Ruth dropped his brother's hand. “It doesn't smell like the woods,” he said slowly.
“Smell!” repeated Rand incredulously. “Why, it's twenty miles in a bee-line yonder. Smell, indeed!”
Ruth was silent, but presently fell to listening again with his former abstraction. “You don't hear anything, do you?” he asked after a pause.
“It's blowin' in the pines on the river,” said Rand shortly.
Rand, who had been listening with an intensity that distorted the left side of his face, interrupted him impatiently.
“Ruth,” said Rand, suddenly looking up in his brother's face, “what's gone of you?”
Ruth laughed. “The fire's out,” he said, abruptly re-entering the cabin. “I'm goin' to turn in.”
Rand, following his brother half reproachfully, saw him divest himself of his clothing, and roll himself in the blankets of his bed.
Rand hesitated. He would have liked to ask his brother another question; but there was clearly nothing to be done but follow his example.
“Good-night, Ruthy!” he said, and put out the light. As he did so, the glow in the eastern horizon faded, too, and darkness seemed to well up from the depths below, and, flowing in the open door, wrapped them in deeper slumber.
Twelve months had elapsed since the quarrel and reconciliation, during which interval no reference was made by either of the brothers to the cause which had provoked it. Rand was at work in the shaft, Ruth having that morning undertaken the replenishment of the larder with game from the wooded skirt of the mountain. Rand had taken advantage of his brother's absence to “prospect” in the “drift,”--a proceeding utterly at variance with his previous condemnation of all such speculative essay; but Rand, despite his assumption of a superior practical nature, was not above certain local superstitions. Having that morning put on his gray flannel shirt wrong side out,--an abstraction recognized among the miners as the sure forerunner of divination and treasure-discovery,--he could not forego that opportunity of trying his luck, without hazarding a dangerous example. He was also conscious of feeling “chipper,”--another local expression for buoyancy of spirit, not common to men who work fifty feet below the surface, without the stimulus of air and sunshine, and not to be overlooked as an important factor in fortunate adventure. Nevertheless, noon came without the discovery of any treasure. He had attacked the walls on either side of the lateral “drift” skilfully, so as to expose their quality without destroying their cohesive integrity, but had found nothing. Once or twice, returning to the shaft for rest and air, its grim silence had seemed to him pervaded with some vague echo of cheerful holiday voices above. This set him to thinking of his brother's equally extravagant fancy of the wailing voices in the air on the night of the fire, and of his attributing it to a lover's abstraction.