Short Stories, Twice a Month, early October 1923

The bottom of Wolfe's Basin is two miles in length, one mile in breadth, and as level as a prairie. The rockbound and majestic Big Blackfern Mountain makes the eastern wall; the western wall is formed by great Lost Trail Mountain, which lifts high toward the heavens a bald peak called Pickett's Dome. A crystal-clear creek gushes from under a rugged gray cliff at the junction of the Big Blackfern and the Lost Trail, splits the basin's bottom in the centre, and flows out through a dizzily-portaled pass, the same being known as Devil's Gate.

Old Alex Singleton and his people lived in twenty-two low and rambling log cabins near the south end of the basin. Old Buck Wolfe and his people occupied eighteen cabins of the same kind near the basin's north end, near the pass. Old Buck's mother lived alone save for a little black dog named Wag. She was sixty-nine, white-headed, as wrinkled as parchment, very sharp of feature and of tongue; she was called wise in her understanding of the curative properties of herbs, and she was a firm believer in supernatural tokens.

Granny Wolfe rose early on this fine summer morning. She slipped her bent old body into a dark-figured calico dress, tied a pair of coarse shoes on her rheumatic feet, wound a red bandana about her white head, bathed her face and hands and dried them on a hempen towel. She filled her clay pipe with homegrown tobacco, lighted it with a coal from the yawning stone fireplace, and took up a long sourwood staff. Another moment saw her entering the crooked, grass-lined path her feet had worn to the home of her favorite son.

A sharp yowl caused her to stop, face about, and bring her staff down hard.

"Durn ye, Wag, ye little devil," she muttered, "I left ye shet up inside! But it's bad luck to turn back, and I jest hain't a-goin' to do it. So yap as much as ye please, ye little devil!"

Now Old Buck Wolfe was a fiddler as well as a fighter, and when his mother had reached a point some seventy yards from his primitive house she was startled by hearing Buffalo Gals fiddled as she had rarely or never heard it fiddled before. Thereupon Granny Wolfe's seamed countenance showed signs of a great chagrin, and she began to talk to herself:

"I'll—be—durned! Ef the durned fool hain't got out o' bed and went to fiddlin'! Wisht I may drap dead in my tracks, ef he hain't! And he'll be a-fightin' them 'ar Singletons afore night, as shore as the Old Scratch hain't a grashopper! Well, I kep' him in bed as long as I could. The bullethole it's done healed over. Now, I shore do wonder what makes menfolks be allus a-wantin' to kill each other? The Lord ha' mussy on us!"

The fiddler sat in a crude, homemade chair in the cabin's front doorway. He was a huge man, and gaunt, and his long black hair and beard were not without threads of silver. His mother halted a few feet from him, and leaned heavily on her staff; she stared at him quite as though she had never seen him before.

"Reckon ye'd know my hide in a tan-yard?" laughed Old Buck Wolfe, dropping the instrument to his knee.

"Hain't you a purty thing, now—jest hain't you!" cried the old woman, with her own particular brand of scorn.

Her son's keen black eyes twinkled. "What's got the matter o' you?"

"You git back in bed!" snapped Granny Wolfe.

Old Buck narrowed his eyes. "When I'm able to fiddle," he said, "I'm able to fight. Stick that in yore pipe and smoke it, mother. Hey?"

"I'll be durned!" shrilled Granny Wolfe. "You wildcat, ye're a fixin' to go fightin' ag'in! Sech a durned fool! And when is it ye're a-goin' to commencet a-fightin,' Buck Wolfe?"

"Us Wolfes," soberly, "is to meet here at dinner-time, and start fo' t'other end o' the basin. It'll be the last fight; d'ye onderstand that?"

The old hillwoman's voice was soft when she spoke again.

"Don't do it, honey," she pleaded, almost pitifully. "Don't. I wisht I may drap dead in my tracks ef I didn't see a star fall over this here house last night, honey; and that 'ar is a shore sign o' death. And I dreamp' o' seein' muddy water, and that's a bad sign, too. Don't do it honey!"

The giant in the doorway laughed outright. He didn't believe in the supernatural.

"My nose itches," he said, winking; "what's that a sign of?"

"Heh? Why, Buck Wolfe, it's a sign somebody is a-comin' hongry! Jest wait and see ef it don't come true. But them 'ar Singletons, don't tackle 'em ag'in!"

"I'd give a mule ef Oliver was here," her son muttered. He turned to address a meek little woman who had come up behind his chair. "Sary, that 'ar damned old blue-tailed hen's a-scratchin' up yore merrygolds ag'in."

Then he rose, kicked his chair over, and threw fiddle and bow to a nearby bed. He stepped to the ground, took his mother by her lean shoulders, and shook her slightly. His whole countenance was terrible.

"The Wolfes settled here fust!" he roared. "When I thrashed old Alex Singleton fo' a-sellin' me a jug o' cawn whisky wi' a leaf o' burley tobacker in it, he needed it. Ha! you fo'got pore little Tuck, brother Brian's boy, and the rest of 'em, a-layin' up thar in the old Blackfern's breast wi' hunks and hunks o' Singleton lead in 'em? Mother, ha' you fo'got?"

"But Tuck he'd killed one o' the Singletons, which was the very fust killin' of it all, too," Granny Wolfe returned sharply. "Asides, the Wolfes has put as many Singletons in the Lost Trail as the Singletons has put Wolfes in the Blackfern, and rickollect 'at! You'd shorely better let it lay right whar it's at, Buck Wolfe."

He glowered down upon her. "The Singleton had called Tuck a liar, mother, and you know it!" he snorted. "Now save yore breath, is my advice. The fight is to be, and it will be."

The old woman limped into the cabin, where she tried to comfort Sarah Wolfe, mother of Little Buck, the Arnold Mason that was.

Noontime came, and twenty Winchester rifles were brought and stacked against a cedar in the narrow yard. Twenty men, some of them barely grown, sat here and there, on the doorstep, on the woodpile, on the ground; they were waiting for their leader to finish his mid-day meal, and Old Buck was showing his contempt for danger by eating more than usual.

When the Wolfes started toward the south end of the basin, the Singletons moved toward the north end. Like the Wolfe chief, Alex Singleton—a big-boned, broad-bodied man with deep, dark eyes and straggling, sunburned black hair and beard—was not without some of the qualities of a general and strategist. A Singleton sentinel on the side of Pickett's Dome gave the alarm by waving a red bandana, then raced down to join his kinsmen. A woman followed each of the sets of fighters. One of them was old Granny Wolfe. The other was the Singleton leader's only daughter.

The Wolfes' one-man advance guard ran back with the intelligence that the enemy was just ahead. Old Buck rushed his little force to the left, meaning to make a surprise attack on the Singleton's flank. Oddly enough, Alex Singleton gave the same order at the same time, with the result that the two sides lost each other, and spent hours in maneuvering more or less blindly; not a shot was fired, and the silence in the basin was the silence of the tomb.

Buck Wolfe's anxious mother saw that the shadow of bald Pickett's Dome was reaching for the fringe of jackpines that grew on the jagged crest of the Big Blackfern, and she knew it was almost four o'clock. Then, there broke out ahead of her the keen, sharp thunder of rifles—the two factions had met where there was no cover save for puny bushes, and it would probably be a battle of extermination. She forgot her rheumatism, dropped her long staff, and ran toward it.

Two others reached the midway point before Granny Wolfe reached it. One of the two was a slender, barefooted young woman with deep blue eyes, copper-colored hair that hung down her back in a single thick plait, and a face that was quite finely handsome in spite of its tear-stains. The other sat astride a rearing, plunging black horse; he was young and stalwart, and an officer's shield gleamed over his heart.

"What's the big idea?" he was shouting. "What's the big idea, anyway?"

The daredevil personality of the newcomer awed the fighters. Even if they might have counted him out, there would have been no possibility of going on with the battle without danger to the two women. And to continue the fighting there in the open, where they had met by accident—well, the hillman is no coward, but he wants cover when he fights.

The two little clans acted wisely. As though by a common agreement, they crept off homeward without a word.

The old woman caught the rein of the now quiet horse.

"And who might you be, stranger," she cackled, "'at comes a-ridin' in here like a angel o' the Lord?"

He smiled very pleasantly. "Don't you know me?"

"Not from Adam's off ox, nor a side o' sole-leather!" declared Granny Wolfe.

"I know who it is," said the other of the three left upon the scene. "Granny, it's Little Buck!"

"La, la, la! You don't tell me it's Little Buck. I be consarned ef I'll believe it!" She shook her white head.

"And I know you, too," Wolfe said to the young woman. "Your name is Louisiana Theodosia Singleton, but they call you 'Tot.' You—er, you were my sweetheart when I was a boy. Don't you remember, Tot? Surely, you haven't forgotten the time when I thrashed Cat-Eye Mayfield and threw him into the creek—there at the sand-bar under the willow—for sticking pine-resin chewing gum into your hair! Don't you remember, Tot? Afterward, when we'd disposed of the villain," and here Wolfe's dark eyes twinkled engagingly, "you kissed me as a reward for my—er, gallantry!"

Louisiana Theodosia Singleton blushed and said nothing. Little Buck's grandmother was now convinced.

"Well ef it ain't you, shore enough," she cried. "Now didn't I tell yore contrary old pap 'at somebody was a-comin' hongry? But who'd ever ha' dreamp' you'd grow from the pesky boy you used to be into the fine-lookin' man ye are! You shore do 'mind me o' yore pore grandpap when he used to come to see me afore we was married. Look at him, Tot Singleton; don't you reelly think he's jest grand-lookin'?"

"You—you're a-doin' the talkin' now, Granny," said Tot Singleton, visibly embarrassed.

Wolfe smiled. But only for a moment. There came from somewhere near the foot of Lost Trail Mountain an old and broken voice that seemed a part of the peacefulness of the eternal hills; an old and broken voice that was filled with the holiness of a benediction:

"'And, lo, the star, which they saw in the East, went before them——'"

"That was pore Grandpap Bill Singleton 'at hollered," explained the old woman, putting her right hand up to meet that of her kinsman. "We calls him the 'Prophet', Little Buck."

She emitted a tiny shriek at his grip; he had forgotten her rheumatism. He apologized quickly, and held his hand down toward the young woman who had been his boyhood sweetheart. Tot Singleton glanced straight into his eyes, seemed suddenly afraid of him, and ran swiftly homeward. Wolfe faced his garrulous grandmother again and opened his lips to speak, but she cut him off short.

"Now don't that beat the devil? She acted like as ef she was afeared ye'd bite her head off, didn't she? Atwixt me and you, Little Buck, wimmen is sawt o' strange critturs. Say, dad-burn it, you jest wait here ontel I step back yander to the aidge o' the basin and git my stick, which same I draped—it lays at that 'ar slim poplar thar—and me and you we'll go to yore pap's house."

Her grandson rode to the foot of the Lost Trail, recovered the sourwood staff and brought it to her. He dismounted then, and the two walked toward the settlement of the Wolfes, the horse following at the end of its rein.

"And so you're a real, shore-enough officer o' the United States law!" proudly observed Granny Wolfe as they picked their way through a thin copse of sumach.

"A deputy-sheriff, made that at the special request of the new Unaka Lumber Company, of which I am general manager," said Wolfe. He went on, "It was done in order that I might better protect the company's interests in the mountains. What lucky fellow got Tot Singleton, Granny?"

"Lumber was Colonel Mason's line; I might ha' knowed it'd be yore line, too," muttered the old woman. "Hey? Now hain't Tot purty! She hain't a bit like the rest o' the Singletons. Bless yore soul, Tot hain't never married nobody! And her mighty nigh it as old as you, Little Buck. Some says one thing about that, and some another; but me, I say it's acause she han't never seed nobody 'at was quite as good as the boy who beat the devil out o' Cat-Eye Mayfield and throwed him in the creek for a-stickin' pine rawzum chewin' gum in her hair! Ye see, honey, a mountain gyurl at sixteen is mighty nigh it a woman—why, I was married at sixteen—whilst a boy at the same age is gen'ally a durned fool. Hey?"

Wolfe laughed. "And what became of Cat-Eye Mayfield?"

"Him? Huh!" She turned up her thin old nose. "He still lives with his pap up whar the two mountains j'ines at. And he still pesters Tot half to death a-tryin' to git her to marry him. Tot she hates him wuss'n the Old Scratch. And she's been a-havin' a sight o' trouble wi' her heatherns, the same as I have wi' mine. She jest cain't stand the idee o' her people a-fightin' like they does. Some says it was Grandpap Bill Singleton 'at put it into her head; but me, I say it's jest natchelly the goodness of her, Little Buck.

"I know you've come back to he'p yore people, Little Buck," Granny Wolfe ran on. "You seed whar at yore duty laid. Well, we've got me and you, and Tot and her grandpap, on the right side o' the fence. But we'll have a awful time of it, shore. Yore pap he's turrible, turrible! It's allus him who begins the fightin' atwixt us and the Singletons. Them Singletons, 'cept Tot and her grandpap, the Prophet, is as quick to fight as a wildcat; but they don't never take the fust step at it, never."

Twilight, soft and peaceful, had set in when the pair arrived at Old Buck's low and rambling log cabin. Standing or sitting here and there in the yard, all of them grave and silent, was a score of men of the name Wolfe—one of their unwritten laws was that when an outsider married a Wolfe he lost his surname and took that of his wife; it was like that with the Singletons, too, that other wild, princely clan. The house was packed with women and children; and they, also, were grave and silent, save for one babe in arms that whimpered softly because its mother wouldn't give it the clock for a plaything.

The returned son of the Wolfe chief threw his horse's rein over one of the rotting gateposts, and entered the yard with his grandmother limping close behind him.

"I'll bet ye cain't guess who this here feller is!" the old woman chuckled—and told them in the same breath. "It's Little Buck!"

Little Buck had been recognized already. The clan favored him with one quick, sharp glance. There was no other demonstration just then.

Young Wolfe stopped before the doorstep, on which his huge, gaunt father sat as still as a stone image. Old Buck's elbows rested on his knees; his bearded chin was almost hidden in his great, knotty hands. The son who had been named for him saw that a tiny streak of dried blood ran from a wound somewhere under his left shirtsleeve straight to the point of his left little finger.

Then the man of the officer's shield put out his hand and said cordially, "How are you, father?"

The clan leader seemed not to have heard. The silence became oppressive. Little Buck Wolfe's lips quivered, and he saw his father dimly. Granny Wolfe made a choking sound in her leathery throat, and raised her sourwood staff threateningly.

"Buck Wolfe, you old fool," clipped her quick tongue, "you git right up from thar and shake hands wi' yore own flesh and blood, him 'at is a credit to you and me and every other Wolfe 'at ever slapped the face o' the earth wi' a shoe-bottom."

The stern old mountaineer did not even change his stare.

"How are you, father?" again.

Wolfe the elder suddenly leaped to his feet, seized Little Buck's hand and wrung it savagely, and growled, "I'm all right, damn it; how're you?"

"All right," very quietly. Little Buck's face had brightened.

His mother, who never dared to speak ahead of her iron-hearted husband, came out to meet him then. He kissed her reverently on the forehead, and it brought to her mind an avalanche of memories of happier days; she stole hurriedly back into the cabin, in order that the menfolk might not see signs of the weakness that had come over her. Her son began a round of handshaking with his kinsmen. The ice was broken.

"Nath," bellowed the old clan leader, "you bring him a chair out here! The' hain't no room in the house; the wommen and young'uns is as thick in thar as fiddlers in Tophet. Set the chair so's he can lean back ag'in the wall and rest hisself, Nath. And bring me that 'ar jug o' yaller cawn licker out o' the cubb'ard, too, Nath—the visitor licker. Boy," to Little Buck, "ye'll have to look over my cussfired onperliteness, I reckon. I've been so cussfired mad all day 'at my dang breath would wilt fullgrown pizen-vine."

He dropped back to the doorstep. A few seconds later Little Buck accepted the chair his big and bearded brother Nathan brought for him. Old Buck then drew the corncob stopper from a one-gallon jug with his teeth, and held the jug toward his fifth son. The latter refused it courteously, and it was not pressed upon him. He saw Nathan smile good humoredly.

"Mebbe you're sawt o' like me," said Nathan, as he passed the jug to his Cousin John Ike. "I got on a rip-roarin' big dido last summer—I was so loaded I wouldn't ha' knowed a lightnin'rod agent from a beauty doctor. Whilst I was in that glorious fix, I drunk a bottle o' hawg cholery medicine by mistake, and so I jest hain't had no hankerin' 'atter licker sence."

This elicited a low rumble of laughter. The earthenware receptacle went around, and was returned to Old Buck almost empty. Old Buck raised it to a level with his eyes, looked toward Little Buck, and drawled the only toast he knew.

"'Here's to you, as good as you are, and to me, as bad as I am; and as bad as I am, and as good as you are, I'm as good as you are, as bad as I am!'"

Young Wolfe only smiled. Nathan responded for him, "Drink hearty."

Old Buck went on. "When a feller can say that 'ar toast straight, he natchelly hain't loaded. I don't never 'low none o' my people to git loaded. I tests 'em by that toast; and ef they cain't say it straight, I thrashes 'em. I thrashed Nath atter he'd got over his dido and his mistake last summer. Ax him, ef ye don't believe it."

Nathan pulled at his silky black beard, grinned, and changed the subject, "What'n Tophet brung ye back, Little Buck?" he asked.

The man addressed swept the half-circle before him with his eyes. They were all smiling upon him now, and he was glad indeed to note that they were disposed to be so friendly. He moistened his lips and began.

"I decided some little time ago to come back. I had heard, through Oliver, about——"

"How's Oliver?" broke in his father.

"Oliver's all right. I had heard, through Oliver, about the fighting, and I wanted to see——"

"You say Oliver he's all right?" interrupted his mother, who now stood in the doorway.

"Absolutely. The fighting didn't seem worth while to me, and I wanted——"

"I'm shore glad pore Oliver he's all right," said Oliver Wolfe's wife.

"——To see if I could do anything to stop it," Little Buck pursued doggedly. "When I was ready to start out here, I learned that the Thorntons, some of whom have owned the basin land since the days of the old North Carolina land grant, were about to sell out to some cattlemen, who wanted the basin for grazing purposes. I investigated, and found out that the cattlemen hadn't offered a very good price because of the trouble they expected to have with the Wolfes and Singletons——"

"Them cattlemen," his father cut in grimly, "had right good hoss sense."

"Well, I knew the basin better than any of them, and I knew the coves of the inner sides of the two mountains were filled with virgin white oak and yellow poplar, timber without a peer in the world. I organized a company—lumber was Colonel Mason's line, you know, and it's mine, also—and we bought both timber and land from mountain's crest to mountain's crest at a very reasonable figure. Then we ordered machinery for a big sawmill, a geared locomotive and cars, and enough light steel rails to run a narrow-gauge road over the six miles that lie between this point and the new C. C. & O. Railway. Everything is in our favor. The logging is all either down grade or on a level; there never was a finer location for a mill and yards than can be had here in the basin; and the little railroad can follow the creek all the way down to the C. C. & O."

A number of the faces before him had hardened. He rose; it was like him to meet the adverse on his feet.

"But I haven't told you the best of it," he went on convincingly. "I have an agreement with the other members of the company by which I am to have any of the land that I may want, when the sawing is done, at two dollars an acre, and I'm willing to pass it on to you at the same price; also, I am willing to give you all work at good wages. I say I'm willing; I mean that I'm anxious. It's for you, my own people, that I'm doing—what I'm doing.

"I want to see every Wolfe by name living in his own comfortable cottage home, on his own little farm, here in Wolfe's Basin. I want us to have a school for the children, a little church, and a post office. I want us to have an ideal community here in this, one of the finest spots on the Almighty's earth. If you'll all stick to me, we'll have it. Now, men, I want to know who's going to stick?"

The eyes of all were turned upon Old Buck Wolfe. When he spoke, he would speak for the others. He sat with his shaggy head bent, a huge and actionless figure in the deepening dusk.

"Ef we don't fall in wi' yore idee, then what?" he asked, without raising his head.

"It's like this," Little Buck told him in a very businesslike voice: "my foster-parents, the Masons, sold every dollars' worth of property they had—except their home, and they even mortgaged that as heavily as it would stand—to get money enough to back me up, such was their faith in me. I've given them my promise that they shan't lose a single penny. If I don't get your help, I—I'll have to develop the timber interest without it. But I want your help!"

"Son," and the stern old mountaineer sat up straight, "onless the' happens to be somethin' ahind of it that I cain't yit see, we're all with ye, lock, stock, ramrod, barrel, and sights!"

"And I say God bless ye, Buck Wolfe!" cried a creaking, but happy old voice from behind him. "Nath, run to my house and let my little dawg out; he's been shet up all day, pore little devil."

Before he went in to super, the Arnold Mason that was exacted an ironclad promise from his father. Old Buck gave his word that, no matter what might happen, the Wolfes would nevermore take the first step in a fight with the Singletons.

The young general manager of the newly organized Unaka Lumber Company refused the visitor-bed that night, and crept up to his boyhood bed in the loft. His dreams were filled with dazzlingly pretty women who kept giving him back diamond rings.

Shortly after daybreak on the following morning, Little Buck Wolfe woke, sat up, reached for his clothing—and thought of Tot Singleton. He kept thinking of her. He caught himself saying aloud as he drew on his boots that she would never have turned him down because he had a brother in the county's chain-gang. Why, Tot would have clung to him but the closer on that account!

He meant to spend the morning in looking over the central part of the basin, where the big sawmill was to be built. After breakfast was over, he talked with his father for an hour; then he set out up the creek, on foot and alone.

When he came in sight of the gnarled old willow that shaded the sand-bar, he halted very suddenly. Sitting at the base of the tree was Tot! Her head was bent low, and there was an indescribable air of loneliness about her. He stood there and watched her thoughtfully for a full minute. She did not move even a finger.

He had reached a point behind a clump of blooming laurel a dozen paces from her when she lifted her head. But she didn't look toward him. She went to dreaming again, and he was saddened by the signs of unhappiness he saw on her countenance.

Just when he was about to make his presence known to her, an angular, slouching figure stepped before her from the bushes beyond. The newcomer was dressed in run-over cowhide boots, blue denim trousers baggy at the knees and held in place by a pair of homemade suspenders, a striped cotton shirt without buttons, and a worn black hat with its rim pinned up desperado fashion in front. His black eyes were lustreless, opaque, and uncanny. His thin lips were twisted in a smile that was decidedly unpleasant.

"Hi thar, Tot!" he sneered. "Waitin' here fo' that 'ar town smarty, like ye used to, I reckon; hain't ye?"

Wolfe's strong, smooth face lost a part of its healthy color. Tot made no reply; it seemed almost that she did not know that Mayfield, her tormentor, was there.

"He throwed me in the creek oncet," Mayfield went on, "but he cain't do it now. I was jest a boy then. I'm a man now. I wisht he'd come along and try it ag'in!"

At last the young woman gave him her attention.

"Little Buck was a boy then, too," she said; "and he wasn't no bigger'n you was, neither. And he's a man now, too—you bet."

