.

When Birt reached the fence, he discovered that the bars were down.  Rufe had forgotten to replace them that afternoon when he drove in the cow to be milked.  Despite his absorption, Birt paused to put them up, remembering the vagrant mountain cattle that might stray in upon the corn.  He found the familiar little job difficult enough, for it seemed to him that there was never before so black a night.  Even looking upward, he could not see the great wind-tossed boughs of the chestnut-oak above his head.  He only knew they were near, because acorns dropped upon the rail in his hands, and rebounded resonantly.  But an owl, blown helplessly down the gale, was not much better off, for all its vaunted nocturnal vision.  As it drifted by, on the currents of the wind, its noiseless, out-stretched wings, vainly flapping, struck Birt suddenly in the face, and frightened by the collision, it gave an odd, peevish squeak.

Birt, too, was startled for a moment.  Then he exclaimed irritably, “Oh, g’way owEL”—­realizing what had struck him.

The next moment he paused abruptly.  He thought he heard, close at hand, amongst the glooms, a faint chuckle.  Something—­was it?—­ Somebody laughing in the darkness?

He stood intently listening.  But now he heard only the down-pour of the rain, the sonorous gusts of the wind, the multitudinous voices of the muttering leaves.

He said to himself that it was fancy.  “All this trouble ez I hev hed along o’ Nate Griggs hev mighty nigh addled my brains.”

The name recalled his resolve.

“I’ll git even with him, though.  I’ll git even with him yit,” he reiterated as he plodded on heavily down the path, his mind once more busy with all the details of his discovery, his misplaced confidence, and the wreck of his hopes.

It seemed so hard that he should never before have heard of “entering land,” and of that law of the State according priority to the finder of mineral.  The mine was his, but he had hid the discovery from all but Nate, who claimed it himself, and had secured the legal title.

“But I’ll git even with him,” he said resolutely between his set teeth.

He had thought it a lucky chance to remember, in his reverie before the fire-lit hearth, that peg in the shed at the tanyard on which Tim had hung his brother’s coat.  Somehow the episode of the afternoon had left so vivid an impression on Birt’s mind that hours afterward he seemed to see the dull, clouded sky, the sombre, encircling woods, the brown stretch of spent tan, the little gray shed, and within it, hanging upon a peg, the butternut jeans coat, a stiff white paper protruding from its pocket.