He seemed in a fever
of haste to terminate the conference and get away. He agreed to his
friend's proposition and promised to be at the bark-mill bright and
early in the morning. As he trudged off, Birt Dicey stood watching
the receding figure. His eyes were perplexed, his mind full of
anxious foreboding. He hardly knew what he feared. He had only a
vague sense of mischief in the air, as slight but as unmistakable as
the harbinger of storm on a sunshiny summer day.
"I wisht I hedn't tole him nuthin'," he said, as he wended his way
home that night. "Ef my mother hed knowed bout'n it all, I wouldn't
hev been 'lowed ter tell him. She DEspises the very sight o' this
hyar Nate Griggs--an' yit she say she dunno why."
After supper he sat gloomy and taciturn in the uninclosed passage
between the two rooms, watching alternately the fire-flies, as they
instarred the dark woods with ever-shifting gold sparks, and the
broad, pale flashes of heat lightning which from time to time
illumined the horizon. There was no motion in the heavy black
foliage, but it was filled with the shrill droning of the summer
insects, and high in the branches a screech-owl pierced the air with
its keen, quavering scream.
"Tennessee!" exclaimed Birt, as the unwelcome sound fell upon his
ear--"Tennessee! run an' put the shovel in the fire!"
Whether the shovel, becoming hot among the live coals, burned the
owl that was high in the tree-top outside, according to the
countryside superstition, or whether by a singular coincidence, he
discovered that he had business elsewhere, he was soon gone, and the
night was left to the chorusing katydids and tree-toads and to the
weird, fitful illuminations of the noiseless heat lightning.
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