"I jest wisht he'd happen along——"

Wolfe had stepped from behind the clump of laurel, and Cat-Eye Mayfield had seen him.

"Well, Cat-Eye," Little Buck said evenly, "you've got your wish."

Mayfield's manner became one of defiance, bitterness, and desperation. He took from a pocket in his blue denim trousers a lump of sticky pine resin wrapped in a green poplar leaf; he threw the leaf aside, and in one quick movement deliberately pressed the resin deep into Tot Singleton's copper-colored hair!

And Tot, her blue eyes glowing and triumphant, had not lifted a hand to prevent it.

The mountain blood leaped madly in the heart of Little Buck Wolfe. He rushed at Mayfield like an enraged panther. His blows, the blows of a primitive man, fell upon Mayfield's sallow face like the pounding of a riveting-hammer, completely stunning him. Then he gathered the angular body up in his arms, bore it across the bar of sand, and hurled it into the water—just as he had done on that red-letter day of his boyhood.

Mayfield crawled sullenly out on the other side, gave the man who had whipped him a look of poisonous black hate, and slouched off up the creek's bank. Wolfe watched him until he was a good hundred yards away to see that he did not find a repeating rifle somewhere in the bushes; then he turned toward Tot.

In another moment he was standing face to face with her—smiling, blushing, finely handsome, barefooted Tot Singleton. He realized that the entire repetition of the little drama of his youth lacked but the climax—a kiss from Tot as a reward for his gallantry. She was looking straight into his eyes. Her slender, sunburned hands crept slowly to his shoulders. She stood on her toes, lifted her lips, and offered him his reward.

For she had no way of knowing that he had outgrown their juvenile affair; that he was for the present heart-broken because of the shallowness of another woman. He had fought for her, and he never could have made a stronger declaration that he still cared for her—it is a law of the cave. Besides, if he hadn't come there to meet her, as of old, why had he come?

Wolfe was not without chivalry. He could not strike down, like an assassin, the glory of her beautiful eyes; it was a glory that awed him, that could have come into being only after the longing, and the faith, and the waiting of years. He bent his head, and kissed her.

But he knew it was unfair, and he blamed himself heavily. He caught her hands as they were about to clasp at the back of his neck, and put them gently from him. She stepped backward, wondering, somehow pitiful. A disc of yellow sunlight fell through the branches of the willow, and burnished the copper of her hair.

"What made you do that, Little Buck?" she asked in the tiniest of voices.

He led her to the base of the tree, and they sat down together on the pure white sand. It seemed better to tell her the whole truth, and he told her the whole truth. Of every momentous thing that had occurred to him since his going away with the Masons to be their son, he told her; and he saw on her now slightly pale face more sympathy for him than disappointment for herself. Some there are who are built for sacrifice, but more there are who are not. Tot Singleton was.

When he had finished, he took from his pocket the ring that Alice Fair had given back to him, and showed it to her. She merely glanced at it; she knew nothing whatever of the value, intrinsic or sentimental, of diamonds.

"Ef—ef I had that fool woman here," she said, her words fairly throbbing, "I—I'd whip her!"

To Wolfe the ring was in a manner sacred because of the memories associated with it; but it was a link that bound him to something that was lost and gone, and he decided that he had best do away with that link. Perhaps his inborn pride, the pride of the hillpeople, had its influence in the matter—he smiled a mirthless little smile, and flung the ring into the centre of the pool before him, the pool that used to be eight feet in depth and now was only two.

"And now I'll have to tell you good-by," he said, going to his feet. "I start back to Johnsville at noon, and I've a good deal of looking around to do here before I go."

Tot rose, said good-by to him, and went homeward.

A few rods down the creek, Wolfe came abruptly upon his father. The iron-hearted old hillman's face was ashen under his beard, and his black eyes were like two points of flame. He had followed his son. He had seen the kiss, from his little distance, though he had heard none of that which they said.

Old Buck waited until Tot Singleton was well out of hearing before he spoke.

"Mr. Mason," he announced, "listen to me. I said we was all with ye ef the' wasn't somethin' ahind of it 'at I couldn't see. The' is somethin' ahind of it 'at I couldn't see—mixin' up wi' that lowdown Singleton set. I promised I wouldn't start a fight with 'em no more, I know, and I won't. The feud it's dead, as dead as hell. And so are you. To me, you're dead. Acause I seed you kiss a lowdown Singleton."

"But——"

"Now le' me tell ye this here: you cain't never darken the door of a Wolfe no more, and you cain't bring no railroad nor no sawmill into this here basin ontel atter you've killed me. You've got my word fo' that, and it's the word of a Wolfe!"

The younger man shook his head dejectedly. "Dad," he began, "you don't know what you're talking about. I——"

"Hack it off right whar you're at!" Old Buck blazed. "I don't never want to hear the sound o' yore voice no more as long as the breath o' life's in me. You're dead, so far's I'm consarned."

The son tried hard to reason, tried harder to explain, all to no avail. The unlettered giant would listen to nothing. It angered Little Buck in spite of himself.

"I've given my word, just as you've given yours," he said spiritedly; "and, as I'm a Wolfe, just as well as you are, I'll keep my word if I live. The lumber track and the mill are coming, and it doesn't greatly matter who likes it or who doesn't."

Old Buck stalked off. His son then regretted that he had lost his temper.

Tot Singleton didn't go home just then. There was nothing she could do at home. Her mother was a very strong, stout woman who didn't want any "dreamin' gyurls a-piddlin'" in her household affairs; who sometimes worked in the woods with an ax, or hoed corn, or helped to make a run of whisky; and who lightened her daily burdens by the constant whistling of old-fashioned hymns.

The young woman absentmindedly destroyed a hundred or so of black-eyed mountain daisies by pulling off their defenseless heads between her bare toes; then she went back to her shrine—it was just that to this unspoiled creature who had been half child and half woman at sixteen and was very nearly the same today.

She stood leaning against the body of the willow, and thought over all that had happened there; looked at the marks Little Buck Wolfe's high-laced boots had made in the sand, at the marks of the struggle that had been so short and so one-sided. Soon she went to the edge of the creek, and peered into the crystal water. He hadn't known about the pool's being so shallow now, when he had thrown the ring into it.

She gathered up her calico skirts in one hand, waded in, found the ring, and hastened back to the sand-bar.

Tot looked at it closely now. It sparkled so in the same yellow disc of sunlight that had burnished the copper of her hair a little while before; almost it hurt her eyes! Wonderment and something very different from wonderment wrote their signs alternately on her countenance. She pressed the ring on her engagement finger, and tried to imagine that it was her own engagement ring; but the iron truth wouldn't be forgotten even for a moment, and a wee smile of intense hurt came to the lips that the sweetheart of those happy other days had so recently kissed in so chivalrous a manner.

When she tried to get the ring off, it wouldn't come! Perhaps she didn't try very hard. Anyway, she laughed a little to herself, and her blue eyes were as bright as stars.

Tot Singleton went slowly up the bank of the creek, going homeward by instinct rather than by design. And she had not covered half of the mile when she met her father and the slouching young man they called Cat-Eye, both of whom were armed with rifles.

With a little gasp, she stopped suddenly and hid her left hand behind her. Her father was very angry, angrier than she had ever seen him before; she knew it the moment she saw his bearded face. It was all plain to her immediately. Mayfield had told her father that she had met one of the hated Wolfes halfway for the purpose of making love. Her face whitened with scorn.

"Well?" she asked.

"Le's see what ye've got on that 'ar third finger o' yore left hand, Louisiany," demanded Alex Singleton, slipping the butt of his repeater to the ground.

Tot remembered that she had been watching the changing colors of the stone when they came upon her. She stared silently and defiantly, and made no move toward obedience.

"It's his'n, that 'ar ring," frowned Mayfield. "He——"

"You shet yore snaky mouth!" Tot interrupted desperately.

"Le's see it, Louisiany!" Old Singleton's voice trembled now.

Still no move whatever from the young woman. The Singleton chief stepped to her, caught her left forearm in his big and sinewy hand, and brought the shining stone up near his eyes by force. The clear, pure beauty of the diamond held his attention for a few seconds; then he threw his daughter's arm from him roughly, as though the bare touch of it were a contamination.

"Take it off!" he blared.

"I—I cain't git it off!" cried Tot, a pink splotch in either of her cheeks.

"Then cut yore finger off!"

Cat-Eye Mayfield chuckled, and it maddened Tot Singleton.

"I don't want it off!" she declared.

The old mountaineer shot upward two inches. "You—you say you don't want it off?" he roared. "You say you don't want it off? By the Etarnal, you shain't never take that 'ar thing into no house o' mine as long as ye live! You're the only gyrul I got, but I'd ruther bury ye, 'an to see ye wi' that 'ar damned thing on yore finger!"

Being her father's daughter, Tot also straightened. She, too, could be obstinate. She pushed the ring a little farther up. Her voice was low and pinched.

"Ef you had ha' come to me and said, 'Louisiany, honey, I'd ruther ye wouldn't wear that,' I'd shorely ha' took it off don't matter how much trouble it was to me. But you a-sayin' what ye said, and the way ye said it, with Cat-Eye thar all a-grinnin' and a-gloatin'—well, pap, I shorely wouldn't be no kin to you ef I was to take it off now."

"All right. You cain't never darken the door o' none o' yore people no more," decreed Alex Singleton, shaking with a great rage. "Any o' yore kin 'at harbors ye will shore haf to reckon wi' me, and I'm a hard man to reckon with—you know that."

"I hain't a-goin' to take it off."

"All right!"

Old Singleton turned upon his heel with almost military precision, jerked his rifle into the hollow of his arm and strode away.

When he had gone, Cat-Eye Mayfield smirked and gave an exhibition of miserably poor judgment by trying to take Tot's hand. Tot struck him across the cheek so hard that her fingers left purplish red bars under the sunburn of his skin. For it was because of him that she was cast out, homeless, without a place to lay her head.

"You'd better take yoreself away from here!" She clenched her hands and stamped one little foot. "You shorely better had! I'm done wi' you a-taggin' atter me, you—you sneakin' old rattlesnake of a tattle-teller! I wouldn't marry you to save yore life and mine, too. And this is the last time I'm a-goin' to take the trouble o' tellin' ye, Cat-Eye. Git."

Mayfield quailed before the fire of her finely glittering eyes. He took a few steps backward, watching her as though he feared she would spring upon him and rend his loosely knit body to pieces; then he turned and went straight toward the foot of Lost Trail Mountain. After he had gone a hundred yards, Tot saw him make a careful examination of his rifle.

Now one doesn't examine a gun like that when he means to shoot squirrels, not when he knows already that the gun is loaded and in order. Tot Singleton fell upon the idea that Cat-Eye Mayfield meant to watch the gate for Little Buck Wolfe, and shoot him from ambush. Mayfield was as unscrupulous a man as ever drew life's breath, and this was just the thing for him to do under the circumstances, she knew.

And Little Buck would start for Johnsville at noon!

After having searched the central part of the basin in vain, she decided that to protect him from the danger would be more sensible than to try to warn him of it. Of course, she couldn't go to the Wolfes' settlement. Besides, there was a strong chance of his being killed while trying to protect himself. In another moment she was running hard toward the nearest cabin, which was Grandpap Singleton's, and which, she thanked whatever gods there were, was not more than a quarter of a mile away; and she kept well to cover, in order that her irate father might not see her.

When she burst into the poor little house, the white-headed, white-bearded old hillman was poking the embers in the wide stone fireplace for a baked potato; he, like Granny Wolfe, lived alone and did for himself because he didn't want to be in the way. He looked around and slowly straightened his lean figure, and the fire-blackened hickory stick fell clattering from his unsteady hand.

"Tot Singleton," he demanded anxiously, "what in the name o' Fiddlin' Bob Taylor is the matter o' you?"

"I want yore old rifle, Grandpap," panted Tot.

"Now jest what're you a-plannin' to shoot wi' my old rifle, I'd like to know?"

"A rattlesnake—mebbe."

"A rattlesnake—mebbe! Heh! Take the rifle out o' the rack up thar over the mantel." He motioned toward it. "My pore old arms is so stiff and screaky wi' the rheumatiz 'at I cain't hardly reach up far enough fo' to scratch my pore old head no more."

His granddaughter stood on her bare toes and took down the long-barreled Lancaster muzzle-loader. She ignored the powderhorn and leathern bullet-pouch the Prophet had taken from a peg in the log wall and was holding out to her. The one load that was in the rifle would be enough. Tot, like the rest of the Singletons, didn't miss.

But as she turned toward the door, her grandfather caught her by an arm and held her firmly. His suspicions were at work.

"Wait, Tot, honey," he said. "You've got to tell me about it fust. It hain't no common rattler you're a-goin' to shoot—mebbe!"

She had been afraid to let him know, because of his strict religiousness. The earnest pleading, the deep love for her in his old eyes, now urged her to confide in him. She told it in a few words, for there was precious little time to be wasted.

"And so he's come back here to save his people, Little Buck has." Grandpap Singleton seemed very much affected. "I tell ye, Tot, honey, they needs him, as shorely as you're a foot high. Well, we'll he'p him ef we can. Shorely, a man ort to believe in a-fightin' fo' the right as well as prayin' for it. Heh?"

The Prophet certainly was not in one of his wandering fits now. He caught up a worn felt hat and pulled it low on his white head, and took the rifle masterfully from Tot's hands.

"Come wi' me," he ordered, almost with the snap of youth.

The pair of them hurried across the little vegetable plot, and were soon swallowed up by the trees and laurels of the mountainside.

"Ef the's any killin' to be done," muttered the aged mountaineer, "I'll do it myself. You're young, Tot, honey, whilst I'm as old, mighty nigh it, as Methusalem's house cat. But I can yit see how to shoot purty tol'able straight. Heh! Do ye know what they used to call me fo' a nickname when I was a young man? 'Cracker,' that's what. Acause I was a crack shot. It was said I was the man who invented shootin' squirrels in the middle o' the eye!"

Considering that he had long been a sufferer from rheumatism, that scourge of the aged, the pace that Grandpap Singleton set and kept was truly surprising.

When they drew up stealthily behind a scrubby oak and peered down the Lost Trail's side of Devil's Gate, they saw just what they had expected to see. Crouched above a stone the size of a barrel, on which lay his repeating rifle on its side, was Cat-Eye Mayfield, motionless, waiting in a diabolical patience.

"We've got to ketch him mighty nigh in the act itself," whispered Grandpap Singleton, "so's the'll be enough real proof to send him to jail. We hain't got no real proof as yit, ye know, Tot. We'll jest wait here ontel he picks up his rifle, which same he'll do when Little Buck comes in sight, and 'en we'll make him put up his hands and call Little Buck up to arrest him. Heh? Shorely. He's a-plannin' to let Little Buck have it when he slows his hoss to ford the creek down thar."

Tot kept a watch on the trail below, which lay in plain view before her for several hundred yards. A few silent minutes went by; then she motioned to her kinsman to get ready.

She saw him kneel, lay the long barrel across a moss-covered stone, rest one shoulder against the scrubby oak's body, and bend his head until his right cheek touched the rifle's stock. After he had trained the old weapon properly, he raised his white head and turned his eyes upward without spoiling his aim; and Tot heard him speak in the lowest of undertones:

"Lord, ef I haf to do it, You'll onderstand, won't Ye? And ef I am in the wrong, which I'm purty shore I hain't, I ax Ye to fo'give me. Aymen."

The young woman wiped a dimness from her blue eyes, and looked toward the trail again. She bent and whispered nervously:

"He's a-comin' fast. He hain't more'n a hundred steps from the Gate. Now you watch Cat-Eye Mayfield, Grandpap Singleton, and don't you let him k-k-kill Little Buck!"

"You leave it to me!"

Mayfield picked up his rifle, drew the hammer back, and began to settle himself like a cat settling for a spring.

"Drap that 'ar gun, Cat-Eye!" cried Grandpap Singleton.

Tot pulled aside a laurel branch, in order that the would-be assassin might see the frowning muzzle that bore upon him. Mayfield was in no haste to turn his sallow face toward them; he looked at them only long enough to see who they were, and did not drop his rifle. Perhaps it was because he did not believe the religious old man would shoot; perhaps it was because his thirst for revenge was so great at that moment that his narrow mind had in it no room for any other thought.

"Drap that rifle, Cat-Eye!" Grandpap Singleton cried again.

Still Mayfield did not obey. The horseman was now almost to the ford, and reining in. Mayfield's round head seemed to sink halfway into his shoulders—he began to look along the sights.

"Shoot!" Tot urged frantically.

The old Lancaster cracked like a giant's whip. Cat-Eye Mayfield dropped his rifle now. He turned a dumfounded, ashen face toward the two Singletons, and babbled something unintelligible. Then—although the bullet had only passed through the upper part of his right arm, thanks either to Providence or to a dimness in the old mountaineer's eyes—Mayfield sank to the stones. The sight of his own blood had made him limp.

The Prophet rose unsteadily. The strain on his feeble mind was telling. He stretched wide his lean arms, and the bright sun threw his shadow down the incline in the form of an inverted cross.

He called to the man in the Gate, "Come up here, Little Buck Wolfe," thickly, "and arrest me fo' mudder!"

At the sound of the shot, Wolfe looked up quickly. He saw the gaunt old man go tottering to his feet, saw Tot standing with her hands clutching at her calico dress below her throat; but because of the creek's dashing he did not hear the Prophet's agonized cry. Wolfe dismounted, fastened his horse's reins to a sapling, and hurried up the rocky steep.

The young woman and her grandparent had come down to where Mayfield lay groaning.

"He hain't dead," said Tot. "He's jest bad hurt. And you'd shore better take him along to town with ye, Little Buck, and jail him, ef ye don't want to be ambushed some other time."

Poor old Grandpap Singleton fell to his knees beside the man he had shot. "He hain't dead!" he rejoiced. "He hain't dead!" His hands were clasped against his hollow breast. His joy was even more pathetic than his grief had been before it.

Wolfe understood fully. He touched the now quiet figure on the ground with the toe of his boot.

"Get up!" he ordered.

Mayfield rose, his right arm hanging limp at his side. Wolfe ripped the shirtsleeve from the injured member, folded one of his own white handkerchiefs and placed it over the wound, and used the torn-out sleeve for a bandage. Mayfield, who was fast recovering from his fit of weakness, watched every move of the deft, strong fingers with old hatred in his lusterless, uncanny eyes.

The first-aid work was barely finished when the high-pitched voice of Granny Wolfe came from a point a few rods above:

"La, la, la! And so ye got him, durn him, did ye, Grandpap Bill Singleton!"

She limped down to them, her little dog, Wag, happy at her heels.

"Ye needn't to mind a-tellin' me about it, Bill Singleton," she chattered, "a-cause I already know, me a-bein' a good guesser. And so the rawzum-chawin' devil's pup—was a goin' to layway Little Buck, was he? You, Cat-Eye Mayfield, quit that a-lookin' at me like as ef ye could bite my whole head off."

She turned toward her grandson, who greeted her gravely.

"I tried to find you before I left," he said, and then told her of his father's change of heart.

"Consarn his old fool hide!" the old woman exploded.

Wolfe picked up Mayfield's rifle, threw the loaded cartridge out of the chamber, and let the hammer down carefully. Then he held the weapon out toward Tot Singleton.

"Take that home with you," he requested. "Mayfield can get it when he comes back."

Tot didn't take the rifle. Her lower lip began to quiver, and she looked away. "But I cain't never go home no more, Little Buck," she murmured.

"You can't go home!" he exclaimed in amazement.

She told him haltingly why. A very little smile curled Wolfe's mouth at the corners.

"So you, too, are an outcast," he said, half-sympathetically, half-resentfully. "But don't feel so badly about it! We always have our compensations, little girl. I wonder if—will you go along with me, Tot?"

She answered simply, "I'd go anywhar with you."

Grandpap Singleton took the rifle. Granny Wolfe addressed her kinsman:

"Ef you're a-goin' to town, you'd shore better start. I seed yore pap's old blue-tailed hen a-settin' on the fence a-pickin' her feathers this mornin', and I've heerd two treefrogs a-hollerin', and them's all good signs o' rain."

Wolfe shook hands with the two old people, and escorted his prisoner and her who had been his boyhood sweetheart down to the Gate trail, where his horse stood pawing the black earth impatiently.

"Get in the saddle, Cat-Eye," he said. "You're not able to walk."

"I hain't a-goin' to Johnsville—" Mayfield began, when Wolfe tapped his deputy's badge with a forefinger and cut in, "Get in the saddle!"

He pushed his coat back far enough to reveal the butt of a revolver that the high sheriff had found for him and urged him to wear. Mayfield obeyed awkwardly and ungraciously. With Tot Singleton walking trustfully beside him, Wolfe led the horse down the winding Gate trail, which soon entered a dark green tunnel formed of laurel, giant ferns, and hemlock branches.

When they had put three miles behind them, Wolfe said to his companion, "I suppose you've guessed where I'm taking you."

"Yes," with a sidewise glance of admiration at his clearcut profile. "You're a-takin' me to them folks who 'dopted you, over in town. And ef they can make me over into the same sawt they made you into, I—I'll swaller all o' my feelin's ag'inst bein' a charity objeck, and he'p 'em all I can."

"That's the spirit!" he said with a good deal of enthusiasm. "You stick to that!"

Wolfe hired a light vehicle at the first farmhouse, and they reached quiet, lazy Johnsville an hour after the fall of darkness. It was a fine, starry night; contrary to Granny Wolfe's prediction, it hadn't rained. They went straight to the big, old-fashioned white house of the Masons, which lifted its gables so proudly above its setting of maples that one was inclined to wonder whether it wasn't scoffing at the heavy mortgage that was upon it!

The colonel and his wife were sitting on the unlighted veranda. He was tall, straight, gallant, courteous. She was rather little, gentle, sweet, a born mother who had never had any children. They were of the old South.

"Father," said the adopted son, as the trio reached the foot of the veranda steps, "here's a man with a pretty bad arm. Call Doctor Rice, won't you?"

Colonel Mason didn't wait to ask questions. He ran toward the phone, switching on the veranda lights as he passed through the hallway. The trio walked up the steps. Tot Singleton blinked in the strange white glow that shone from two frosted globes on the veranda ceiling. Cat-Eye Mayfield glared like an animal in a corner. Wolfe approached Mrs. Mason, who was at the same time approaching him.

"This is Miss Singleton, mother," he said. "I—I thought you wouldn't mind caring for her a little while as you cared for me for so long."

The colonel's little wife turned to Alex Singleton's daughter, took her hands, bent forward and kissed her on the brow. Tot stared; then a tear traced a crooked line down the road-dust of either cheek. No other woman had ever kissed her, not even her own stout, whistling mother, that she remembered. In that instant her whole weary, fiery mountain heart gave itself in everlasting love and devotion to Mrs. Mason.

"Let's go into the house, dear," softly said the older woman.

They went in. The colonel hastened back to the veranda.

"Rice is coming," he announced. To Mayfield, "Please sit down, sir."

