Now and then a glitter from
the fragments of the copper still and the sections of the coils of the
worm marked the course their ravages had taken, and all the chill,
cavernous air was filled with the sickly odor of singlings and the
fermenting mash adhering to the broken staves of the great riven tanks,
called the beer-tubs. The moonlight came into this dark place at the
further end, for this was one of the many caves among the crags that
overhang the Little Tennessee River, and once, looking toward the jagged
portal, Archie saw a sail, white in the beams on the lustrous current,
and asked if they were going in that boat to his mother, for, he said, he
knew that she did not live in this cellar.
"Yes, yes," Clenk assured him. They were making ready to leave now,
though not in that boat. "An' look-a-hyar! What a pretty! Ye kin hev this
ter play with ef ye will be good."
He led the little boy up to a tallow dip blazing on the head of a barrel,
that he might have light to examine the token.
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