Page:Pioneersorsource01cooprich.djvu/47

 the step. But the lines of an uncommonly prepossessing countenance were gradually becoming composed; and he now sate in silent and, apparently, abstracted musing. The Judge gazed at him for some time with earnestness, and then smiling as if at his own forgetfulness, he spoke—

"I believe, my young friend, that terror has driven your name from my recollection—your face is very familiar to me, and yet for the honour of a score of buck's-tails in my cap, I could not tell your name."

"I came into the county but three weeks since, sir," returned the youth coldly, "and, I understand you have been absent more than that time."

"It will be five to-morrow. Yet your face is one that l have seen; though it would not be strange, such has been my affright, should I see thee in thy winding-sheet, walking by my bedside, to-night. What say'st thou Bess? Am I compos mentis or not?—Fit to charge a grand jury, or, what is just now of more pressing necessity, able to do the honours of a Christmas-eve, in the hall of Templeton?"

"More able to do either, my dear father," said a playful voice from under the ample enclosures of the hood, "than to kill deer with a smooth-bore." A short pause followed; and the same voice, but in a different accent continued—"We shall have good reasons for our thanksgivings tonight, on more accounts than one."

A slightly scornful smile passed over the features of the youth, at the archness of the first part of this speech; but it instantly vanished, as he listened to the tremulous tones in which it was concluded. The Judge, also, seemed to be affected with the consciousness of how narrowly he had escaped taking the life of a fellow—creature, and, for some time, there was a dead silence in the sleigh.