The three of them sat down. The colonel slyly studied the wounded man's face, and he found it interesting. Soon the doctor arrived.

Rice dressed the hillman's arm in record time, and was paid on the spot for his services—by the young fellow he had always known as Arnold Mason. Wolfe then went with Mayfield into the dining room, where they had supper. Immediately after they had finished the meal, Mayfield was shown to a bedroom upstairs and in the back half of the house.

"Don't bother to run away," and Wolfe smiled a very pleasant smile. "You may go home tomorrow. I won't give you any trouble over trying to pot me; you see, I understand fully just how hard a prison term is for any mountain man! You won't try to do me harm in the future, will you? I want you to promise me that."

"Shore," Mayfield nodded. "I promise. You're a good feller, Little Buck, a dang good feller."

Mayfield had expected anything but mercy. But he was not too bewildered to grind his teeth and fling a vile, whispered curse at the door when Wolfe closed it behind him.

When Wolfe went back to the veranda, the lights had been cut off to keep away a swarm of annoying summer beetles. He saw that the colonel and a slender figure in white sat in rockers near the front steps.

"Miss Singleton—who wants me to call her Tot, like everybody else does—" began Colonel Mason, "has told me about the difficulties you had and—er, expect to have. It looks bad, Arnold; there's no denying it. You can't arrest and imprison your own people, of course. Frankly, I don't quite see how you're going to manage it, son."

Wolfe stepped to the veranda post and put his back to it.

"You've always believed in me," he said earnestly. "I want you to continue to believe in me. I'm not to the barrier yet. There are six miles of narrow-gauge road to be built before the barrier is reached—the Devil's Gate, you know. No use worrying over things in the distance, father, eh? This is what I've got to do—when I get to the barrier, I'll cross it, or go under it, around it, or through it. I don't know how. I know only that it must be done."

"By George, sir!" The colonel brought a hand down on his knee for emphasis. "Of course, I'll keep faith in you! That pass—the Devil's Gate—was beautifully named, wasn't it? But there's one thing, Arnold, I must ask you to remember. That your life is of more value to us, infinitely, than our money. Don't forget it, son."

There followed a few minutes of silence save for the night song of a mocking bird somewhere in the maples. Then Tot Singleton, who now wore shoes and stockings and a white dress that Mrs. Mason had found for her, sat up straight in her chair and addressed the dimly-shining officer's shield.

"Let me tell you, Little Buck," she said, "you'll shorely wish you'd put Cat-Eye Mayfield in jail the minute you got to town. I'd bet my life ag'in a safety-pin 'at Cat-Eye Mayfield ain't in the house right now. As long as he can go whar he pleases, yore life ain't wo'th nothin'. I tell you, after you've done what you've done tonight fo' him, he'd foller you to the bottomest hole in Tophet to git to shoot you in the back. Hate you? Why, he's hated you ever sence he can rickollect. It's all the' is to him, that hate fo' you. As Grandpap Singleton says, the sourest vinegar in the world is made out o' molasses—a-meanin', o' course, hate made out o' l-love. Cat-Eye thinks he l-loves me, y' know——"

If the lights had been on, they would have seen that she was blushing terribly; she had made a bad mess, she thought, of telling them how it was.

The last word had barely left her lips when there came from the velvety darkness of the lawn the voice of an eavesdropper, a snake, Mayfield himself, who had stolen out by way of the back stairs:

"Ef ever she told the truth in all o' her borned days, Little Buck Wolfe, she told it then. Ye might as well make yore fun'ral 'rangements afore ye come into the hills ag'in, acause I'll certainly git you!"

Wolfe ran down the steps and disappeared in the blackness. Colonel Mason flashed on the veranda lights, and brought out a shotgun. But Mayfield and the night were too closely akin, and they failed to catch even a glimpse of him.

"I have always held out," muttered the colonel, when they had again gathered on the veranda, "that there was no man without a little that was good somewhere in his make-up. I admit now that I was mistaken."

Little Mrs. Mason came out then. She put a hand on Tot's arm.

"I've got a room ready for you upstairs," she said. "Would you like to go to bed now? You must be pretty tired."

"Yes'm," Tot replied absentmindedly.

She displayed no interest whatever in the beautiful blue-and-white bedroom that the good woman at her side told her to consider her own. She barely noticed the dainty night-dress that Mrs. Mason took from a drawer and hung across the back of a chair for her. Wondering at her sudden abstraction, the colonel's wife smiled a gentle, "Good night, my dear!" and left her to herself.

Tot Singleton was thinking of Mayfield. She had long ago given up trying to stop hating him; he wouldn't let her stop hating him. For years he had dogged her like a shadow; she hadn't been able to go anywhere, it seemed, without his following her. A thousand times he had profaned the sacred spot under the whispering willow—with his feet, with his voice, with his opaque and uncanny eyes, with his thoughts. Over and over she had tried to insult him, in order that she might be rid of him; but there was, apparently, nothing about him that could be insulted. No, he wouldn't let her leave off hating him!

And now Mayfield was free again; free to wait in the laurels beside the trail, or behind a stone above it, with his coward's soul red with the spirit of murder, and a rifle in his hands.

Little Buck Wolfe would go to the mountains in the morning to bring Mayfield back; he would be shot from ambush; the cost of his kindliness and his fearlessness would be his life. She was absolutely sure of it, and her conclusion was certainly not far-fetched. Well, she would save Wolfe again. She was one of the very few persons in the world who could approach Cat-Eye Mayfield, now that he knew the hand of the law was against him, without great danger of being killed. She herself would arrest Cat-Eye. If he didn't submit to arrest, she would—but he would submit. It would be easy enough to find him. The mountains and their dense forests were as an open book to her; no man of the Wolfes Basin country knew them better.

To the outsider, the decision of this unlettered, but strong-souled young daughter of the hills is perhaps rather startling. But to Tot there was nothing so very extraordinary about it. To her, duty was duty, and nothing more—or less.

When Mrs. Mason rapped lightly at the door of the blue-and-white bedroom on the following morning, she received no response. She opened the door and went in, and found the bed not only empty, but undisturbed. Shortly afterward, the colonel's wife found that Tot's calico dress was gone; and in its place lay the white garments and the shoes and stockings that Tot had worn the evening before.

Mrs. Mason hurried downstairs and met Wolfe in the hallway. He seemed anxious.

"Mother," his voice troubled, "when I woke this morning, my revolver was gone from my holster, and the deputy shield from my coat. What do you suppose became of them? Do you think Mayfield——?"

"I believe I can explain, Arnold," she interrupted breathlessly. "The girl, too, is gone!"

"After Mayfield!" he cried.

"I have no doubt of it, Arnold. She probably thinks your officer badge gives her plenty of authority!"

There was a heavy step on the veranda. A big and poorly-dressed man, wearing a sunburned black beard and carrying a rifle by its muzzle, appeared on the threshold.

"Whar's my little gyurl?" he asked jerkily.

The colonel's wife looked with instant pity upon him. There was something very forlorn about Alex Singleton, the repentant. His gaunt and haggard face, his ragged clothing, his run-over cowhide boots, all were covered with the dust of travel. Just under his eyes, which were wide and hungry-looking, his cheeks were mottled faintly, and it was chiefly by this pathetic little token that Mrs. Mason read the story of his remorseful sorrow. He stared straight at her; he appeared to be wholly unaware of the presence beside her of old Buck Wolfe's son.

"Whar is she at?" he asked again, this time almost in a whisper.

"She went back to the hills last night," Mrs. Mason answered kindly.

"I'd ort to be shot fo' a-runnin' her off," muttered Alex Singleton. In louder tones, "Might I ax ye fo' a big drink o' whisky, mis'?"

Mrs. Mason's eyes twinkled. "I think we have some. Sit down and wait, and I'll go for it."

It was then that she noticed that his left shirtsleeve had been ripped open to the shoulder; that a rawhide thong did service as a tourniquet just above his left elbow; and that his left forearm, wrist and hand were swollen and discolored.

"Copperhead bit me as I was a-creepin' through a fence jest outside o' town," the mountaineer explained apologetically. "Got me afore I knowed it was anywhar nigh me. That's what I wanted with a big drink o' whisky, mis', it a-bein' good fo' snakebite."

"Oh, you must have Doctor Rice!" the little woman cried frightenedly. Already she was fairly pushing him toward a veranda chair that Wolfe had hurriedly provided; he sat down as obediently as a child would have done. "Arnold, phone Doctor Rice——"

"But there's no time to be lost in waiting for Rice, mother," said Wolfe. "Look at that arm! I can treat snakebite; I've got some potassium permanganate that I bought to take to the hills with me——"

He ran to his bedroom and returned with a small bottle. Alex Singleton rose angrily.

"I hain't a-goin' to let you do it!" he declared.

"You'll have to," replied Wolfe. "You don't want to die, do you?"

"But thar's whisky——"

"Whisky," old Buck Wolfe's son interrupted, "is as bad as it is good. It stimulates the heart action, but it spreads the poison through the system rapidly. This permanganate—we just cut right through the marks of the fangs with a knife; then we draw out as much poison as will come; then we fill the wounds with this stuff, and pretty soon you'll be as good as new. You see, you evidently got the tourniquet on quick, which is a big thing."

"Me, a Singleton, and you, a Wolfe?" The mountain man was suffering much. He was a stranger in a strange land, dazed and bewildered, and heart-broken because of his treatment of his only daughter. He weakened.

"You'd do that fo' me, a Singleton? Ef you would, I hain't a-goin' to be lowdown enough to keep ye from it. Yank out yore knife and cut the whole danged arm off, Little Buck, ef ye want to!"

He held out the swollen, discolored hand. Wolfe took a sharp knife from his pocket, and with it split the fang-marks two ways. With his mouth he succeeded in drawing out some of the virulent yellow poison. After that he filled the wounds with permanganate crystals. The colonel came up and tried to help.

"We'll loosen your thong at intervals," smiled Wolfe. "There's some poison in that arm that the permanganate won't reach, but it won't hurt much if we let it into the circulation a little at a time. It's the shock of the whole dose, you know, that kills."

Some hours later, the leader of the Singletons put out his good right hand.

"Boy," he said with a great deal of feeling, "you've got one friend, anyhow, which no time, nor no change, nor no thing on earth can ever take away from ye. I want ye to shake wi' me, Little Buck."

They shook.

"Now will ye please tell me, ef ye know," Singleton went on, "how come it Louisiany left here in the night?"

Wolfe told him briefly.

"Cat-Eye Mayfield!" growled the big hillman. "Well, I reckon I'm a-goin' to haf to kill Cat-Eye sometime. Goodness knows I hates to do it, but fo' pore little Louisiany I will, as shore as green apples. Le' me tell ye this here, folks—thar's the lowdownest man 'at ever stuck a boot-track on the face o' the world."

After two more hours, the rawhide thong was removed entirely. Singleton's constitution was like iron. He rose, and took up his rifle and hat.

"I guess I'll be a-movin' toward home," he drawled softly. "I feel good enough to thrash my weight in wildcats now. I shore won't fo'git this."

"Better wait until tomorrow," advised the always hospitable colonel.

"I'll go with you," said Wolfe. "Tot may need help, you know. We'll separate at the Gate, in order that my people——"

"No!" old Alex broke in stoutly. "You cain't go to the mountains now. Mayfield would be plumb shore to snipe ye off, plum' shore. You must stay here fo' three days, at least. I tell you, I knows jest edzactly what I'm a-talkin' about, Little Buck."

"But he wouldn't have got away, if I hadn't been such a boob!" frowned Wolfe. "It's up to me, as the saying is, to bring him back."

Singleton shook his head. "Oh, no! Ef I'm a-goin' to be yore friend, you must le' me have my way about it. Don't be a-skeered but what Louisiany can take blamed good keer o' herself. Cat-Eye, he wouldn't hurt her, anyhow. He knows me too dang well to hurt her. And so good-by to ye all!"

Half a minute later, he had left the house and was hurrying toward the great, dim-blue ranges.

The young general manager of the new Unaka Lumber Company began immediately the building of his toy railroad. Before twilight of the next day, more than a dozen tents had been staked on a level spot near where Wolfes Creek flowed under the C. C. & O., and the mountain air was filled with the songs of weary negro laborers. Early on the following morning, under the supervision of a young foreman named Weaver, the narrow roadbed began to creep toward the basin. The hills everlastingly rang with the staccato of the axe, the keen tenor of the saw, and the low bass thunder of exploding dynamite as tree after tree and ledge after ledge of stone fell victims of the hand of progress.

Late in the afternoon of the day following, Wolfe left the work entirely in charge of his foreman, and started to Johnsville for news. No person had passed by way of the trail that led down the creek from Devil's Gate, but those for whom he had been watching might possibly have taken another trail.

He found no news awaiting him in Johnsville. Nothing more had been seen or heard of the Singletons or of Mayfield. Wolfe feared that some evil had befallen Tot. Before he went to bed that night, he decided that he would be in the hills at daybreak on a search for her.

Colonel Mason wished to accompany his foster-son, but he awoke too late. Whereupon he gallantly wagered his wife a silk dress against a peach pie that he would overtake Arnold before he reached Devil's Gate—and he won the peach pie.

A slender, barefooted feminine figure in a torn and bedraggled, blue-dotted calico dress stood motionless behind the twisted body of a wind-swept jackpine on the crest of a baby mountain miles from Wolfe's Basin. Her face was thin from starving, and her coppery hair matted and tangled, but in the depths of her blue eyes there was fire. An Army-type revolver hung heavily from her right hand. Over her heart shone an officer's shield. She was slyly watching the side of another baby mountain, on the crest of which lay lightly the dying, golden summer sun.

The yellow disc sank out of sight, and shadows began to thicken in the valley before her. Still she stood motionless behind the wind-swept pine, too full of her purpose to sit down and rest. Darkness came on out of the east, and a little brown owl somewhere below her cried a mournful welcome to it. A nighthawk cut the air over her head with its knife-sharp wings; its shriek was like the dying note of a steamer's siren. From far across the other mountain came the shrill sound of a panther's scream, imitating the call of a woman in mortal distress.

Then there was silence, a deep and awesome silence. The earth, the sky, and all between, formed one vast and hollow loneliness. But Tot did not feel it. She herself was loneliness.

At last she sat down on the pine needles. Her weariness, the weariness of long hours of tramping without food, of long vigils on mountain tops, forced her to rest. What a game of hide-and-seek it had been! Half a dozen times she had been almost upon him. His way of eluding her was both uncanny and maddening. He had really seemed to be enjoying it!

Again the owl cried out; again the nighthawk shrieked; again the panther screamed. And again did Tot Singleton pay no attention to the gruesome trinity.

Some time later, she saw on the side of the other mountain a tiny point of light. It brought a cold but triumphant smile to her lips. How sure of himself he was! She rose, and began to move swiftly and noiselessly down through the scrubby laurel and ivy, going as straight toward the point of light as the slopes of the valley would allow.

After nearly an hour, she divided a wall of rank green undergrowth and stepped into a little, round patch of huckleberry bushes, in the center of which was a small brushwood fire—and beyond the fire, eating berries, his rifle lying across his knees, sat Cat-Eye Mayfield, who also was pale and haggard. He looked up. His jaws stopped their movement as though they had been that moment paralyzed. He stared at her half-defiantly and half-reproachfully.

She went closer to him, the big revolver ready in her hand, her gaze riveted on his.

"You're onder arrest fo' tryin' to kill Little Buck Wolfe," she said in a low voice that carried the ring of ice. With the forefinger of her left hand she pointed to the officer's shield that she wore over her heart like a target and a dare.

"Ye don't say!" he sneered.

"But I do say!" she replied.

"Depity-Sheriff Tot Singleton!" grinned Mayfield.

"C'rect, sir!" boldly. "It's jest what I am. I'll haf to ax ye to pass that 'ar rifle acrost to me, Mister Cat-Eye."

"Humph!" scornfully.

"Pass me that 'ar rifle, butt fust—pass it, quick!"

Mayfield saw, or imagined he saw, her finger tighten on the trigger. He gave her the gun, butt first, reluctantly. She lifted it in her left hand and brought it down hard on a stone, disabling the mechanism of the breech. Mayfield muttered an oath and leaped to his feet, but the revolver's muzzle held him off.

"You better hadn't!" she warned, her finger now so hard on the trigger that the cylinder trembled. "I've got the whole United States ahind o' me now, and I shore hain't afeared to shoot. Ef you think I am, try me and see!"

The other prepared to play his last card. He had some faith in it. He tucked his thumbs under his homemade suspenders, and cocked his bullet-shaped head to one side.

"We've had a fine time a-playin' whoopy-hide, hain't we?" He tried to laugh, and failed. "But it's all come to a show-down now, I reckon. You've sp'iled it all; the fun's all over. Tot Singleton, you won't want me to go to jail when I've told ye what I've got to tell ye!"

"Tell it!" impatiently.

"All right. Well," leered Mayfield, "you rickollect 'at time me and yore pap went over to Shelton Laurel and stayed a week at the big shootin'-match, sev'ral year ago? And you rickollect yore pap acted pow'ful strange fo' a long time atter we'd got back? It was the talk o' the whole Singleton tribe. You rickollect, Tot?"

"Yes. Shorely," she nodded. "Git the rest of it out o' ye quick."

"All right. Well, yore pap he killed a man named Mort Gibson over thar," Cat-Eye Mayfield went on, "and I seed him do it. I was the only witness. I'm the only pusson on earth 'at knows who done it—'ceptin' yore pap. Take me to jail, and I'll shore tell who it was killed Mort Gibson. Then yore pap he'll land in the penitenchy even ef he don't hang!"

Tot Singleton saw light in a place that had been mysteriously dark to her for years.

"So that," she cried, shaken hard, "is why pap never would make you stop a-pesterin' me to marry you! He was afeard to make you mad, acause he was afeard you'd tell! But," with fine scorn, "he knowed he could trust me never to tie up to sech as you, o' course. Do ye reckon, Cat-Eye Mayfield, they'd take yore word about the killin', and you in jail?"

"Tumph! I'd jest tell 'em to ax yore pap about it, and he'd give hisself away. He hain't got over it yit. It's nigh driv' him crazy."

It was all too true. Then the young woman's countenance took on an expression that fascinated Mayfield because he couldn't begin to guess what it meant.

"You turn yore back to me, quick!" she ordered.

The revolver threatened. The firelight gleamed on the deputy's badge she wore. Mayfield lost faith in his last card. He turned his back to Tot, and bent his head dejectedly. She stepped to him, gripped the waistband of his blue denim trousers in her left hand, and shoved him forward.

"Move on!" she said, bleakly but desperately, and he moved on. "Try anything I don't like the looks of, and see ef I don't shoot—then you cain't tell on pap. I—I've got the whole United States ahind o' me now."

They reached the crest of a high and rugged mountain just before daybreak. Tot decided to halt there and wait for the dawn to show her the surrounding country, in order that she might get her bearings again.

When the gray light came, she found that the great pile of earth and stone under her feet was the Big Blackfern, the eastern wall of Wolfe's Basin!

"Listen, Cat-Eye," she said wearily. "This is what we're a-goin' to do. We're a-goin' straight down the mountainside to the aidge o' the basin; then we're a-goin' to sneak out to the right under cover o' the trees ontel we're to the Gate. Anything about that you don't onderstand?"

"Yes," growled her prisoner, "I onderstand ye."

"Rickollect, ef you try to run, I'll shoot."

She released her hold on his clothing, now that he no longer had darkness for a friend. She followed him doggedly, fighting for strength to keep on her feet. Before they were halfway to the basin's edge, she was stumbling, and the trees were beginning to run grotesquely together like drunken monsters, and there was in her eyes a light closely akin to that of delirium. Mayfield knew that she soon would be completely exhausted, and upon this he was depending for his escape. Now and then he cast a sly glance over his shoulder, and with each succeeding glimpse of her his countenance grew a degree less heavy.

When they had come to a point a hundred yards from the level ground of the basin's bottom, Mayfield halted suddenly and began to stare ahead of him. His captor thrust the muzzle of the revolver weakly against his back. Still he didn't move. His immobility was like that of an evil bird that a snake holds charmed.

"Go on!" mumbled Tot. "Go on!"

"Looky thar!" exclaimed Mayfield. He pointed.

"What is it?"

She saw that they were standing at the lower side of the family burying-ground of the Wolfes.

"Thar!" Mayfield growled, pointing again.

At last she saw. "It was you," she gasped, "that done it!"

A thick, black mist was already settling down before her. She couldn't see anything at all now. Mayfield seized the revolver and tore it from her weakened grip. She made no attempt to recover it, for nothing mattered; the universe had become one great, dark void; it was finished. She staggered and fell prostrate, with her arms flung out helplessly. There she lay quite still, with the officer's shield pressed close to the earth and no more like a target, no more like a dare.

In the basin below were two men, one of whom was mounted, who had been watching with rising interest the progress of the pair down the rugged slope of the Blackfern. They had recognized Tot and Mayfield only when the latter-named halted suddenly and pointed; captor and captive had come into plain view at that moment.

Colonel Mason uttered an exclamation that was half-oath, and spurred his horse forward. The man on foot also was an elderly man, and he was tired and worn from days and nights of fruitless searching through the mountain wilderness. He thought that Mayfield had struck Tot down. He choked back a sob and cried out a whole oath instead, and ran, not toward his daughter, his one little girl, but after Cat-Eye Mayfield.

The colonel dismounted and with infinite tenderness gathered Tot's limp body up from the new mound of black earth on which it had fallen. He shook his head sorrowfully, regretfully, at sight of the new slab of sandstone that had been put at the head of the mound only that morning.

For on it had been chiseled crudely this pitiful inscription:

Hear Lays Little Buck Wolfe

Granny Wolfe had signally failed to soften her son, Old Buck. She had talked to him until she was hoarse, now pleading, now threatening him, now browbeating him with her sharp and ready tongue. Several times he had walked off to keep from hearing her; twice he had seized his fiddle and gone to playing "Buffalo Gals" wildly to shut her up.

But her spirits were not so low this morning. She had put on her red flannel petticoat wrong side out by mistake, and that certainly meant better luck in the future. It was a sign that never failed.

She had gone out, with her little black dog at her heels, to weed a bed of sky-colored ragged-robins. Her gaze sought out the not far distant family burying-ground instead. That which she saw caused her to drop her sourwood staff and step on her little dog's foot.

"Wag, ye black devil!" she creaked in response to the canine howl.

She recovered her staff, took her clay pipe from her almost toothless jaws, shaded her eyes with one hand, and looked toward the side of the Blackfern again. That which she had seen before had become an indistinct blur.

"I wonder what!" she muttered.

The eyes of Old Buck Wolfe were keener. He threw a last clod at a marauding hen, snatched up his always ready rifle, and hurried toward the mountain.

As he passed his mother's cabin, she hailed him shrilly, "Wait thar, and I'll go 'long wi' ye!"

He didn't even turn his head.

"You'd ort to be skun alive!" and she limped after him, Wag following at her heels.

