Page:Harold Titus--Timber.djvu/312

304 ("I don't sleep much, now—since Jenny's sleeping out there under the oak tree.") He enumerated some of those in the community who were up in arms at the organized campaign against her. They were people of little influence.

That night Thad did not watch the mill. Raymer sat in the doorway of his tar-paper house, a shot gun handy, until the approach of dawn, when he went inside.

He had not seen a slowly-moving hulk come up to the edge of the brush and squat and wait, wait for hours, scarcely moving. But when Raymer went within the hulk moved back into the brush, wriggled prostrate on the far side of a charred log and went through the intrinsically innocent operation of lighting a cigar.

It crept forward again and waited; then rose and skulked in the shelter of the mill and appeared again on the dam, glow of the cigar hidden in the curve of a gnarled and unsteady hand—A crowbar prodded the earth, working down into the mud and muck. From his shirt bosom the man extracted very carefully a bundle of greasy cylinders and tamped them down into the opening his bar had made, keeping the long white tail which extended from the packet dry. He looked about and listened. His head bowed down, and with both hands he shielded the glow of the cigar, held it against that white tail—a sputter, a careful scuttling across the clearing and into the brush.

The sleepy chirping of the first birds was stilled by the heavy, muffled detonation. Mud and dry earth were thrown high. The gravel of the road which crossed the dam was broken and cracked. Water filled the crevices, began spilling through on the far side; the seep became