Colonel Mason looked for water with which to revive Tot and, it being unfamiliar territory to him, failed to find any. Wondering whether he could mount unassisted with the young woman in his arms, he went back to his horse. Then he saw, standing less than two rods away, as motionless as the trees about him, the bearded, hard-eyed, giant mountaineer, Old Buck Wolfe.

"You're a terrible man, Buck," the colonel observed bitingly.

Wolfe changed not one feature.

"Will you be so kind, sir," and the old Southerner's voice was now not so cold, "as to hold this girl until I can get on my horse, and then pass her up to me?"

Still no word, no move, from the hillman. His mother arrived, panting heavily. She went straight to Colonel Mason. A great deal was plain to her already.

"Le' me take keer o' Tot," she said, fumbling at the bandana corners that were knotted under her chin, "ontel you can chase out the mountain thar about half a quarter and wet this here handkercher in a little spring ye'll find. Hey?"

The colonel returned not long afterward with the bandana soaking wet. Tot opened her eyes the moment the water touched her face. Granny Wolfe smiled, swept the matted and tangled hair back from the high, smooth brow and crooned:

"Now don't you worry yore little self no more, Tot, honey. Why, the' hain't a blessed thing to worry about! Little Buck ain't dead at all! His pap thar, the cross-grained old fool, he made that 'ar grave thar, and set up a tombstone to it, as a sign to the whole world 'at his best son was dead to him. Don't ye see, Tot, honey? Why, it's as plain as yore nose!"

"Cat-Eye didn't kill him?" Tot breathed uncertainly.

"Shorely not!" the old woman assured her.

"I thought Cat-Eye—had got him," Tot mumbled weakly, and slowly closed her eyes.

Colonel Mason rose and faced Old Buck Wolfe squarely.

"You could be a mighty good man," said he, "if you would. I know you've got plenty of chances to be bad; still, that's a very fine reason why you shouldn't be. I tell you, sir, there's nothing much coming to the fellow who is good simply because he hasn't any chance to be bad—and don't you ever forget that. Come, now! Help your son instead of hindering him. Be what you ought to be to him. You owe him your——"

"I don't owe nobody nothin'!" cut in the man who kept his word, told the truth, and paid his debts; who bent his knees only to a woodchuck's den, a ginseng root, or the furnace of a moonshine still; and who believed in nothing that he couldn't see with his temporal eyes.

Old Kirby Mason drew himself up straight, as straight as he had stood at Chickamauga when a general had complimented him to his face. But he was pale now, instead of flushed.

"By George, sir!" he bellowed.

With that he sprang to the head of the new black mound, tore away the slab of sandstone, lifted it in both hands and brought it down hard against the stump of a tree, breaking it into half a dozen pieces. The mountaineer went toward him, his rifle ready. The colonel looked into the barrel of the weapon without flinching.

"You ort to be hung as high as Haman or higher, Buck Wolfe!" the old woman cried. "You go home! Some says a old fool is the biggest fool on earth, and some says a young fool is the biggest; but me, I say you settle the question forever. Now you go on home!"

"Nobody hain't axed you fo' none o' yore edvice," growled her son.

"By gyar," Granny Wolfe retorted witheringly, "you need edvice, as shore as the Old Scratch hain't a jaybird."

Colonel Mason turned to his waiting horse, and swung himself into the saddle with the agility of a cavalryman. Tot seemed only half-conscious, only half-alive, and it was with some difficulty that the colonel and Granny Wolfe lifted her to the saddlefront. The grizzled mountain man stood and watched it with a face like a mask of stone.

Then the horseman left the old hillwoman berating her son mercilessly, and rode toward the basin's bottom.

"Now, little lady," he said when they had come to level ground, "I'll take you to your mother in short order. I'm afraid to try to take you to Johnsville; it would probably be too much for you. It'll be all right for you to go home. Your father is sorry he was so hasty with you."

Tot stared wide-eyed into his patrician old face. Her spirit fluttered up quickly.

"I want to go back to Mis' Mason," she told him.

"Oh!" smiled the colonel. "Back to Mrs. Mason, eh? Very well. Perhaps it would really be better. You may need the services of a doctor, and you couldn't get one out here—though I'd never dare to tell Granny Wolfe that! And I fancy, little lady," he added pleasantly, "that Mrs. Mason will be right glad to have you back."

They soon met young Wolfe, who had just ridden through Devil's Gate. He heard the story as they rode toward Johnsville, and made no comment, though there was a glint in his eyes that his foster-father hadn't been accustomed to seeing there.

Mrs. Mason saw them coming, and called the doctor by phone. Then she ran to make ready the bed in the blue-and-white room upstairs.

It was a case of utter physical exhaustion and high nervous strain, the doctor said; there was some fever now, and would doubtless be more before morning. Tot watched him as though she were not the least interested. After an hour, Doctor Rice left medicine and directions for giving them, and turned homeward.

Another hour went by. The patient spoke to the anxious-faced little woman who sat at her bedside.

"That tombstone. I can see it as plain as daylight. Ef I look somewhar else, it moves whar I look. 'Hear lays Little Buck Wolfe.' Are you shore he ain't dead, Mis' Mason, plum' shore?"

"Very sure," promptly. "He's perfectly safe."

"Ef you don't keer, Mis' Mason," and Tot strove to lift herself to an elbow, "I'll jest step downsta'rs and see."

"Delirium," the colonel's wife whispered to herself. Aloud, "No, you mustn't get up! Wait, dear; I'll call him."

Wolfe entered the blue-and-white bedroom a minute later. He went to the bedside and knelt there, took one of the hot and fluttering hands and caressed it awkwardly.

"I'm all right," he told her over and over. "Don't you see? Everything is all right."

She appeared to be satisfied, and accepted a teaspoonful of queer-tasting liquid without a murmur.

But the fever kept going higher in spite of the queer-tasting liquid, and the doctor was summoned again. He gave a powder, left others, and departed. Out in the hallway, Wolfe paced the floor anxiously. On the veranda the colonel sat smoking and swearing under his breath at the forces that had brought themselves together in a mighty attempt to crush him that was as flesh and blood of his own.

Wolfe stopped his nervous pacing at the sound of soft footfalls behind him, turned, and faced his foster-mother.

"I don't think you need worry yourself like this, Arnold; the case isn't so desperate," said Mrs. Mason, half-whispering. She went on smilingly, "If you hadn't told me about Alice, I'd think you were about to fall in love with Tot—or that you'd already fallen in love with her! She's handsome, honey boy, isn't she?"

"Very," he agreed, "but I'm not in love with her, mother."

Mrs. Mason gave him a wise look. "Of course, you aren't, not yet. It's gratitude and appreciation, now. But a man of your make-up could hardly help caring for a girl like Tot—after she has had a little polish, you know. That was a boyish affair you had with Alice, a sort of flashlight affair; you hadn't been much used to women, and she dazzled you. You'll see the day, dear boy, when you'll be quite thankful that Alice wouldn't have you. Now go straight off to bed, Arnold!"

"You'll call me if she gets worse?"

The colonel's wife promised. Wolfe went to his room. He shook his head and smiled a trifle bitterly at that which Mrs. Mason had said concerning "a flashlight affair." He thought she didn't understand.

But she did.

At noon of the next day, Sheriff Alvin Starnes, tall and lank, brave and illiterate, rose from his office chair and went to a telephone instrument on the wall. He asked for Colonel Mason's residence.

"This is Sheriff Starnes," he growled into the transmitter. "Is the young lady still improvin'?"

"Doing finely, thank you, Sheriff." It was Little Buck Wolfe talking. "The colonel told you about her, eh?"

"This mornin', sir. I think I'd better go after Mayfield, Mr. Mason. I ain't forgot that I promised to let you run that end o' the county, on account o' your kinfolks; but Mayfield ain't your kinfolks."

"Go ahead!" laughed Wolfe. "Hope you catch him."

"Startin' right now," replied Starnes. "Goo'-by!"

He hung up the receiver, rang off, crossed the room and took his broad-brimmed black hat from a nail that had been half driven up in the corner of a board lettered boldly: NO SWARING ALOUD. He buckled on a revolver-laden cartridge-belt, and took a pair of buckskin riding gloves from a drawer of his desk.

Just then there came a slow, heavy rapping at the door, the rapping of a rifle's butt.

The sheriff's lean face showed signs of annoyance. He went to the door. Two men stood a few feet from the steps. One of them was loosely-built, angular, and bullet-headed; the other was a big, square-chested man with sunburned black hair and beard. Only the big man was armed.

"You're the high sheriff o' this here county; hey?" said Alex Singleton.

"I am, sir."

"Then you arrest this here rattlesnake—take him off o' my hands afore I lose what little holt I've got on myself and put out his blasted light!" old Singleton roared. His voice was hoarse, rasping, like the sound a dull file makes when drawn across a thin steel edge. "He tried his best to kill a man I call my friend, Little Buck Wolfe; and the damned yaller dawg"—he was blind with rage, choking full—"he struck the one and only gyurl I've got——"

"And arrest him, too," Mayfield broke in desperately—"arrest him, too, fo'——"

"Shet yore mouth!" cried Singleton. His eyes blazed gloriously now, and his voice held a note of triumph. He wheeled and faced Sheriff Alvin Starnes again.

"And arrest me," he said, "fo' a-killin' Mort Gibson in a cyard game, over on Shelton Laurel, five year ago come eight o'clock o' the night o' next September the thirteenth!"

Alex Singleton, winner as well as loser, passed the officer his rifle and a revolver, and held out his wrists for manacles.

It was the third of August, and one of the warmest days of the summer. The extremely dry weather had withered all small vegetation; even the leaves of the laurel, that evergreen chaplet of the hills, were curled into little tubes and drooping. The majestic bald peak called Picketts Dome shimmered in the pale blue heat-haze. The ragged fringe of jackpines on the uneven, rockbound crest of the Big Blackfern stood motionless for lack of a breeze, seeming much like soldiers turned to stone in a battle-line that had previously suffered from the galling fire of some invincible enemy.

Grandpap Singleton, the Prophet, mopped his old brow frequently with a faded bandana as he followed the Devil's Gate trail, going northward. He walked with a dogwood cane, his other hand resting on his rheumatic left hip; but in spite of his decrepitude there was about his movements an eagerness that suggested an objective point of no little importance.

When he was barely through the Gate, he came upon old Granny Wolfe, who was kneeling beside the trail and trying to tie the ends of a 'coonhide shoestring that was somewhat too short.

Before she knew that he was anywhere near her, he leaned over, touched her lightly on the shoulder, and cried out like some mischievous boy, "Boa!"

The old hillwoman, startled, went stiffly to her feet.

"Well, I wisht I may never! My sakes, Grandpap Bill Singleton, you skeered me mighty durned nigh it to death! Now what'n Tophet do ye mean, anyhow, a-slippin' up on folks that a-way?" She tried to appear very angry, and failed altogether.

"Huh-huh!" laughed Grandpap Singleton, tugging at his long white beard. "How's yore old bones this mornin', Jane Wolfe?"

Granny Wolfe smiled the smile she had been holding in with difficulty for half a minute.

"Bill Singleton," she said, bending toward him, "ef it wasn't fo' the dad-burned old rheumatiz', I'd feel like a yearlin' colt! I've been a-totin' a buckeye-nut in my pocket, but it never done me a hoot's wo'th o' good. 'Bout the onliest thing 'at ever helped me any was good luck, lampile, and tarpentine. Ever try it, Bill, honey?"

Some thirty feet back in the laurel, a huge and gaunt man whose black hair and beard were not without threads of silver, knelt before a ginseng plant. He had been listening, and he had heard every word of the little conversation that had just passed between his mother and the father of his bitterest enemy. Once he had whispered to himself, "Well, I'll be danged!"

"I've tried everything, Jane," nodded Grandpap Singleton. "Well, I'm a-goin' down to the upper end o' Little Buck's railroad to see Little Buck, Jane. My pore son Alex his trial was to take place over in town yeste'day, and Little Buck he'll shore know about it, o' course. I shorely am a-hopin' they've done went and turned Alex loose; and yit—and yit, Jane, he ain't never come back home!"

"And when is Cat-Eye Mayfield to have his trial?" Granny Wolfe wanted to know.

"Done had it," the Prophet answered. "He got a-lackin' one day of a year in jail, at hard labor. May I ax whar you'd started to, Jane Wolfe?"

"Me? Oh, I'd jest started down to gass wi Little Buck fo' awhile, Bill. My shoe it got ontied, and I was a-tryin' to fix it up when here comes you to skeer me mighty nigh to death. I've allus heerd, Bill Singleton, 'at when anybody's shoe it got untied it was a shore sign 'at somebody was a-thinkin' about 'em. Hain't you?"

The aged hillman nodded. Then he went to his knees before her, drew up the ends of the 'coonhide lace, and tied them securely.

"I reckon ye ain't no objections ef we walk down thar together, ha' ye Jane?" he asked as he straightened.

"Shorely I hain't, Bill," with a twinkle in her old eyes. "Jest so's ye don't try to flirt wi' me like ye used to do! When me and you was young and frolicsome, a-livin' with our folks back in the Balsam Cone section, Bill, ye know; hey? Do ye rickollect, Bill Singleton, that 'ar night when me and you was a-goin' home from Mariar Spinnett's weddin' dance, and you slipped one o' yore arms around my waist?"

"Heh?" The old man almost jumped. "O' course I rickollect it, Jane. Perish me ef you didn't slap my jaw so hard I couldn't taste nothin' but red pepper fo' two weeks!"

Then his lined countenance became very sober. "And may I ax ye now, Jane, atter so many years is gone sence, why it was you married Sackett Wolfe 'stid o' me? I allus felt like I wanted to know, Jane."

"Well, I'll be danged!" Old Buck Wolfe muttered into his beard.

"Well," Granny Wolfe creaked, "I thought ye begun to boss me too soon, Bill. But don't misonderstand me; I hain't no regrets about a-marryin' who I did, though the day I tied up to Sack I reckon I loved you the best."

Back in the laurel, Old Buck Wolfe sank down on his heels, the ginseng root entirely forgotten. Grandpap Singleton took off his hat and shook his snowy head sadly.

"And so come on, Bill, honey," smiled Granny Wolfe, "and le's me and you go down to see Little Buck; hey?"

Together, side by side, they limped down the narrow trail, each of them wondering what the difference would have been if they had married each other in the wild and glorious morning of their lives. Old Buck Wolfe crept from the thick underbrush and followed them stealthily, for he, too, wished to know the outcome of Alex Singleton's trial.

The bed of the toy railroad had forged its way, like the path of some monstrous serpent, to a point easily within three miles of Devil's Gate. The geared locomotive had been put into service, and the laying of light steel rails was progressing rapidly. Already the sawmill and logging machinery had been unloaded from the new siding that the C. C. & O. had put in for the Unaka Lumber Company.

The aged couple found the company's general manager talking with his foreman under a great yellow poplar that was to be cut to make way for the road's bed. Wolfe dismissed Weaver, and turned to shake hands very cordially with his visitors.

"What about the trial o' pore Alex, my son?" Grandpap Singleton asked forthwith.

Wolfe had been expecting inquiry of this nature. He had his answer cut and dried, as the saying is.

"Alex will be back pretty soon—" and Old Buck the eavesdropper clenched his fists—"according to what Tot says about it. The trial was postponed, and now they'll have to bring Cat-Eye from jail to testify. Alex will stick to a straight story, and claim self-defence. Mayfield will be the only witness the State will have, and we think Alex will be cleared altogether.

"I hope the devil gits Cat-Eye Mayfield afore night!" cried Granny Wolfe. "The rawzum-chawin' pup—his durned eyes allus 'minded me of a spread-head snake's in dawg days!"

"And how's Tot a-comin' along in town?" asked Grandpap Singleton.

"She's doing remarkably well under Mrs. Mason's teaching," Wolfe told them. "You'd hardly know her, already! She's studying grammar almost day and night, and she wears her clothes like a lady."

"And when," inquired the garrulous grandmother, "is you and her a-goin' to marry, Little Buck?"

Wolfe gave the old woman an odd look. "Never, perhaps."

"Well, now, that 'ar beats the Old Scratch." Granny Wolfe's face was troubled. "Shorely, honey, you hain't never axed her!"

Old Buck pressed forward a little in the concealing laurel that he might not fail to catch the rest of it.

"No," said his son, "I haven't asked her. And I probably won't, because she wouldn't accept me if I did. I learned that much, anyway!"

Old Buck clicked his teeth. "Well, I'll be damned!" he muttered into his beard.

It was the first of October, which in the mountains means clear and frosty nights and days like rare old wine. The pointed shadow of bald Picketts Dome was reaching for the jagged summit of the Big Blackfern; it was, therefore, almost four o'clock. Granny Wolfe sat huddled low in the doorway on the sunny side of her old cabin; she was trying hard for a nap. Her little black dog Wag lay at her feet, now and then snapping at a bothersome fly.

The old hillwoman was in an irritable mood. She had slept almost none the night before, which had been occasioned by her worrying over the day when the little railroad would reach Devil's Gate, the basin's mouth; she feared, and with good reason, that blood would be shed then. Her son Buck was harder than ever, more grim, more silent, more terrible than ever.

"Wag, drot ye," she said indistinctly, "ye'll gi' me fleas, ye little devil."

There came then a long drawn, lonesome sound from somewhere near the foot of Big Blackfern Mountain. It is no common thing to hear the mournful cry of a whip-poor-will in the daytime. Granny Wolfe rubbed her aching eyes and looked up in sudden anxious interest. Less than a week had passed since Sarah Wolfe had told her that Preacher Longley Thrash's wife's sister had said that her husband's uncle had said that the cry of a whip-poor-will when the sun was shining meant a death within three days unless the bird was killed promptly.

Granny Wolfe rose with a rheumatic groan, took down from its wooden hooks over the doorway an old, old rifle that her departed husband had loved next to her, and went toward the foot of the Big Blackfern.

"I'll git ye!" she mumbled to herself. "I'll git ye, drot ye!"

It came again when she had gone a hundred yards: "Whip-poor-will!"

"Plague on yore pickcher of ye!" she muttered, quickening her step so much that her little dog was forced to trot in order to keep up with her heels. "Ye imp o' Satan, ef I don't shoot a hole through ye wi' this here old rifle o' Sack's big enough fo' a bay hoss to jump through, I hope I may sink! Consarn ye to thunder! I hain't a-havin' enough bad luck, I reckon," bitterly, "and so you had to happen along."

Shortly afterward, she drew back the hammer of the old rifle and limped into the border of laurel. Something moved slightly on a log a few rods up the mountainside, and she saw it. She rested the long barrel in the fork of a sapling, and began to try for an aim, when a cracked old voice came down to her.

"Don't ye shoot me, Jane Wolfe!" half laughing, half afraid. "Heh! Don't ye shoot me, Jane Wolfe!"

"Ef it hain't Grandpap Bill Singleton, the Prophet!" Granny Wolfe cried, greatly relieved. "Why, Bill, 'at's jest the way you used to call me down to the big beech on the creek when you and me was both young and frolicsome, ain't it? My pap he didn't like it fo' you to come to see me, ye'll rickollect! Now I might ha' knowed, dang the luck, what it was when I fust heerd it!"

She went on soberly, "Now what'n the name o' goodness do ye want to see me about, Bill? You shorely hain't a-courtin'!"

"Heh! No, not a-courtin'," he said.

He moved slowly toward her, and she noted that he carried a worn leather-backed Bible under one arm.

"Yes," he told her, "it was me a-whistlin' like a whip-pore-will fo' you, Jane. I didn't much like the idee o' goin' down thar in the inemy's country to see ye, Jane. I wanted to have a talk wi' ye. About the lumber track. Jane, Little Buck he told me 'at the track it would shorely git to the basin tomorrow!"

Because Granny Wolfe had known that already, she expressed no surprise. She leaned the rifle against a tree, and rested her hands on her thin old hips.

"I'm a-listenin', Bill," she reminded him. "You ain't done a-talkin'."

"I wondered, Jane," thoughtfully, "ef the' was anything on earth you and me could do to stop the bloodshed afore it comes."

"The' hain't!" Granny Wolfe exclaimed. "Bill Singleton, the's a-goin' to be trouble sech as even me and you never seed afore. My son Buck he has done passed his word 'at the railroad shain't never come into the basin; Little Buck, bless his heart of him, has passed his word and promise 'at it shall—and they're both Wolfes. Little Buck he's got to put the thing through or die a-tryin', ef he's a-goin' to be hon'rable to them 'at sold all o' their property to back him up. He cain't call the law in to help him, acause that would—you know, Bill, jest what it would mean. May the Lord ha' mussy on us all, Bill Singleton! I jest don't know what to do! I've done wore mighty nigh it all the hide off my pore old screakin' knees a-prayin' fo' peace. I've talked to my son Buck ontel I was as black in the face as my dawg.

"And I've tried to pe'suade the rest o' the Wolfes to foller Little Buck 'stid o' Old Buck," she went on gloomily. "But they won't do it. They're like sheep a-follerin' a bell-sheep. All but Nathan, that is. Nath he's allus loved Little Buck, somehow. And Nath he tried to talk his pap into a-seein' the crookedness o' his ways, but it never done no good at all. Lord ha' mussy on us all, Bill Singleton!"

"What did Old Buck say to Nath?" the Prophet wanted to know, one palsied hand burying itself in his patriarchal white beard.

"He never said nothin' to him," was the answer. "He hit him in the mouth wi' his fist. Pore Nath! Bill, I was jest so sorry fo' Nath, and so durned mad at Buck, 'at I could jest—I could jest ha' died right thar in my tracks."

"Well," Grandpap Singleton said hopefully, "mebbe it'll all come out right in the end. Le's me and you both go to Old Buck and talk to him; heh? Both o' us together, Jane. It may not do no good; but ontel we've done it we hain't done all we could do, Jane. What do ye say; heh?"

"All right," Granny Wolfe nodded. "He's out the mountain thar a-makin' a run on his moonshine 'still. He'll be mad when he sees us together, mebbe; but ef you don't keer, I shorely don't. Bill Singleton, hain't it a dad-burned shame fo' a man as good as him to be as lowdown mean as he is?"

"Yes, Jane, yes. Ha' ye got a weensy teensy bit o' pipe tobacker about ye, Jane? I fo'got to bring mine along, and I'm jest a-sufferin' fo' a smoke."

"I ain't never without it, Bill, shorely," the old woman told him. "I plants my tobacker afore I plants my bread cawn. We hain't got no fire to light our pipes with, though."

"Good excuse fo' a-goin' out to Buck's still," said Grandpap Singleton. He fished a blackened clay pipe from a trousers pocket. "The tobacker, Jane."

She took a dry twist of homegrown tobacco from a pocket in her faded calico dress, and passed it to him. He courteously filled her pipe first. Then they went limping out the side of the Big Blackfern, these two, over ground carpeted softly with leaves of brilliant saffron, pale yellow, mottled scarlet, deep red, and several shades of brown. Neither spoke, for each was saddened by a keen realization that it was autumn for them in more ways than one.

After fifteen minutes of traveling thus, they entered a narrow and deep, dark gash filled with hemlocks and laurel, through which flowed a very small, clear stream of water.

"Why, the still it hain't far from the fambly buryin'-ground, is it, Jane?" observed Grandpap Singleton as they stepped into a path that wound its way dimly through the undergrowth.

"Which is jest as it should be, Bill, honey," returned Granny Wolfe, her voice heavy with meaning.

"Heh! Yes, Jane," her companion agreed.

Old Buck Wolfe was in no good humor that afternoon. For one thing, he had been absentmindedly allowed a "run" to boil over, and the whisky tasted like pickled beets. The decrepit pair found him on his knees before the crude little stone-walled furnace; he was lustily blowing the fire to make it catch to fresh wood. Another run was on.

Grandpap Singleton walked up silently, to all appearances unaware that he was on forbidden land. He bent stiffly over and scooped a live coal into the bowl of his pipe. A few puffs lighted the tobacco for him, and he passed the coal to the pipe of the old woman. Then he very calmly seated himself on a downward-turned mash tub.

"Buck," he said seriously to the moonshiner, who had been eyeing him hard, "whar are ye a-goin' to when ye die?"

"I am a-goin' to a place," very readily, "which is knowed as a three-by-seven, a grave, a hole in the ground, a last restin'-place, and a last ditch, whar I'll rot down to plain dirt."

He sat back on his heels, and stared at Grandpap Singleton in open defiance.

"Oh, no, Buck," and the aged mountaineer shook his snowy-white head emphatically. "You hain't a-goin' to stop thar. No, sirree. Ef you hain't quick to blaze a new trail, Buck, you're a-goin' as straight to Hell as a honey-bee to its comb."

"How do you know?" snapped Old Buck Wolfe.

The Prophet took his worn Bible from under his arm, put it flat on his outstretched left hand, and touched it with a shaking forefinger as each word was formed on his lips.

"I knows it by the Word o' God, sir." After a silent moment, he continued, "Buck Wolfe, in some ways you're a most pow'ful smart man."

"I'm smart enough," the moonshiner replied, "not to be ketched a-believin' in things I cain't see, anyhow."

"And so you hain't a-believin' the's anything in the nachur of a hereafter, Buck?"

"Nor no Heaven, nor no Hell," the leader of the Wolfe clan snarled—"nor no God."

His mother began to wring her hands. "Buck, honey, it skeers me to hear you talk that a-way," she moaned. She sat down on the leaves, took the red bandana from her white head, and wiped nervously at her eyes.

"My friend," said Grandpap Singleton, his voice ready to break, "you shorely are mistaken. Didn't ye ever look at the stars at night, and think about the beginnin' of 'em, and the endin' of 'em? Didn't ye ever think 'at they was allus new, as old as they are—heh? Who else but a God A'mighty could ha' made them stars—and the sun, and the moon, and the earth?

"And about the res'rection, Buck. Take mighty nigh it the least thing in the world, a mustard-seed. You put it in the ground, and it rots back to dust jest the same as the human body does; and it comes up in the spring, and without any o' the rot or the blackness—but, to save yore life, Buck Wolfe, you cain't cut a mustard-seed open and find out what makes it grow! I tell ye, the mortal soul has its June as well as the mustard-seed. Buck, any man wi' even hoss sense in his head can argy hisself out of a God ef he only tries. And to them as thinks the' ain't no God, the' ain't none, so far as they're concerned...."

And after a long, still minute: "Here's another proof, Buck. The' never was a nation on earth but what wushipped somethin', whether it was a image, the sun, or the true and livin' Almighty; and ef that hain't the c'lestial spark handed on down and down from old Grandpap Adam, what is it; heh?"

"Fear!" cried Old Buck Wolfe, jutting out his great, bearded jaw. "Most o' good people is good acause they're afeard not to be, and fo' no other reason. Take yore own case, Grandpap Singleton. It hain't been so many years sence you was counted one o' the wickedest, fightin'est men in the country—'Cracker'-Singleton, they called ye then. You never made a change ontel you seed 'at yore best days was done past. You jumped at the hope o' life everlastin' beyant the grave only atter the confidence you had in yoreself was gone. Deny that, ef ye can!"

Old Singleton's countenance became infinitely sad. "I cain't deny it," he muttered brokenly. "I did put it off ontel I'd done turned the crest o' life's journey. And it's acause I put it off fo' so long 'at I'm a-doin' all I can now to build me a pore little shelter in the skies afore I'm called on to go."

"Humph!" Old Buck Wolfe rose too. "Ef the' is sech a Bein' as you think the' is, Grandpap Singleton, the's a-goin' to be some o' the woolpullin'est times on the Day o' Jedgment ever you seed. I'd shore ruther take my chances as I'm a-takin' 'em; not as a damned coward, but as a onbeliever acause I hain't never had nothin' proved to me. Well, I've got a run o' yaller-cawn licker to take keer of, and I tharfore hain't got no more time to fool away wi' you. Tomorrow's a-goin' to be a busy day here in the basin, as shorely as you're knee-high to a tomtit. You better shell out fo' home, is my guess."

"One more minute," begged Grandpap Singleton. "You shorely hain't a-goin' to give Little Buck any trouble in his lumber business, heh?"

"He hain't got no lumber business," flatly.

"I mean this here little railroad and the sawmill——"

"Hain't I done said 'at they shain't come?" sourly. "You've knowed me long enough to know I keeps my word, hain't ye? And hain't I done told ye I've got a run o' licker to take keer of? You take my edvice, old man, and shell out fo' home."

Grandpap Singleton realized that his mission had failed utterly. The disappointment was so great that it threw his feeble mind into one of its temporary breaks. He knelt and lifted his hands, with the Good Book clasped between them, and began to mutter unintelligibly. Old Buck Wolfe, in a sudden rage, struck down the palsied hands, and sent the Bible flying to the leaves; then he seemed sorry. He lifted old Singleton to his feet, and pointed toward the southern end of the basin.

"Go on home," he said.

The Prophet found his Bible and went off slowly, his shoulders drooping, his head bent low. The moonshiner turned to his mother, expecting another lashing from her sharp old tongue.

"Begin!" he commanded.

She said in tones so low that he barely heard, "My son, you'd ort to take off yore boots, acause you're a-standin' on ground that pore old man's knees made holy."

Before he thought, Old Buck looked downward. He bent over, his eyes suddenly wide, his jaw hanging, and caught his breath quickly. Cut there in the tightly packed earth was the sign of the cross, about seven inches by five!

"Who done that?" he roared, straightening like a jack-in-a-box.

"What? Oh!" frightenedly. His mother, too, had seen the sign. "It's a warnin', Buck, honey—a warnin' to you!"

She wrung her hands. Her son looked about him queerly. Cut in the bark of a nearby tree was the cross again, seven inches by five. And he remembered distinctly that Grandpap Singleton had placed one hand on that tree to steady himself as he went.

"Who done that?" he roared again. "You, mother, you done it. Old Bill Singleton couldn't ha' done it without me a-seein' him. I'd ha' seed him, I tell ye!"

"I didn't, Buck," came promptly. Granny Wolfe was quivering with a fear that was certainly genuine. "It's a warnin' to you—Buck, it's the crook o' His finger!"

Old Buck swore roundly. He caught up an ax and chopped away the sign of the cross that had been cut in the bark of the tree. With his boot-heels he quickly effaced that which had been cut in the ground. Then he knelt before his false god, the moonshine still.

A voice cried out from the laurel, the voice of the Prophet. It seemed to hang in the air, like smoke—smoke of burning incense.

"'He came unto his own, and his own received him not.'"

Dawn of that memorable day at Devil's Gate found the general manager of the Unaka Lumber Company dressed and standing in the opening of the tent he shared with Weaver. The foreman, too, was awake; he sat on a box inside, busily lacing his boots. Wolfe hadn't slept well because of that which bore so heavily upon his mind; he was quite nervous, which was exceedingly unusual for him; strive as he would, he could not rid himself of the feeling that disaster was very near.

After a few minutes spent in absentmindedly watching the antics of a playful squirrel on the side of a nearby hickory, he turned to Weaver. Weaver was fully acquainted with the circumstances; Wolfe had found him extremely solid, and he had confided in him unreservedly. The two had grown to like each other well in the few months they had spent in working together.

"You're sure," Wolfe asked, "that we've got enough ties cut and piled at the Gate to reach to the mill-site?"

"There's four thousand in that pile, sir," said the foreman.

"It ought to be enough. I'm going down to the engine, Weaver, to see if Tom's got her fired up. Wake the camp, and let's get out as early as we can."

The foreman went out, put his cupped hands to his mouth and shouted an echoing, "Coo-ee!" In response to it, the tents of the negroes became instantly alive, and laughter and joking began to fill the morning air. There came from the cook's canvas domain the rattling of cast-iron. Soon the laborers were kneeling beside the sparkling creek with soap and towels. Not long afterward, many nostrils were sniffing hungrily at the mingled odors of frying bacon and steaming coffee.

Wolfe found his geared locomotive already lifting at its safety-valve spring. He passed the negro engine-man a word of praise, and returned to the camp by an indirect route, trying to engage his worried mind with the autumnal splendor of the woods as he went.

Breakfast was eaten as heartily as though no one expected anything out of the ordinary that day—and no one did, except for Weaver and Wolfe; the laborers had sensed nothing of the barrier that awaited the little railroad at the basin's mouth.

Less than an hour later, the slow but powerful locomotive drew its string of lumber flats to a halt at a point near where the rails ended; it was a short distance below the Gate. The crew sprang to the ground, each man of it with a pick or a shovel, a spike-driving hammer or a crowbar, an ax or a saw. The work began forthwith.

Wolfe and his foreman walked ahead to the lower edge of the Gate, entrance to the forbidden land. They stopped near a slender young poplar that had been felled squarely across the trail during the night just gone; it reached from one side of the pass to the other, and it was strong testimony to the nice calculation of the person who had cut it. Weaver looked puzzled, then he faced Wolfe.

"Who did this?"

"This," Wolfe answered correctly, turning to his companion, "is the deadline."

"You mean your father——?"

"Nothing else." Wolfe picked up a leaf of transparent yellow, and began to tear it to pieces without even seeing it.

Weaver suddenly wheeled and looked off down the creek. "I wonder what's wrong back there?" he grumbled. "The boys have quit singing, and they don't do that when everything is moving along smoothly. Suppose we see if anything's happened; eh?"

He retraced his steps of a few minutes before, with Wolfe following at his heels. They found the crew, even to the engineer, standing grouped under a crooked water-oak; all their jaws were sagging, and all their eyes were staring upward.

Suspended by a white cord, some twenty feet from the ground, was a foot-square piece of cardboard which bore in pencil this crudely-printed warning:

BLACK MAN DON'T
LET THE SUN GO
DOWN ON YE HEAR

"Say, Boss Weaver, suh," inquired a dozen uneasy voices at once, "what do that mean, suh?"

Weaver did not answer the question. He looked toward Wolfe. It was Wolfe's place to answer. But there was only silence.

The driver of the locomotive approached the foreman then. "What them mountain people gwine do to us black men effen the sun go down on us heah, Boss Weaver, suh?" he asked frightenedly.

Before Weaver could utter the "I don't know" that was on his tongue, there came from a point a few rods above in the laurel the keen report of a rifle. The white cord parted, and the piece of lettered cardboard fluttered to the ground. It was a forceful answer to the negro engineer's question.

"Good marksman, all right," Weaver observed.

"Stay right here until I come back, boys," ordered Wolfe.

He hurried up the rugged steep, searched the laurel and the rocks, and saw no sign of any one. He climbed to the top of a huge boulder, and looked in all directions from that point of vantage. Then he saw a huge, gaunt man with a rifle under his arm step from the underbrush below and walk rapidly toward the settlement of the Wolfes. It was his iron-hearted father.

"I thought so," he muttered.

He went back to Weaver and the negroes.

"I'll answer for your safety, boys, until the middle of the afternoon," he told the crew. It would require that long, he figured, to build the railroad to the deadline. "You know very well that you can trust me to keep my promises. Double pay from now on. Go to it."

The laborers resumed their work, but not very willingly. There was a spirit of certain danger in the air they breathed.

A few minutes later, Wolfe faced this pointed inquiry from his foreman: "Well, sir, have you any plans as to what we're going to do after the middle of the afternoon?"

"I must admit, Weaver," promptly, "that I haven't."

He thought, then, of something he had once said to Colonel Mason: "When I get to the barrier, I'll go over it, or under it, or around it, or through it."

The little speech had seemed dramatic enough at the moment of its utterance. Now it seemed tragic and pitiful.

"See here," said Weaver, gripping Wolfe's arm firmly, "there's only one way out for you. I'll not deny that it's a hard way; it will cripple or kill your first purpose, the—er, elevating of your people; but there's no alternative. The law, I mean; that's your one way out. When you cross the deadline with the track, your dad and his men will be up there on the Big Blackfern's side of the Gate with rifles in their hands—all but your brother Nathan—and the devil will be to pay. After that, you won't be able to keep the law out; don't you see, sir?"

"The law——"

"Yes," Weaver nodded. He continued, "It wouldn't be hard for Starns and a picked posse to steal upon them from behind while their attention is turned toward your crossing the deadline, and arrest them; it could be done without any trouble, I think. Then they could be kept—er, out of harm's way until they promised to behave themselves. I'm only your foreman, I know, sir. But I don't want to see you fail!"

Wolfe shook his head. "Even granting that the arrest could be made without hurting anybody, it isn't the thing for me to do," he said gloomily. "My people would refuse to work when they were put into jail; they'd be starved to it; it would build up a hatred for me that no length of time could wipe away. It is useless to talk about it, Weaver."

"But there's no other way, sir!" the foreman insisted.

"No other way?" echoed Wolfe. He faced Weaver sternly. "I'll show you. There must be another way. It's up to me to make another way."

The other smiled a rather mirthless smile. "All right," he said. "Go the limit. I'll try to be there with you, if you need me, no matter what or where the limit may be. I'm no quitter, sir."

"I'm very much obliged to you," Wolfe said earnestly, "but——"

He never finished it.

The work went on sluggishly. The negroes were afraid of the men who could so easily cut down a hanging thread with a rifle's bullet. Weaver had learned well the subtle diplomacy necessary to his trade; but, try as he would, he was unable to get those under him to move beyond a certain pace.

Just before noon, Little Buck Wolfe went to see his father. Old Buck sat in his cabin's front doorway; he was moodily whittling at a stick of soft red cedar. The son stopped at the rickety gate, and leaned lightly against one of the decaying posts.

"Good morning, father," he said brightly.

The big mountain man looked up, saw his namesake, and went to his feet. His face was the face of a savage now. His coal-black eyes glared his unspeakable contempt. Every big, hard muscle in his body seemed to be gathering itself for action. He was a human tiger.

"What in hell do ye want here?" he demanded in a voice that was as cold and as merciless as death itself.

"I came to ask you for advice," quietly. "I'm very much up against it, as the saying is. If you were in my place, trying to help your people, trying to make good for the sake of those who put up everything they had to back you, trying to win out without recourse to law—I say, if you were in my place, what would you do? You know the circumstances. Please advise me."

The shot failed to tell. It glanced off without leaving the slightest impression as a shot.

"Ef I was in yore place," came readily and sneeringly, "I'd change my name to Singleton—or Dawg—and 'en I'd go out in the woods and sp'ile a good rope by a-hangin' myself with it. That's edzactly what I'd do ef I was in yore place."

"That's no answer to my question," the younger Wolfe protested, trying hard to hold his temper in leash and succeeding barely. There were times when education fought almost a losing fight with his hot hill blood, the blood that was not so far removed from the dark wildernesses and their animal skins and clubs with heads of stone, and this was one of those times.

"Yes, it is, too," blared Old Buck Wolfe. "Ef the's anything else ye wants to know, spit 'er out; ef the' hain't, make some quick tracks away from here!"

"One thing more," said the son, with enforced calmness. "Do you actually mean to make murderers and outlaws of yourselves in the attempt to keep me out of the basin?"

His father took up from beside the doorstep a repeating rifle of heavy caliber. Old Buck held the weapon in his left hand, and with his right forefinger slowly tapped the blued-steel barrel.

"The fust man 'at drives a spike on this side o' the little poplar in the Gate will be shot by me, myself," he declared in a voice that had become hoarse. "Now ye've got my word fo' that, and you know mighty well 'at I keeps my word."

"The first man to drive a spike on this side of the deadline," Little Buck Wolfe replied, "will be me. You know that you could never shoot your own son. Our people never would stand for that. You wouldn't be chief of your 'clan' any longer. You'd be cast out, just as you've cast me out. And if it's necessary, I'll drive all the spikes that remain to be driven."

This was a shot that made an impression. Old Buck had gone ashen behind his beard, and his eyes were wide and staring. But he was not long in a quandary. His rage had drawn him deep into the vortex of primitive passion. The ties of blood were none too sacred now. He advanced a few steps, and shook a great fist at his fifth son.

"Ef you don't believe I'll shoot you fo' a-drivin' the fust spike on this side o' the little poplar, jest try it and see!" he cried. "I'll do it ef I haf to shoot myself wi' the next ca'tridge in my rifle. I'll do it ef I haf to shoot every man Wolfe by name. And ef you think you can send a sheriff's posse out here to take me, try it. The' hain't no sheriff's posse 'at can take me!"

He meant every word of it. He was almost a madman now. It drove young Wolfe into the depths of despair.

"I'm not going to send a sheriff's posse out here," he said broken-heartedly. He had a strangle-hold on his temper now. "I'm not going to resort to law. I'm even forgetting that I'm an officer of the law myself. I think—perhaps—I'd better—I'm going to drive that first spike and let you shoot me. It's the only honorable way out for me. Good-by, and maybe I'll meet you at another Gate after we've met again at the Devil's!"

He turned and walked off blindly.

Blindly, and bitterly. The fates were set against him. The fates were laughing in their sleeves at the failure of his strongest efforts, at the defeat of his best impulses. In his despondency he really believed that it would be best to drive the spike of destiny, take the bullet from the cruel, never-erring rifle and die, and go out honorably along with the soul of his iron father. Only two need die this way. The work would be carried on by others, the Masons would not lose, and his benighted people would ultimately be led into the paths of light. The result, surely, would be worth the sacrifice.

He found difficulty awaiting him when he reached the workers below the Gate. The negroes had talked matters over among themselves, and they were anxious to be off from the place where danger lurked everywhere. Wolfe went into their midst, and prevailed upon them finally to stay with him for two more hours. The little railroad began to creep toward the deadline once more.

Wolfe seated himself beside the old trail, on a stone the size of a small barrel, and watched the work almost without seeing anything of it. A hand placed lightly on his shoulder from behind brought him back to himself. He turned his head and saw a tall, slender but very muscular, finely-featured young mountaineer smiling down upon him. Through the newcomer's sharp resemblance to Tot Singleton, Wolfe recognized him as her brother, "Fightin' Lon"—the only brother she had.

"Hello!" said Wolfe. He rose and proffered his hand. Young Singleton took the hand and shook it warmly.

"We've jest had a letter from pap," said Fightin' Lon, in his musical drawl. "Tot she sent it out from town by a hunter. Pap says he had to git a real lawyer to write the letter fo' him, and we had to ax the hunter to read it fo' us. Pap he said 'at he was acquitted on grounds of self defense and 'count of no one believing Cat-Eye Mayfield and 'at he'd be a-comin' home right off, and he said fo' us to light in and he'p you any way we could, Little Buck. So we gethered ourselves together and cut the mustard right down here to he'p you build yore railroad, all of us."

As though he had given a signal, more than a score of stalwart, strapping hillmen emerged from the thick laurel, not one of them armed, and formed a half-circle before Wolfe. The Unaka Lumber Company's general manager shook hands with the last man of them.

"We heerd you a-talkin' to them 'ar darkies, Little Buck," smiled Fightin' Lon. "You needn't to keep 'em a minute longer. We'll lay yore road fo' ye, clean smack-dab to the top o' the Dome ef ye wants it to go thar. And it shain't cost ye a red copper cent!"

Wolfe began to stare at the brown and gold carpet of autumn leaves under his feet. Here was a dilemma, indeed. He didn't dare refuse the assistance of the Singletons, on their own account; on account of his own people, he didn't dare to accept that assistance. He wondered it were possible to make Lon and his kinsmen understand. That appeared to be his only hope.

"Men," he said impressively, "first I want to say that I don't know how to thank you as I'd like to thank you, for this. Remember that. I'm grateful. Now pay close attention to what I'm going to say to you."

He made them an eloquent address there in the mellow autumn sunlight, there amid the sad glory of falling and fallen leaves. He appealed with impassioned words to the good that he knew slumbered in their half-savage breasts. There was little in his heart, indeed, that he did not lay bare to them. But he saw their faces cloud in spite of all that he could say. They could not, or would not, see far enough into the truth to grasp his point of view.

"Let loose o' that 'ar pizenvine-and-honey stuff!" Fightin' Lon finally interrupted. "You're a-wastin' puffectly good breath a-doin' it!"

The Singletons had reasoned, of course, that they were bending their pride close to the breaking-point by conferring this great favor. They had debated the question warmly upon receiving the letter from old Alex from Nashville, and the affirmative had carried only because of the stubborn insistence of Lon. Consequently, Lon was now by far the angriest of them all. He drew himself up as straight as an Indian, and, like an Indian, folded his fine sun-browned arms over his ample chest. He held his head high, and looked down along his aquiline nose and to the pale face of Little Buck Wolfe.

"Yore own folks has done cut you off," he said, his voice dry and hard and pinched. "They even put up a tombstone wi' yore name on it as a sign 'at you was dead fo'ever so far as they was concerned. I know 'em, Little Buck, and I know 'at you cain't never be at peace with 'em. We're mad at this, o' course. We got a danged good right to be mad. We had to fo'git a lot o' things to come down here this a-way, and it hurts to be turned down flat. We come willin' to work the blood o' our hearts out through our hands fo' ye. We come willin' to fight fo' ye ef ye need it!"

He swallowed hard, and continued hotly. "Halfway stuff don't go wi' us at all. I give ye this here: you can either put us to work without any pay, or else we'll take the Lost Trail's side o' the Gate and stop yore railroad afore it gits to the poplar tree deadline! Well," impatiently, "which one is it a-goin' to be?"

"I believe," said Wolfe, "that I told you my people would fire on you the minute you went to work for me. I explained to——"

He stopped trying to talk. It was of no use to talk.

"Didn't I tell ye," almost shouted Lon Singleton, "'at we was willin' to fight fo' ye as well as work? Why, fightin' it's our middle names, dang it to the devil!"

It was here that Weaver the foreman took a hand. He walked angrily up to Singleton.

"Don't you see that you're tormenting him for nothing?" he asked. "He's got the right dope, sure; you're wrong, absolutely. And it won't pay to try sniping at us from the rocks up there, so take my advice and don't. Now take your men away, won't you?"

He was fumbling nervously at the butt of the big revolver he wore at his right hip. The Singletons glanced at each other, winked, turned into the laurel and were gone like so many spirits. Wolfe beckoned to his foreman.

"They'll be back pretty soon, Weaver. If they have to go home to get their rifles, it'll be an hour—but they won't have to go home to get their rifles. We'd better let the men go. Tell them——"

A rifleshot rang out sharply. A bullet struck a negro's shovel, ricocheted, and buried itself deep in a tree with a quick and spiteful snak! Another rifle bullet came whining down and splintered the handle of a pick. Still another leaden warning struck a light steel rail that rested on a laborer's shoulder, gave forth a nasty ting! and dropped, flattened, to the ground. The blacks let out a wild howl of fright, and broke incontinently for the shelter offered by the four thousand ties. Once there, they looked reproachfully toward Wolfe; he had promised to answer for their safety, and they were certainly not safe now!

Wolfe and Weaver also went to the shelter of the ties. They did not succeed in convincing even one of the crew that they had not foreseen the immediate thing they were facing.

Before long the Singletons separated, a man to himself, seeking to get at all sides of the refuge the negroes had chosen. They did not mean to shoot to kill; they meant only to shoot to scare. If they stopped the building of the little railroad, that which they considered their injured pride would be healed.

Then they opened fire again with hair-fine aim. But a glancing bullet drew blood from the engineman's forearm—and Wolfe heard bitter words of blame directed toward himself. It put Wolfe at the end of the tether that had been strained so hard. He could have held himself in no longer. The primitive part of him rose above his better self. He snatched his revolver from its holster, and turned upon Weaver almost savagely.

"We're going to fight, my friend," he said calmly but with a dangerous glitter in his eyes. "Their bluff is getting serious—if it's a bluff. A barricade all around us first—at it, boys!"

The ties made it. When it was done, Little Buck Wolfe, bright-eyed, white in the face, straightened behind it and began to look for a Singleton. He wanted to see Fightin' Lon. He had forgotten now that Lon was Tot's only brother; that Tot had loved him nearly all her life; and that Tot had saved him from death at the hands of the murderous Cat-Eye Mayfield—the vise of circumstance had pressed it entirely out of his memory in that moment of crisis.

He caught a glimpse of Fightin' Lon, and he fired six shots at him!

And Fightin' Lon, safe behind a tree, laughed down, "Bah! You couldn't hit the United States, Little Buck, wi' a double-barreled scatter-gun!"

Wolfe growled out one of the few oaths of his responsible years, and began to reload his revolver's cylinder hastily. A Singleton bullet jumped his hat tantalizingly on his head, but he paid no attention whatever to it. When he began to fire again, the foreman joined in with his own revolver. The air in the barricade became thick with powdersmoke. The echoes of the firing became one continuous roar.

Then one of the hillmen cried out in pain, and following that, the acting-chief of the Singletons shouted in a black rage, "You've got blood now, Little Buck Wolfe! We're a-goin' to shoot to kill from now on!"

Weaver caught the general manager by a shoulder and drew him down and out of danger. Bullets began to fairly pepper the barricade. The real seriousness of their position smote Wolfe like a blow. He wasn't used to this.

"Look up there!" said Weaver, pointing toward the Big Blackfern's jaw of Devil's Gate.

Old Buck Wolfe and his men, all of them armed, stood in plain view up there among the boulders.

"If your people don't help us," Weaver went on, "right here is where we either stick up a white flag, or check out. We can't handle the Singletons; there's too many of them. Let me ask your father for help!"

"No!" Wolfe objected. "No to the white flag, too!"

But Weaver was already shouting lustily to the leader of the Wolfes.

And Old Buck roared back this, "No, sirree! I've done promised I'd never start another fight wi' the Singletons!"

Then a great silence fell over everything. The Singletons were saving ammunition, and waiting patiently for a man inside the puny barricade to show his head. Wolfe knew they wouldn't wait long. He knew they would become impatient, and rush the barricade. He looked around at the groveling negroes. Their lives were in his keeping; he was responsible for their safety. For their sake, he decided that he would humiliate himself in the eyes of both the Singletons and the Wolfes.

He drew from his pocket a white handkerchief, ever the emblem of rank cowardice to the mountaineer, and began to knot a corner of it to a sourwood switch.

But it was not necessary that he suffer the humiliation of being looked upon as a coward. A big, square-chested man came running up the track; he bellowed two words that were as magic—"Go home!"

The attacking party turned unhesitatingly to obey!

Wolfe leaped over the barricade to meet the newcomer. Wolfe was altogether himself now. The spirit of civilization was again in the ascendency.

"Alex Singleton, by the grace of God!" he cried dramatically.

Five minutes after the coming of the old chief of the Singletons, the Unaka Lumber Company's general manager was the one man left in the immediate vicinity of the piles of ties. Alex Singleton had driven his kinsmen homeward, telling them in no uncertain language as they went just what he thought of them for the grievous mistake they had made. His brother Eli turned upon him angrily, and so did his son Lon; he quite promptly knocked them both down.

Weaver had been sent with the negro laborers to Johnsville, where he was to do the paying off. The Wolfes had disappeared silently from the eastern side of the Gate.

The one man left on the scene of the recent fight did not ponder the situation for long. He took up an ax and went to cut the deadline tree twice and remove the piece. He had not struck half a dozen blows when he saw coming toward him from the basin, as fast as she could possibly walk, his grandmother; the old woman carried her sourwood staff horizontally, and the bowl of her clay pipe was turned carelessly downward. When she saw her grandson alive, she stopped, threw up her hands, and let her pipe fall to the grass at her feet. She appeared to be unable to believe that he was really safe.

"Little Buck, honey," she called fearsomely, "is 'at shore enough you a-choppin' that 'ar tree the same as ef—as ef ye wasn't hurt none? Or does I see a sperit?"

"I'm all right, grandmother," he answered cheerily; then he asked solicitously concerning her rheumatism.

"My rheumatiz? I'd durn nigh' fo'got it." She picked up her pipe, and limped to him. "But I hain't no 'count, honey, at all. I'm skeered ontel I hain't got as much sense as a last year's bird nest. I was shore 'at ye'd been killed by them devilish fools. I dramp' it last night, too. I wisht I may never git another breath ef it don't jest look like the good Lord has fo'got ye, Little Buck, darlin'! But He ain't. He jest got ye in the pot to b'ile ye down to see what the' is to ye, honey. You stick; you show 'em. Yore pap hain't a-goin' to shoot at ye. Yes, I knows about it. So does the rest o' the Wolfes. They all says 'at he won't shoot at you. Why, he's dang nigh all to pieces!

"Or he was this mornin' early, anyhow," she ran on. "He found a cross cut in his bedroom floor, seven inches by five! And the' hadn't been nobody in the room but him and yore mother, neither; and yore mother she never done it. Now ye needn't to ax me nothin' about it, acause I shore don't know nothin' about it! But it makes me afeared to stay by myself at night, Little Buck; I can tell ye that. Well, what about the shootin'?"

He told her.

"I knowed it was the Singletons, acause most of it was done from the Lost Trail side," she chattered. "Well, Alex he'll hold 'em down fo' ye now. So you jest go right on ahead like ye've been a-goin', and ye're shore to win out, honey."

"I hope to," he said uncertainly, "but I don't see how. I need men, and I can't ask anybody to come in here and risk being sniped. I—I don't know what I'm going to do about it, grandmother."

She cocked her head to one side. "Would Nath he'p any?"

"Yes," quickly. "I'd like to have Nathan. I wonder if he'd dare to come over to me?"

"Little Buck, jest you ax him!" exclaimed the old woman, bringing her staff down on the little poplar with a clatter. "And say, honey, listen; don't call me 'grandmother'. Call me 'grammaw' like ye used to when ye was a weeny teeny boy. Hey?"

"All right, grammaw," without the quiver of an eyelash, "I'll ask Nathan the first chance——"

A man, tall, black-bearded, sad-faced, his mouth still showing signs of the bruise made by an iron-willed father's fist, stepped from the undergrowth and confronted Little Buck Wolfe squarely. There was a repeating rifle in his hand. There was a dimness in his eyes. It was Nathan himself. He shook hands silently with his brother.

The younger of the two men spoke first. "You've just come down from the Lost Trail, Nathan, I see; what were you doing up there with a rifle?"

"I wanted to he'p you out."

"I see," gratefully. "You didn't shoot?"

"I never got thar in time," said Nathan Wolfe. "When old Alex he comes a-runnin' up to you, I was jest a-fixin' to let Fightin' Lon have it atween the eyes; and ef I'd ha' pulled the trigger, they'd shorely ha' been another buryin' in the Lost Trail dirt. Little Buck, I heerd ye a-wonderin' to Granny thar ef I would dare to come over to ye. Yes, I would dare. I'm to ye, wi' pick or shovel, rifle or club, sink or swim, live or die, ef ye reelly do want me."

"I really do want you," his brother hastened to assure him. "Well, we'll go to work right now. While you finish cutting this piece out of the deadline tree, I'll go back and throw some ties and rails on the upper lumber flat. We'll try to get the track here by nightfall. The grading is all done this far, you see, and the rest of it is all level ground."

Nathan put his rifle down on the leaves. "Gi' me that 'ar ax," he grinned; and soon the woodland began to ring as his powerful arms drove the steel blade up to the eye at each blow in the soft yellow wood.

By the coming of darkness, the two perspiration-soaked men had finished the narrow-gauge road to the deadline. Then they sat themselves down before a crackling brushwood fire, and ate heartily a meal of their grandmother's cooking.

They slept beside the fire that night.

Granny Wolfe also furnished them with breakfast on the following morning. When they had eaten, they rose silently, each thinking the same thought, a thought concerned with the driving of a certain very important railroad spike. The shadow of the Big Blackfern was slowly falling from the crest of the Lost Trail and the base of bald Pickett's Dome. A few birds were singing their good-by songs to the lingering spirit of summer. A few sleek squirrels ran here and there in the trees or on the ground, choosing only the finest of nuts or none at all, now and then shaking their bushy tails saucily.

The old hillwoman was hopeful. She wore her red petticoat wrong side out; she had seen, the evening before, the new moon over her left shoulder and not through brush; she had dreamed of being at a wedding, too, a wedding that had taken place in a big white house that stood in the very center of a wide garden of flowers. All this, of course, could mean nothing but good luck!

"It was you and Tot!" she whispered to Little Buck. "And how her blue eyes was a-shinin'! Blast me ef I cain't see 'em yit, her eyes. Now I keep a-wonderin', honey, how Tot she's a-gittin' along in town? Is she a great, fine lady now, Little Buck? She shorely hain't got to be stuck-uppish, has she; hey?"

"Not a bit," smilingly. "She's getting along well, and learning fast; it's remarkable, they say. She's a fine lady, all right! But she's hardly 'stuck-uppish,' grammaw. No fine lady could possibly be stuck-uppish, you know."

"Well, I wisht—now hain't that the truth! Well, I'm a-botherin' of ye, honey. You and Nath wants to go to work. So go ahead. Yore pap he'll break his word, and 'en the goin'll be as smooth as ile. He—honey, ef here don't come pore old Grandpap Bill Singleton, the Prophet! How d'ye come on this fine mornin', Bill Singleton?"

The aged mountaineer's lips wore a smile, but there was worry in his eyes. He limped up to the trio.

"Ef ever I've seed a drier summer and fall," he began, "I don't know when it was. Why, what'm I a-talkin' about? I don't keer nothin' about the weather now; what I want to know now, Jane Wolfe, is what has become o' pore little Tot?"

Granny Wolfe straightened. "Hain't she at Johnsville, Bill?"

"She 'cided to come back wi' her pap yeste'day," said Grandpap Singleton, "and he hain't seed her—nor none of us has—sence he outrun her when he heerd the shootin'. Alex he's s'arched the woods all down thar below, and mighty nigh it everywhar else, and he never found no sign of her at all. Little Buck, please try to find her!"

"Perhaps she went back to the Masons—though it's not likely that she'd run from a fight that her own people were mixed up in," young Wolfe muttered. "We've a 'phone at the camp. Maybe I'd better go down there and 'phone the Masons."

The old mountain man's eyes flitted to the silent locomotive.

"Ef ye go on the ingyne, I'd like to go wi' ye," he said. "I hain't never—heh!—rid on no train nor nothin' like it."

"All right," nodded Wolfe. "Want to go with us, grammaw?"

"Shore," eagerly; "I hain't never rid on no train neither."

Wolfe helped the two old people to the cab seats, uncoupled the locomotive, sprang aboard and loosed the brakes. They were off for the now deserted camp.

The Masons hadn't seen Tot Singleton since the morning of the day before! Wolfe frowned hard at the tidings. After a few minutes spent in talking with the colonel, he hastened back to the locomotive, which was now trembling under a fair head of steam. He delivered his message to Grandpap Singleton, and reached for the throttle-lever.

"Honey," smiled Granny Wolfe, seeming somehow like a guilty child, "ef you won't git mad at me—I know whar Tot is! As we left the aidge o' the basin, I seed her a-peepin' down at us from the laurels on the Lost Trail side! I know I'd orter told ye, honey; but I hadn't never rid on no train afore, and I—I was jest mighty nigh it a-dyin' to ride!"

"That's all right, grammaw," said her grandson. "I wonder why she didn't go to her father's?"

Neither of his hearers could answer the question. He opened the throttle, and a sharp staccato of exhaust shattered the woodland peace.

When he stepped from the cab at a point near the upper end of the track, Nathan met him and said in a series of hoarse whispers, "The's dozens and dozens o' eyes on us right now, Little Buck. Gethered up thar on the Lost Trail is the Singletons, men, wimmen, childern, and dawgs; the Wolfes is the same way on the Blackfern side. I cain't locate pap, which ain't no good sign, Little Buck. I've been a-thinkin' purty hard, sence you left fo' the camp. Pap he's plum wild. He's a-goin' to shoot the man who drives the fust spike, and 'an he's a-goin' to shoot hisself—to keep his word is his religion, and it's his only way out. That's why he's hid out away from the rest of 'em. You don't think he'll do it, hey? None o' the rest of 'em does. But he will! Now, I've b'iled it all down to this here, Little Buck; listen clost——

"Ef you was to have pap and t'others o' the clan arrested and kep' in jail ontel ye could git through wi' buildin' the road and the mill, they'd burn the mill and the timber-woods as shore as shootin' when they got out. Then the law'd come out here wi' big posses, or mebbe the militia, and the'd be a awful fight, and deaths and deaths. So ye cain't do that. The one thing left is fo' me to drive the spike, and let pap shoot me and keep his word; that'd turn all o' our people over to you, acause they'd never stand fo' pap a-shootin' his own son. This way, they'd be jest pap and me killed; t'other way, they'd be dozens killed, and more dozens o' pore, daddyless little childerns left to suffer.

"So I'll drive that spike, Little Buck," he smiled. "I hain't a-goin' to let you do it. You're wo'th so much more'n what I am. You can carry on the business, and I couldn't. Asides, I've been a awful mean man in my day, and I want to do this here to sawt o' square things up wi' the Almighty. And so good-by, Little Buck, and good luck to ye as long as ye live!"

He caught up a hammer and a spike, and ran toward the section of loose rails his own hands had placed the proper distance apart just beyond the deadline.

His brother, shaken with emotion, started after him, to catch him and hold him back, to take the hammer and the spike from him and to drive the spike himself; but he tripped and fell, and before he found his feet again Nathan had placed the big iron nail and was raising the hammer to strike it.

"Wait, Nathan!" cried Little Buck Wolfe frantically. "Stop!"

Nathan did not wait. The hammer fell with a force that sent the big iron nail halfway to the heart of the oaken tie. Again the fine, muscular arms lifted the pointed hammer, and again did the hammer fall—then there came from the eastern jaw of Devil's Gate the roaring, murderous sound of a shot.

But Nathan paid no attention to it! He worked on determinedly. Before the echoes of the report had died completely away, two more spikes had been driven up to the head beyond the deadline. Little Buck Wolfe went to help, and soon the entire section of rails was made fast. A victory was won. For the first time in his life, Old Buck Wolfe had failed to keep his word.

The two brothers straightened then, and looked in all directions. A moment later, they saw Sheriff Alvin Starnes and a posse of men that represented the flower of the county's manhood, step into the Gate trail from the undergrowth; and they held as prisoners Old Buck Wolfe and nineteen other Wolfes, all of them disarmed and handcuffed!

The general manager of the Unaka Lumber Company went pale. He ran toward the sheriff's party.

"Sheriff Starnes," he protested hotly, "this is my own affair! You must let my people go. I never can do anything with them if you take them to jail, never! I promised my father that—at least, I told him—that I would not resort to law. He can't ever be made to believe that I didn't send for you; he thinks I've lied to him, don't you see? They didn't harm me, or my brother Nathan. The fact that you found them with rifles amounts to little; they're never without rifles. Please let them go!"

"One minute, Mr. Mason!" the illiterate, but brave Sheriff Starnes was somewhat angry. "We didn't arrest these men for nothin'. It was like this. One o' my deputies and me watched your father, while the rest o' the posse watched the other nineteen; your dad was some little distance away from the other nineteen, y'see. When the first spike your brother drove was goin' down, your dad lifted his rifle and said to hisself, and loud enough for me to hear, 'I'll git him in the edge o' the leg, anyhow, and keep my word.' I fired off my revolver as a signal for my men to cover the rest of 'em, and my pardner and me took charge o' your father.

"They've got to stay in jail, sir," he continued sharply, "until they can give a peace bond; and they cain't give a peace bond until they promise to not harm you or the business you're managin'. Maybe you don't know it yet, Mr. Mason, but Mr. Whitney Fair is buyin' out all o' the stock-holders in this thing but you and the colonel, which will give him a controllin' interest—and you know how he stands on sentiment!"

Whitney Fair! Alice's father. It was very bad news, indeed. Wolfe clenched his fists instinctively. Whitney Fair was a—a hog.

"We'll make no sech of a promise to nobody!" stormed the ashen-faced old clan chief.

The nineteen others repeated the declaration grimly, and some of them striped it with oaths.

"If I was to let 'em go," the sheriff went on, his voice now not so hard, "what then? You couldn't finish buildin' your operations, and you couldn't operate your operations even if you had 'em built. Jail's the only cure for this contrary twenty, sir. It'll take some o' the pepper out of 'em, and it won't do the everlastin' harm you think it will, either."

Thereupon Starnes and his posse half led, half dragged, their prisoners toward Johnsville.

Once more young Wolfe found himself in despair. What meddlesome person had brought the interference of the law? Whitney Fair? Who had told Fair about the crisis? Had it not been for that interference, the day would have been signally won for him. True, Nathan would have been shot in the leg.

But what was a fleshwound to such a victory! For his people would have discountenanced even that slight wounding of Nathan, who had so nobly laid himself on the altar of sacrifice, so much that they would have ceased to look to his father. His people would have come over as Nathan had come over. Thrown down, broken-spirited, his father himself might—possibly—have come over to the right way of thinking.

He didn't blame Starnes for taking the nineteen others also. Starnes could not have taken any one of the clan; he had to take the entire faction or none of it.

Weaver arrived from Johnsville. The moment Wolfe saw his foreman, he did something that was rather unusual for him; he jumped at a conclusion.

"What right had you to send the sheriff out here?" he thundered. "If you would take care of your own affairs, and leave mine to me, no doubt you would——"

The look of intense hurt he saw on the face of his friend stopped his speech abruptly. It was long before he forgot that look.

"They'll pay you what's due you at the office," he went on grimly, and Weaver went off down the track.

A slender figure in a blue dress sprang out of the laurels and confronted Wolfe. It was the missing Tot Singleton!

"He didn't do it!" she breathed. "I did it—I did it because I just c-c-couldn't bear the thought o' you being killed. I met Mr. Weaver going to town yesterday, and I made him tell me everything. Then I went for the sheriff and a posse—but I made the sheriff promise he wouldn't act unless it was to prevent bloodshed. Mr. Weaver took all o' the blame to save me. Call him b-back and ask him to excuse—to pardon you!"

Wolfe had been seeing her too often, and he had been too busy, to fully appreciate the vast improvement she had made in her language—even when he wasn't beside himself with anger. He gave her a queer, narrow smile now, then called Weaver back and apologized.

"And will you forgive me, Little Buck?" plaintively whispered Tot, when the foreman had turned away.

The bitter answer of Little Buck Wolfe, who in this black hour was mostly mountaineer, came promptly.

"I don't think I will," he said.

It was with a growing feeling of contempt for himself that Wolfe watched Tot Singleton go silently and broken-heartedly toward her old home in the south end of the basin. He knew that he had been grossly unkind to her, to say the least. She had done that which she had done only because of her deep interest in his own welfare. She had been his guardian angel, ever ready to make any sacrifice for him, and she had never asked anything of him but—forgiveness.

He grappled with the foolish primitive pride that had more than once come near to being his undoing, and put it down.

"Wait, Tot!" he said.

Instead of waiting, she began to run from him. She, too, had a certain amount of primitive pride.

And he frowned and let her go.

Not long afterward, Alex Singleton appeared with twenty-seven of his kinsmen, among whom was his son. He proffered the services of himself and the twenty-seven strapping hill princes in the work of finishing the railroad. Under the new circumstances, he believed Wolfe would feel free to accept. Wolfe did accept, with gratitude, and the little lumber track began once more to move onward.

When the mill-site was reached, the Singletons, with old Alex as foreman, went to one of the big coves and began to wage war upon the giant oaks and poplars. A better force of woodsmen never felled trees.

Wolfe hurried out the necessities for the building of the monster sawmill as fast as they could be shipped. Following the material, came carpenters, masons, and millwrights. The plant went up with a rapidity that was next to amazing. The first day of November saw all the machinery installed and belted, and a huge pile of perfect logs waiting to be converted into export stock worth above a hundred dollars a thousand feet. Since entering the basin, there had not been a single hitch anywhere.

And in October, that month of silences, dying leaves and soft, hazy skies, Wolfe did something besides watch over the building of the sawmill. On the spot where his father's rambling, rotting, leaky cabin had stood, an extra force of workmen had put up a very comfortable dwelling of six rooms; it was furnished throughout with modern furnishings, and lying on one of the cabinet mantels was a beautiful orange-and-brown violin. The whole was to be a surprise present for the elder Buck Wolfe. After some persuasion from the colonel and his good wife, Sheriff Starnes had agreed to bring the old clan leader out to see it.

The son was counting upon this surprise present to do much toward softening the hard iron of his father's heart. He had drawn his salary for fifteen months in advance, in order that he might build and furnish the house and buy the violin. It had put him to wearing cheap blue shirts and corduroys; he was saving his one presentable suit for special occasions.

The mill was to be started at noon. The Masons and Tot Singleton, Alice Fair—who was still dazzlingly pretty—and her father had come out to see it. Whitney Fair now owned a controlling interest in the company, which was no fault of Colonel Mason's, and he wasn't going to miss anything. Physically, Fair was a big fellow, corpulent and florid, with an unlikeable cleft in his chin and eyes that were a little too small for the rest of his features.

Promptly at twelve o'clock the great whistle blew and awoke ten thousand echoes from the walls of the basin; Progress the Brobdignagian was once more defying the spirits of the wilds. The sawyer threw a log to the carriage by means of a powerful steam apparatus; he thrust his main lever forward, and the foot-wide ribbon of steel dove into the wood with a scream like that of some victorious medieval warrior. The edgers and trimmers and slashers began to roar intermittently; it was like the quarreling of demons. Fine yellow poplar panel stock began to drift down the transfer chains and to where an inspector stood with a new rule in one hand and a new tally-book in the other.

The Masons and the Fairs shook Wolfe's grimy hands in congratulation. The humming of machinery and the sounds of the saws made speech impossible; but the man who had built the mill understood.

Then Wolfe missed Tot Singleton, and wondered where she had gone. Her absence was, somehow, a fly in this ointment. He left the Masons and the Fairs, and went down the outside stairway to the ground. The Singletons met him in a body. He found himself on old Alex's shoulders, while the rest of them cheered. When he was set on his feet, Granny Wolfe appeared with her staff and her dog; she put her arms proudly around his neck, drew his head down and kissed him on the forehead.

"Granmaw's so happy today, honey," she told him brokenly, "'at she could jest drap dead in her consarned old tracks. Kiss grammaw!"

He did, quite affectionately. Old Grandpap Bill Singleton then shook his hand as heartily as his poor strength would permit, and said to him, "Well done! You shorely ain't a slothful servant."

But the fly was still in this ointment of Wolfe's. Tot had stolen away to keep from meeting him. She was still angry with him, and the thought was oddly annoying!

His footsteps led him, it seemed without the aid of his will, up the creek and to the stately old willow that still towered over its bar of pure white sand. He came upon Tot standing motionless against the body of the gently whispering tree. She met his eager gaze with a pair of blue eyes that were half-curious and half-defiant.

It was Tot that spoke first. "I understood that the mill was to be set in the very center o' the basin. This tree is in the very center o' the basin. Why didn't you put your mill here, Mr. Wolfe?"

He stared at her. Then he took a sort of grip on himself.

"Because I didn't want to—er, desecrate this fine old spot," he told her. "Now please don't call me 'Mr. Wolfe' any more!"

"Oh, Mr. Wolfe," with the very queerest, chilliest little smile, "how many times did you figure out the amount o' lumber you could get from this tree before you mag-nan-i-mously decided to let it stand—Mr. Wolfe?"

He winced. A sharp reply sprang to his lips, but he kept himself from giving it voice.

"If you don't mind," he said, "I'd rather you wouldn't tease—now."

"Well," and her eyes scintillated peculiarly, "'Little Buck' sounds so much like an outlaw's name, or the name of an ox, you know."

She was strikingly handsome in that moment. A sudden feeling that he was her inferior kept him from being very much exasperated. He looked down at his ragged and greasy corduroys, at his grimy hands, at his worn old boots. He touched the short, stubby beard on his chin with finger and thumb. But he must offer his long-delayed apology.

"I wanted to ask pardon, Tot," said he, "for telling you a month ago that I didn't think I'd forgive you for sending the sheriff out here. I've seen you but twice since that day, and you avoided meeting me both times, or I'd have apologized sooner. Will you pardon me, Tot, and try to forget that I was such a brute?"

The mountain heart within her leaped wildly. What was an apology, the mere uttering of a few courteous words, compared to the nights and nights of poignant suffering his wounding her had brought? She had drawn deeply from self-pity for solace, without knowing that self-pity is one of the most poisonous weeds in the garden of life. She remembered more keenly than ever now. The wrong was magnified in her intensely human breast. And—she loved him.

Tot Singleton straightened proudly and proudly lifted her head. Deliberately she repeated the words that he had said to her when it was she that begged forgiveness.

"I don't think I will."

"Tot, you can't mean that!"

"But I do mean it," quite calmly.

"Then I'm mighty sorry, little girl."

He faced about slowly and left her, going toward his sawmill.

"I'm lowdown!" she whispered to herself when he had disappeared in the bush. "I made fun o' his name, and how could he help his people if he used any other name? Oh, I'm lowdown—He's such a fine man, and I—I have to watch myself, or I can't even talk proper!"

She turned her face to the body of the old willow that had been a witness to so much in her life, and sobbed because she hated herself for having taken her revenge.

Thirty days in jail had not made the Wolfe clan into better men. Contrary to the expectations of Sheriff Starnes, not one whit of the pepper had been taken out of them. They were as grim, as silent, and as bitter on the thirtieth day of their imprisonment as they had been on the first. They had stolidly refused to help in the building of good roads for the county until a diet of plain bread and water forced them to it; and then they had worked slowly and sullenly, shirking at each and every opportunity. Not a man of them but watched by day and night for some avenue of escape. For escape, to the twenty mountaineers, was the one and only alternative of rotting in jail.

Several times Sheriff Starnes had called Old Buck to him and said in the kindliest possible fashion. "If you'll give me your word that you won't allow your son or the lumber business out there to be harmed, I'll sure raise a peace-bond for you and the others, and let you go home. Promise?"

The stubborn old hillman had not once stooped to give the officer a verbal answer to the question. He had not even shaken his shaggy head. He had said once that he would never make such a promise, and once was enough to say anything.

The jail gang had come in from work on the evening of the day that had seen the starting-up of the big sawmill out in Wolfe's Basin. Much to his surprise, Old Buck found himself alone and unguarded in the little room that served as a lavatory. He peered down the long, narrow corridor that led to the jail's main entrance. There was no person in sight. He had but to make a determined dash for liberty, and liberty would be his. The dusk was thick outside now.

But he didn't make the dash! It was not according to his code of honor to go free himself and leave the other men of his name behind bars. Where one Wolfe went, all the Wolfes must go; when one Wolfe suffered, all the Wolfes must suffer; it was part of the clan's religion. The big hillman threw away his opportunity to escape without the slightest regret.

He drew himself up almost ludicrously straight, walked to the main entrance, and shouted for Alvin Starnes. The sheriff and John Bird, the night jailer, appeared before him.

"What're you doin' out here?" Starnes asked puzzledly.

"Lookin' fo' somebody to lock me up, that's what," growled the mountaineer. With intense scorn, he went on, "You two is a purty pair o' rose-geraniums, hain't ye? Yau ain't fitten to gyard geese, let alone a real man-size man like me. Now smoke that in yore pipe, you tin-can sheriff! Put down yore guns, and I'll thrash ye both."

"I reckon not," smiled the sheriff.

"I reckon not," parroted the jailer.

"Cowards!" retorted Wolfe. "Well," impatiently, "are ye a-goin' to keep me a-standin' here all night? Ef ye hain't a-goin' to tangle up wi' me, stop a-standin' thar a-gawpin' at one another like a pair o' sick hound pups, and le' me into my res'dence!"

Shortly afterward a door of iron bars was closed and locked behind him.

Old Buck ate his supper greedily, wiped his bearded mouth with a blue bandana, and stretched himself out on his hard and narrow bed. Everything was quiet now, save for the ceaseless chirping of a cricket somewhere under the jail floor. The rays of the little electric in the corridor lighted the cell but dimly, and threw the shadows of the door's bars in weird, snaky, black lines against the outer stone wall. Old Buck looked slyly across to where his cellmates, his son Oliver and Cat-Eye Mayfield, sat on a pair of soap boxes. He glanced toward the door, rose and tiptoed over to them.

"I reckon we'll try it tonight, boys," he whispered. "Tonight'll do as well as any other time, I reckon. Ef it fails, it'll jest haf to fail. Better go to bed, both o' ye. But don' take off nothin' but yore boots. Watch me; and when ye see me give the signal, take yore place whar we've done agreed. Now rickollect, boys, the feller 'at makes the least bobble gits the thrashin' of his life from me!"

The two nodded and began to remove their footwear. The old clan chief went back to his bed, pulled off his boots and threw them noisily to the floor as was his wont, and hid his huge figure under the gray blankets.

All through the hour that followed, Old Buck watched the corridor covertly. Then he saw just what he expected to see and had been waiting for: John Bird brought a small table, a chair and a newspaper, and proceeded to make himself comfortable a few feet from the iron-latticed door.

Now this night jailer never failed to become drowsy at about the time when most people are going to bed, and nobody knew it better than the men he guarded. Soon he began to nod in spite of himself, and Old Buck Wolfe rose without a betraying sound; he took from his bed ten feet of strong wire, which he had cunningly smuggled into his cell a few days before, and very deftly made a slip-noose at one end of it. This done, he threw out a hand toward Mayfield and his son Oliver; they rose noiselessly, and stole to a point beside the iron door.

The high light of the scheme crept forward cautiously. He thrust the slip-noose out, dropped it over the shoulders of the nodding jailer, and with a violent backward surge, jerked him from his chair and pinned him hard against the door's bars. Oliver Wolfe quickly put an arm through and caught Bird around the neck; with the other hand he shut off the outcry Bird strove so desperately to make. Cat-Eye Mayfield snatched a big revolver and a ring of heavy keys from the jailers figure, and within another moment he had shot back the bolt that had held him a prisoner!

"Bring them 'ar three new wash towels from the washin' room, Cat-Eye," whispered Old Buck. "We're shorely a-goin' to do this here thing up right and tight whilst we're about it."

One of the new towels was knotted hard and fast over John Bird's mouth, making it impossible for him to call out; the other two were used to bind Bird's hands and feet. The three mountaineers then pulled on their boots, found their hats, put the night jailer into the cell they had so recently occupied and locked the door upon him, and hastened to liberate the rest of the Wolves.

"Now," grinned the leader, after they had gained the cover of the outside darkness, "now fo' the basin and a big kag o' yaller cawn-juice edzactly seventeer year old come next berry-pickin' time. I was a-savin' it, Cat-Eye, fo' my friends to drink at my fun'ral."

Twenty minutes later, they climbed aboard an eastbound C. C. & O. coal train, which had stopped at Johnsville to take on water for the locomotive. There would be no difficulty whatever in getting off at the sharp grade just beyond Wolfe's Creek.

John Bird did not succeed in ridding his mouth of the towel, though he struggled until he was faint. He resigned himself to the inevitable, and there was a deathlike silence in the jail—save for the ceaseless chirping of a cricket somewhere under the floor.

When the first afternoon's sawing was done, Little Buck Wolfe went to his adoring old grandmother's cabin for his supper. He had been taking his meals at the new house; but his mother was now entertaining the Masons and the Fairs, and she had her hands full without caring for him. Shortly after nightfall, he turned toward a small, rough building that stood not far from the mill. This little building had two rooms; one of them was furnished with a cheap bed and a cheap dresser, while the other contained a desk and a chair, a table, and an iron safe that now held four weeks' pay for the twenty-six carpenters, masons, and millwrights. Wolfe stopped at the door of his office and looked upward; except for a thick bank of clouds that lay low in the west, the sky was filled from horizon to zenith with very bright stars.

A moment later, he sank into his swivel chair, took a tally-sheet from his desk, and began to figure by the light of an oil lamp. The mill had, he found, cut two thousand dollars' worth of choice lumber in five hours! There were, he told himself, big gold mines that did not pay as this sawmill was going to pay.

Just then there came to his ears the hum of merry voices, which was followed by a sharp rap at the door. He called out an invitation to enter. The door swung stiffly inward, and the Masons, the Fairs, Granny Wolfe, Tot Singleton and her father and a spotted hound came trooping in. Fair and the colonel wore overcoats; the women wore wraps.

"You be the spokesman, Alex," said Colonel Mason, with a sly wink at the general manager.

Old Singleton tugged at his sunburned, black beard and laughed like a happy, healthy boy.

"How about a 'possum-hunt, Little Buck?" he asked.

"It's too dry, isn't it?" said Wolfe. "I'm afraid a dog couldn't pick up a trail at all, tonight."

"It hain't rained—durned ef I know when it was!" chattered Granny Wolfe. "Wisht I may die ef ever I seed another sech a dry summer and fall sence I was borned. Would ye gi' me a match, Little Buck, honey? This here contrary old pipe it's gone out ag'in."

"Why not have a cigar?" Whitney Fair suggested sportively, drawing a light-brown weed from a vest pocket.

"I be consarned ef I don't try it oncet, anyhow!" laughed the garrulous old woman. "I allus would try 'most anything oncet."

She applied a burning match to the cigar, and went to puffing with all her might, greatly to Whitney Fair's amusement.

"Yes," Alex Singleton agreed seriously, "it's too dry fo' a dawg to trail good. A feller just couldn't catfoot atter squirrels at all now! But these here folks they're all dead sot on a 'possum-hunt, and I've done j'ined my symp'thies wi' their'n. The's a lot o' pe'simmon-trees jest a-hangin' full down thar clost to whar yore little railroad meets the big railroad, and we might find a 'possum or two in them trees 'thout havin' to depend on the dawg to trail. And as the steam hain't went down in the ingyne yit, we wondered ef we couldn't have what Miss Alice thar calls a 'scursion as well as a 'possum-hunt. We could put some chairs on a lumber flat, ye know."

"Come along, like a good fellow," urged Fair, smiling a cold smile that temporarily effaced the cleft from his chin. "The safe will be all right, won't it?"

"I don't see why it shouldn't be," Wolfe answered. He threw off his weariness, and entered into the spirit of the thing. "I'll run up to the mill and get the locomotive and a flat," he continued, "and pick you up somewhere on the track below. While you're waiting for me, Alex, you might ask my mother for half a dozen chairs, and get about two lanterns ready, eh?"

Singleton nodded joyously. The seven callers and the dog then hastened into the cool, starry night.

Wolfe shaved himself and put on his one presentable suit of clothing, which required fifteen minutes. When this was done, he thrust a pair of buckskin gloves and a small flashlight into his pocket, and hurried toward the mill.

His brother Nathan, the watchman, challenged him faithfully. He instructed Nathan in case of trouble to call Weaver, who was now the mill's foreman, and who stayed at the big and rough boarding-house that had been erected for the accommodation of the "furriners" of the operating crew. Then Wolfe went to the geared locomotive, threw fresh coal into the furnace, and coupled to a lumber flat.

He met the others at a point close to the new dwelling that was to be given to his father, and took them aboard. Alex Singleton rode on the fireman's seat with his dog in his lap.

They stopped near the C. C. & O. siding. Granny Wolfe knocked the fire from her first cigar, and put the half-smoked weed in her pocket to save it. Alex Singleton took up one of the lighted lanterns, and set his feet in a narrow, laurel-lined trail that led off westward. Behind him in the order named went Granny Wolfe, the Masons, the Fairs, young Wolfe, and Tot Singleton.

Miss Alice Fair began to lag purposely, and soon there was a distance of some fifteen yards between her and her father, who carried the second lantern.

"That bank of clouds ahead looks like rain, Arnold," she said—plainly, to make conversation.

"Yes," agreed Wolfe; "and we need it."

"You've been avoiding me, Arnold."

He admitted it.

"Because you didn't want to be near me—which, of course, is a very simple conclusion!"

"Er, yes," he said.

"Why didn't you want to be near me?"

"Because we have nothing in common now, Alice," he told her. "It's—er, your own decree, and it's the best for both of us, I'm sure. I'm not the kind of fellow you'd care for with the only affection worth while. We'd be unhappy if we were married to each other. The time to part ways is now. Don't you agree with me, Alice?"

"I certainly do!" There was a tiny note of desperation in her voice; she had tried to make up, and failed. "I don't wonder at your forgetting me so easily," she went on. "You fell in love with me so easily, you know."

"Yes. I'm twenty-four. I felt the real need of the fine, understanding companionship of a good woman. You were the only young woman I knew intimately; I'd studied almost day and night trying to make up for a youth that had been entirely lost, so far as education was concerned, and I hadn't time to be a sociable fellow. I didn't stop to consider whether we'd be suited to each other—you were so pretty, you know, Alice."

"Thanks!" with stinging sarcasm. "But I'm fading now—am I?"

"I think you'll always be pretty," he said very seriously.

She looked backward and laughed at him scornfully. "But the impossible Miss Singleton——"

"She's not impossible," interrupted Wolfe, who was now somewhat incensed. "In fact, she's one of the finest specimens of humanity I've ever met."

Without another word, Miss Fair hurried on and overtook her father.

Suddenly a hand was placed lightly on Wolfe's arm from behind. He stopped and faced about, and confronted a slender, but well-rounded figure, a feminine figure in dark blue. It was Tot Singleton, and she was trembling violently.

"I overheard—I eavesdropped!" she whispered nervously. "I feel mean about it, Little Buck, and I wanted to tell you for my conscience's sake. To—to think that you, after the way I treated you this afternoon, would take up for me to Miss Alice! It hurts, and I'm ashamed o' myself. Please forgive me, if you can, will you?"

He took both her hands and pressed them warmly. The touch gave him a comfortable thrill. "Forget it!" he smiled.

"You're so nice to me," she cried softly. "But you're mistaken in what you told Miss Alice. I'm little, and mean. I'm just beginnin' to l'arn about myself. I'm a-findin' that half o' the fruit o' the tree o' knowledge is tears. Listen, will you—mountain dialect again! I wonder if I'll ever quit thinking in it? Understand me, Little Buck; I'm not exactly ashamed of the mountain dialect."

Wolfe laughed. "You can't go all the way at one leap, Tot, of course; be patient, and keep trying!"

"In some ways, I'm worse than I used to be," she said dejectedly. "I've got so afraid of the dark that it was easy enough for me to make myself believe that I kept close to you and Miss Alice because I didn't dare to stay far enough behind to be out of hearing. I wasn't afraid of the night when I lived back here in these hills. I wonder a lot about that, Little Buck. Maybe it was because I was a part of the night myself then!"

Wolfe looked at her with increased interest. She was beginning to show new facets. There was something quite wonderful about her.

"I'll be falling in love with you, Tot," he told her, "the very first thing you know."

"That's not likely," laughed Tot.

She hurried past him, and soon disappeared around a sharp bend in the narrow trail.

Wolfe walked on rapidly, and overtook the rest of the party just as the deep music of the dog's baying fell upon the chilly air.

The voice of Alex Singleton boomed out, "By the Eternal, ef he hain't treed a'ready! Treed by sight! Hold the 'possum, Rock! Hi, thar, Rock—don't ye lose him! Good old dawg, Rock!"

"I'll be durned ef this here hain't good luck," said Granny Wolfe. "Light out atter him, Alex!"

They followed their guide, who turned to his right and picked his way through a copse of laurel, and drew up at a persimmon tree laden with frost-bitten fruit. Singleton kept his lantern swaying behind him, while his alert gaze searched the branches of the tree for a pair of round and glistening black eyes. He wished he had a good pine torch!

"I see him!" he cried finally. "Le's hide the lights onder our hats, Mr. Fair, and everybody look right in the tiptop o' the tree."

They saw between them and the starry sky a round, dark bulk that was as motionless as the mountain under their feet. The old hillman passed his lantern to Colonel Mason, sat down, and removed his boots. A few minutes, and he had climbed to a point within ten feet of the persimmon-eater.

"Look out below thar!" he shouted.

He began to shake the uppermost branch with both hands. There was a sudden dull thump on the ground below. With a yelp of delight, the spotted dog dashed forward and seized the little animal by the throat. The opossum stiffened, and feigned death perfectly, but the hound was not one whit deceived. Alex Singleton climbed down, tied a stick in the 'possum's mouth to prevent its sharp teeth doing damage, pulled on his boots, rose and led the others proudly to another persimmon. For one night, old Alex was king.

The sport kept up until midnight, when Colonel Mason suggested that they return to the basin.

Just as those on the flat were settling themselves for the run, just as Wolfe was reaching for the throttle-lever, there came tearing through the stillness the dull but mighty roar of the sawmill whistle. It was somehow like a death-knell. It blanched the cheeks of every member of the party. The long blast died out in its own echoes. Then there came a short blast that ended abruptly; it was as though the hand that had held the whistle-cord had been suddenly stricken down.

Wolfe opened the throttle as far as he dared. With the other hand he opened the valve to the sandbox.

When they had covered three miles, a voice from the flat ahead sent tremors to Wolfe's heart. The voice said but one small word, but that one small word meant destruction.

"Fire!"

Fire, when the fine, new mill had run but half a day!

It was a cataclysm.

Soon the now thickly overcast heavens became lighted everywhere ahead by a lurid, blood-red glow. It was evident that the conflagration was great and steadily growing. Granny Wolfe knelt on the lumber flat, turned her seamed and troubled face toward the Omnipotent, and begged that a rain might come and put to rout the element that is at once mankind's best friend and worst enemy. The rest of the party kept grimly silent.

When the little locomotive pushed its one car through the jaws of Devil's Gate and into the basin, those on board were greeted by a spectacle that was nothing less than appalling. Every one of the deep and finely-timbered coves was a raging furnace of dead leaves, dead wood, and resinous pine, which were as dry as tinder. The big mill itself was a raging furnace. It was already too late for any rain except a cloudburst to save anything whatever. The devastation promised to be complete within a very short time.

"This is the end," Wolfe kept saying bitterly to himself. "This is the end of it all."

The locomotive and its flat came to a jarring, grinding halt a hundred yards from the burning mill, and the hunting party alighted. The "furriners" of the mill crew, most of the Singletons, and the women and children of the Wolfes were gathered together before the blazing plant in an awed, helpless mass of humanity. The children were crying with fear; some of the women were sobbing aloud; the men were pale and silent.

Weaver, the foreman, and Nathan Wolfe, the watchman, hurried to meet the party that had just arrived. The watchman was burned about the hands and face and arms; his clothing was scorched and blackened and torn.

"Well?" the general manager said unsteadily.

The foreman looked toward Nathan Wolfe, then turned his face away. Nathan Wolfe gulped, and tears began to sting in the broken blisters of his cheeks.

"Here's how it was, Little Buck," he said in a shaken drawl. "A fire was started up in every cove, it seemed to me, at about the same time. As soon as I seed it, I made a streak fo' the whistle-cord. Somebody slipped up and grabbed me from ahind o' me, and throwed me down hard. This man was half-drunk, but he was as strong as a bear all the same, and I jest couldn't git loose to save my life. Three other men carried bucket atter bucket o' mile-ile upstairs, and poured it out, and 'en set it afire. When the ile it was a-burnin' good, the big man he le' me go.

"I tried awful hard to put the fire out, Little Buck, but I jest couldn't do it. The water I throwed on the burnin' ile didn't do nothin' but spread the fire. Then I made fo' the whistle-cord ag'in, and this time I got to it. I'd done blowed one long blow, and was a-startin' to blow ag'in, when the same man 'at grabbed me afore grabbed me and throwed me out o' the ingyne-room door and kep' me out. Mr. Weaver and them 'ar other furriners they run in then, but they met about twenty men wi' clubs, and they couldn't do nothin'. And purty soon it was too late to even try to save anything. Was the mill inshored, Little Buck?"

"The insurance men were to be out tomorrow," Little Buck Wolfe answered hoarsely. "They'd refused the risk twice before. But you didn't tell me who set the mill and woods on fire, Nathan."

"I hates to tell ye, Little Buck," sadly, "but you're plum' shore to find it out anyhow. It was our own people. They must ha' broke jail. It was pap who grabbed me the twicet, and it was Unc' Brian Wolfe and our brother Oliver and Cat-Eye Mayfield who carried the ile upstairs and set the mill afire. The whole outfit of 'em was a-drinkin' hard."

Young Wolfe straightened under this, the greatest blow of his life, and folded his arms across his deep, broad chest. He stared toward the furnaces that lighted the whole of the basin as bright as noonday and roared as though they were Gehennas filled with lost souls; his hopes were all in those fires and burning, burning to gray ashes. Everything was gone. The Masons were left practically penniless in their old days; it was this, perhaps, that hurt him most—he could have wept over it. There had come to his whitened countenance a look that kept away even those of his friends and kinsmen who loved him best.

Suddenly there appeared from the bush to the eastward the Wolfe clan and Cat-Eye Mayfield. They reeled a little, and they were full of defiance. The Wolfes were now armed with rifles, which they had taken from their homes after their womenfolk and children had gone to the burning mill. They halted a few rods from the awed multitude. Their leader, staggering for the first time under alcoholic influence, shook his great fist toward the man who was losing most, and lifted his Goliath voice in tones of black triumph:

"Who wins now?"

The son did not even appear to be aware that the father had addressed him. There fell a silence that the noise of the nearby hungry flame was scarcely able to dissipate. Now no woman sobbed; no child wept.

"Who wins now?" the giant mountaineer repeated.

At last Little Buck Wolfe turned his head and looked toward his half-drunken father. A great deal of the suffering left his face, and a pity that was akin to the divine shone from his eyes. The old clan chief went pale in spite of himself. Came at that moment an old voice that seemed to hang in the air, like the smoke of incense——

"'And they bring him unto the place Golgotha, which is, a-bein' interp'eted, The place o' a skull.' Saint Mark; fifteen, twenty-two."

Like a John the Baptist out of the wilderness, Grandpap Singleton, the Prophet, stepped before them. Until this moment, his people had not seen him since the time of the mill's starting. His mind was almost completely broken. His snow-white head was bare, and his lean face was strangely haggard. In one hand he carried a dark, round object that the others did not then recognize for the pitiful, tragic thing it was.

He went to a point close beside the young man whom his good old heart had loved so truly and so well. He stretched one of his long, thin arms toward Picketts Dome, which stood out plainly in the fire's light and in bold relief against the red, red heavens. The others looked, and saw on the summit of the peak a great ironwood cross. He had erected it there in the hope that his children and the children of his children might see it when temptation assailed them, and not forget.

"Finish it!" he cried to Old Buck Wolfe, and it was a terrible condemnation. "Finish it! Loose the silver cord, and break the golden bowl—break the pitcher at the fountain, and the wheel at the cistern! Take this good man, yore own flesh and blood, up thar and nail him hand and foot. Spit upon him, and give him vinegar and gall to drink when he axes fo' water. Pierce his side, and cast lots fo' his clothin'. Finish it!"

The demented patriarch held up the dark, round object he had brought. It was a crudely woven crown of thorns. He pressed it down upon the brow of Little Buck Wolfe, the Arnold Mason that was, who stood as dumb and as motionless as a tree; and if the thorns that sent several tiny drops of blood trickling down the pallid face gave pain, there was not the least sign of it.

Save for the Wolfe clan, Cat-Eye Mayfield and Whitney Fair, the multitude groaned at the sight. It was eerie, and it was also somehow holy. Tot Singleton sank to her knees and sobbed aloud. The Wolfe clan, and even Cat-Eye Mayfield, became suddenly sober. Old Buck shuddered. Long forgotten things were gripping his soul and making him ashamed of himself. He dragged a tremulous, grimy hand across his forehead and started slowly, drawn irresistibly, toward the best of his five sons; and his footsteps led him all too near the burning plant.

Young Wolfe removed the chaplet of thorns from his brow, and put it down at his feet.

"It makes me afraid," he muttered; "it makes me afraid," and he went to meet his father.

Then the great, hot smokestack swooped downward with a mighty swishing roar. It was Little Buck who saw Old Buck's imminent danger first.

He leaped forward, shouting, "Out of the way! Run! Quick!"

His father stopped as though the words had paralyzed him. He appeared to be unaccountably dazed. The great stack loosened a beam from the roof which flew out and struck him across his shoulders, and bore him to the ground on his face.

"He'p me!" he screamed smotheredly. "I'm a-burnin' to death—he'p me, fo' God's sake!"

Every man of those present dashed toward him. There was no time to be lost in looking for levers; if the wheels of fate were to be cheated, bare hands must lift the smoldering beam; human flesh must voluntarily be seared.

"Drag him out, Little Buck, when we raise; all together, boys—go to it!" Alex Singleton bellowed.

They went to it all together, Wolfes and Singletons face to face and shoulder to shoulder, and there rose the sickening scent of scorched flesh. Little Buck Wolfe dragged his father's giant figure to safety. The others dropped the searing beam and ran. A blazing wall fell and hid the spot where Old Buck had lain.

"His pore back!" wept Granny Wolfe. "It's all burnt and blistered! He'p me to take him home, Nathan, honey. Will ye go home, Buck, pore boy?"

And her favorite son answered weakly, "I'll go anywhar ye wants me to go, mother. Fo' because I'm already in hell."

It began to rain then. It was a slow, drizzling rain that could have saved nothing, had it begun hours before.

Ten minutes after the slow rain set in, the grounds about the almost consumed building were deserted save for the general manager. Wolfe had not been able to leave the thing that had been his palm of victory and the pride of his heart. Colonel Mason and a number of others had insisted upon his seeking shelter, to no avail; they had then insisted upon remaining with him, but he wouldn't permit it. He walked slowly and alone, like a sentinel upon his beat, and watched the flames die down and leave a great pile of glowing coals and red-hot, twisted iron and steel. When finally he turned toward the house he had built for his father, he was wet to the skin.

Just as he left the dimming red glare, there came to his ears a dull rumbling that was like an explosion of dynamite. He paid little attention to it then, though he remembered it vividly enough afterward.

Already he had decided upon a course for the future. He would go to one of the lumbering districts of the Northwest, and establish himself there; he would pay back, the Masons first, every cent of the money that had been lost in the ill-starred Unaka Lumber Company. It would require the best part of his life, perhaps, but he would do it. It should be his one purpose.

Whitney Fair met him on the new house's veranda. They were about to pass, when Fair said gruffly, "I'll take the key to the office door, if you please."

Wolfe frowned. He knew why Fair was going to the office. The wonder of it was that Fair had not demanded the key sooner. He meant, of course, to telephone Sheriff Starnes at Johnsville, and notify him of the outrageous doings of the escaped prisoners.

"The key, if you please!" Fair growled.

In no heart are the ties of blood stronger than in the mountain heart. Wolfe drew back. His kinsmen had wronged him deeply, it was true, but they were still his kinsmen. They hadn't had the advantage that had been his.

He took the key from his pocket, and gave it over. There was, plainly, nothing else to do. Anyway, he told himself, the chances were that the jail delivery had already become known, and Sheriff Starnes and his posse were perhaps even then on their way out to the basin. Whitney Fair turned the collar of his greatcoat up close around his neck, and hastened toward the crude little office.

Wolfe entered the new house without rapping. There was a cheery log fire in the living-room. Old Buck Wolfe, his blistered back bandaged, sat very straight on a couch.

"Where are the others?" his son asked.

"I run 'em out," sourly.

"Why?"

"I wanted to be by my lowdown self, damn it," answered the old mountaineer. "Whose fine dwellin' is this here?"

"Yours and mother's. I built it for you."

Old Buck nodded thoughtfully. "That's what they told me, but I jest couldn't believe it was the truth to save my life. And whose fine fiddle is that up 'ar on the mantel?"

"Yours. I bought it for you."

Old Buck cleared his throat. "That's what they told me, but I jest couldn't believe it. I figgered you'd got married to Alex Singleton's Tot and lived here wi' her. Hadn't ha' been fo' them Singletons, I reckon I'd ha' done been burnt to a cinder; wouldn't I?"

"There's no doubt of it," promptly.

"Little Buck," the father said with striking earnestness, "no man cain't be the same atter he's look death in the eyes, and tasted of it, like I've done tonight. Death it showed me things. Death and the cross and the crown of thorns. I'm a-tellin' ye, son, a man can shorely live a whole etarnity in his one dyin' minute—though I'm no coward, and don't ye fo'git that. I reckon I been the meanest, lowdownest polecat 'at ever lived, hain't I?"

"I guess not." Wolfe the younger turned his face away. "There are worse men than you."

Silence fell between them. Old Buck's fifth son then went gloomily to the semi-darkness of the veranda, and dropped into a chair.

After what seemed a very long time to Little Buck Wolfe, a slim feminine figure, in clothes that were wet and bedraggled, ran through the gateway, ran up to him, and put a hand rather hard on his shoulder.

"Tot!" he exclaimed. "Where've you been, Tot?"

"I followed Mr. Fair," breathlessly. She dropped to her knees beside his chair and went on, "He told Sheriff Starnes everything over the phone. They'd already found out about the escape, and Deputy Sheriff Howard Cartwright'll be here with a posse before very long. And—listen! The office safe has been dynamited and robbed! Mr. Fair found your gloves and flashlight lyin' on the floor, Little Buck, and he thinks you did it! He thinks that's why you stayed behind. He told the sheriff it was you. Oh, I'm so sorry; it seems that the—the Lord is tryin' to see how much you can bear!"

"I heard the explosion that opened the safe," Wolfe told Tot. "How I wish I'd investigated then!"

He felt through one of his pockets after another. Both gloves and flashlight were gone.

"I must have left them in the locomotive's cab," he reasoned aloud, "and some ransacker found them. Afterward the ransacker found the dynamite in the tool-house, and the safe in the office. It all fits in very nicely, Tot."

"Yes. How much money was there in the safe?" she asked.

"Twenty-eight hundred."

He went to his feet, and at that instant his father appeared on the veranda. Old Buck walked slowly and with considerable pain. He had overheard the conversation between his son and the daughter of old Alex Singleton.

"The fire it was all my fault," he confessed. "Ef it hadn't ha' been fo' me, nothin' wouldn't ha' been set afire at all. I headed the whole thing, me and a kag o' licker did. Tot, I want you to go and tell Oliver and Brian and the others 'at they must light a rag out o' here and keep from a-bein' arrested. Tell 'em to go away back to the Balsam Cone section. Their wimmenfolks and children can foller 'em atter a little while. I made this here debt, and I'll pay it all myself. Tell 'em that, Tot, please."

Tot Singleton looked questioningly toward Little Buck, who said no word, gave no sign.

"Please, Tot," the old hillman begged, "go and tell Oliver and Brian and the rest what I said. The debt it's all mine, and I hain't a-goin' to let nobody else pay none of it. Please go, Tot!"

"Must I?" Tot whispered to Little Buck.

She had no answer whatever. After half a minute of waiting, she disappeared in the rainy night.

A quarter of an hour afterward, the clan stole hurriedly up to its leader. Old Buck asked them to go while there was yet time. But they would not agree to it. They wouldn't be yellow. One man should not pay all of the debt to the law.

"Ef you'd jest go along wi' us, Buck," finally said Brian Wolfe, "then we might go."

"But I cain't hardly walk!" Old Buck exclaimed. "I'd be nothin' but a drawback and dead weight on ye. Go on, boys! You cain't resk a-bein' sent to the State penitenchy, a-leavin' yore famblies to make their own way; don't ye see? It hain't fair to 'em! Yore fust duty lays to yore wimmenfolks and children, boys; hain't ye got hoss sense enough to know that much?"

Little Buck Wolfe caught his strapping brother Oliver by the shoulders and shook him.

"You've got to do it, Oliver," he said hoarsely. "I'll hide him—" he pointed to his father, and looked covertly toward the open front door—"somewhere; and when he's able to travel he can follow the rest of you to the Balsam Cone country. You've got to do it!"

"Atter the way we treated you?" Oliver Wolfe's voice was almost pathetic. "You'll shorely hide him?"

"I certainly will. You'd better hurry, or it'll be too late, Oliver."

Not until they were gone did Little Buck Wolfe realize fully just what he had done. He had put himself into the place of an accessory to the crime of arson, and he was liable to almost as much punishment as the principals themselves! The thought was staggering to him. He began to pace the veranda floor nervously.

Tot Singleton appeared before him. She understood fully. She strove to make him feel that he had but done right.

"Don't feel so blue about it, Little Buck," she said to him gently. "What else could you do? Their families need them more than the prison needs them. They're as sorry now as the penitentiary ever could make them. Besides, the mountain man can't stand imprisonment for long; most of 'em wouldn't live through the fifteen years—that's what I understood Mr. Fair to say it would be. You m-mustn't worry, Little Buck!"

Wolfe stepped to his father and took him by the arm.

"We must go," he whispered. "Cartwright will soon be here. I must have you hidden before he comes. We must go!"

"I guess," Old Buck demurred, "I'd better let Cartwright have me."

"No! Let's go—for mother's sake. You must think of her, and not of yourself. You've been too unkind to her in the past." He was fairly dragging his sire toward the steps. "Quick—we must be quick. Fair may come back at any minute, and he—let's go!"

Old Buck permitted his son to lead him out of the yard and away in the murky drizzle.

A bleak, gray dawn was slowly breaking over the scene of black desolation when the two men arrived at a small-mouthed cavern in the side of the Big Blackfern. The elder of the pair squeezed himself through the rocky opening with some difficulty. The other placed a great flat stone over the hole, and almost ran back to the new house to tell his mother and the Masons and Tot Singleton good-by; he meant to start for the far-away Northwest immediately.

Whitney Fair met him at the gate. Fair had discovered that every man of the escaped Wolfes had disappeared; he was purple in the face, and his small, pale-blue eyes glittered like those of an angry animal.

He seized one of the lapels of Wolfe's coat and cried savagely, "You'll pay for this! You warned them, and that makes you as guilty as they are—give me the money you took from the safe!"

"I didn't take any money from the safe," Wolfe replied with a level calmness that surprised even himself.

"You did!"

"Be careful, Mr. Fair!"

Whitney Fair went ashen instead of purple. "And there are some other things against you, too," he fumed. "You had an agreement by which you were to have this land for a pittance an acre when the sawing was done; you drew your salary for—er, more than a year in advance. Oh, but I'll have the net around you good and hard before you know what's happened! Hand that money right back, you thief!"

There was a quick step behind him. Colonel Mason, tall, patrician, and now white, caught his arm.

"Let him go, sir!" the colonel ordered hotly. "He is no thief—and anybody that says he is, sir, lies outright!"

Fair sniffed like a disgusted hound. "Meaning that I have lied outright, Colonel?"

"Exactly that," the old Southerner said quickly. "If the shoe doesn't fit, take it off!"

The cleft in Whitney Fair's chin deepened in a black scowl. He swore. He took his right hand from Wolfe's coat lapel, tore his arm from Colonel Mason's grip, and struck Colonel Mason in the chest——

The world turned as red as blood to Little Buck Wolfe. He couldn't stand idly by and see the man who had been to him a better father than his own father thus brutally mistreated. He went at Fair like a combination of cyclone, pile-driver and battering-ram and, with his two fists pounded Fair until his coarse face was almost unrecognizable. The worsted man sank dazedly to the wet ground.

"The next time you feel like striking anybody that's seventy-five pounds lighter and twenty years older than you," advised Wolfe, "be sure that there's no son of his near to take his part."

He led the colonel aside, and took him by the hand.

"I'm going away," he whispered, and he hastily explained why. "You can see that the evidence is big against me, and I can't possibly spare the time that it would take to spend a term in prison. I'll write when I think it's safe. Tell my two mothers and Tot good-by for me. I——"

Strong man that he was, he had choked. Colonel Mason choked, too.

"Son," he whispered thickly, "be careful when you write. Fate has left nothing undone, it seems—Fair is soon to be appointed postmaster at Johnsville! But you don't owe us anything, Arnold, my boy. We are willing to accept life's brimming cup of bitterness along with life's honey-sweetness. It was not your fault, certainly! But I must admit that the case against you looks bad, for Fair is undoubtedly influential, and you really had better get out from under. Good luck to you, and God be with you always——"

He was unable to say more. Mrs. Mason and Old Buck Wolfe's wife ran toward them from the house. The two women had seen and overheard much; they had easily guessed the truth. Wolfe embraced them tenderly, and kissed them on the cheek with reverence. Then he tore himself from their arms, and went rapidly toward the foot of scarred Lost Trail Mountain.

Once behind the border of burned and blackened laurels that stood along the edge of the basin's bottom, he noted that the slow rain had ceased, and halted and looked back. He could see the long, strong arm of the law, in the shape of the doughty Deputy Sheriff Howard Cartwright and a posse, coming by way of Devil's Gate!

Wolfe ran toward the other end of the basin, keeping always behind the border of blackened laurel. Before he had covered half a mile, he met Alex Singleton and his son, Fightin' Lon. Both the Singletons wore thick bandages over their palms. They questioned Wolfe anxiously, and he told them all there was to tell.

"You shorely can't slip out o' the basin now," declared old Alex. "That man Cartwright, I knows him. He used to be a revenuer. He's got eyes like forty hawks; they say he never fails to bring in his man. Better stay hid in the basin untel tomorrow night, anyhow, Little Buck. I'll hide ye in the apple-hole onder my cabin floor, and they cain't never find ye thar! Come on wi' me—quick."

The fugitive was hidden among bushels and bushels of green and yellow pippins. The boards were put back into place above him, and a crude table was dragged over the spot. Lying down there under the floor, he heard Alex Singleton and his son take chairs to the front doorway and sit down noisily. He heard stout Mrs. Singleton whistling one of her old-fashioned hymns in the lean-to.

A long hour afterward, there came to his sensitive ears sounds made by the tramping of dozens of human feet and ironshod hoofs.

Cartwright accosted the Singleton leader sharply. "Seen any o' the Wolfes?"

"Seed 'em all last night at the fire," quite readily, "and I seed Little Buck a-runnin' toward the Lost Trail from his pap's new house somethin' like a hour and a half ago."

The deputy then demanded pointedly, "Are any of them here?"

It had become, after a fashion, a battle of wits. Alex Singleton rose in the doorway.

"Howard Cartwright," he almost roared, "d'ye thing fo' a minute 'at I'd have little enough sense to hide anybody from the law? I hain't a-hankerin' atter the penitenchy sence I've seed the inside of it, and le' me tell ye that. But ef you think I'm a-lyin', s'arch my house and satisfy yoreself!" It was adroit.

The posse had already surrounded the cabin. Cartwright entered and looked carefully in the loft, under the beds, in the two big chimneys of stone—everywhere but in the apple-hole.

He apologized after he had finished searching the premises. They told him that it was entirely and absolutely all right. Mrs. Singleton even stopped her everlasting whistling long enough to tell him that it was all right.

Old Buck Wolfe found the darkness stifling. He crept back to the cavern's narrow mouth, rested himself on an elbow, and looked through a small aperture. He watched his son whip Fair. He watched his son bid the Masons and his mother good-by, and run toward Lost Trail Mountain. He saw the minions of the law enter the basin, saw them searching, saw them go away empty-handed, and because they had gone empty-handed, a slow, pale smile of triumph spread over his bearded face.

But the smile did not last. His keen gaze soon picked out a tall and powerful figure in officer-blue that was sneaking back on foot along the fire-blackened side of the Lost Trail. Deputy Sheriff Cartwright, who had never failed to bring in his man, had not yet given up; he hid himself at a point that commanded a fair view of the whole basin, and began to wait with the patience of Job.

Everything was so very still now. Not a breath of air was stirring. The clouds had lifted somewhat, and Old Buck Wolfe's gaze came to rest on the great ironwood cross that poor Grandpap Singleton, the broken-minded, had erected on the summit of majestic Picketts Dome as a reminder to his people. The same queer, shuddery feeling that had assailed the chief of the Wolfes the night before now gripped him again. Between him and the sacred emblem of life and death the misdeeds of his past stood up like the spirits of gaunt, grim, evil giants. Finally a sense of utter shame overpowered him, and he wiped at his eyes with a big, blue bandana. Words out of the mouth of Grandpap Singleton, the Prophet, came back to him forcefully, and brought him face to face with his own soul:

"To them as thinks the' ain't no God, the' ain't none, so far as they're concerned."

His lips jerked, then moved stiffly.

"Who but a All-Pow'ful Bein' could ha' made the sun and the moon and the stars and the world? These things had to have a beginnin', shorely. They never jest happened. Sech big things as them cain't jest happen. From this day on, I'm mebbe a-goin' to do my little argyin' on t'other side o' the fence."

The clouds lowered, like a broad, feathery blanket dropped from the skies, and the ironwood cross was hidden from his sight.

By nightfall he was very hungry. He had eaten nothing since his last meal in the jail at Johnsville. But he bore it with fortitude, and in his uncouth way tried to be thankful for the tiny stream of water that trickled out of a crevice in the rocks a few yards behind him. The long, dark hours dragged by, and midnight came. Still no one had come to bring him food. He stretched himself out on his side, with his great, shaggy head pillowed on a forearm, and went to sleep.

When morning dawned, he crept to the aperture and peered through cautiously. He saw nothing of Howard Cartwright, but that fact was not proof that the officer had quit the watch. The chances were that Cartwright had only changed positions.

The day passed, and night fell again, and still Old Buck Wolfe had had nothing to eat. He was ready to run any ordinary risk to satisfy his gnawing hunger now. He put his hands against the flat stone that his son had placed over the narrow mouth of the cavern, and overturned it. Another minute, and he was standing beside an upright, charred shaft of wood that had been a fine yellow poplar tree. Something drew his gaze upward; he saw millions of frosty, brightly-twinkling stars—promises, Grandpap Singleton had called them.

He began to move slowly and soundlessly down toward the deep gash that had hidden for so long his moonshine still. Save for its upper edges, this little hollow had escaped the fire.

Then a big, dark form stepped suddenly before him, and a voice that he recognized instantly inquired in low and guarded tones, "Buck, old feller, is that you?"

Old Buck choked back an oath that had come unbidden to his tongue. Had not Alex Singleton helped to save him from death in the worst of all its shapes, death by burning?

"Yes, Alex," he answered in a small voice, "it's me. I'm mighty nigh it starved plum' to a shadder. I jest had to git out, Alex, and try to find me somethin' to eat."

"Now le's be awful keerful," Singleton whispered. "Le's go to the cave, Buck."

Wolfe led the way in. Singleton followed close behind him. The two groped their way several rods back into the pitchy darkness before they stopped.

"I'd ha' done brung ye somethin' to eat, Buck," old Alex said, as they sat down together, "ef Cartwright hadn't ha' been a-watchin' so hard. Here, take this here basket; it's got three fried chickens, half of a whole b'iled hawg ham, and a big pone o' cawnbread in it. And take this here cawfee-pot; the cawfee's all sweetened and ready. Tot she fixed it all up fo' ye, Buck, and the cawfee's got a tear in it—damned ef I didn't see it drap, myself. Now, old feller, eat ontel ye blamed nigh bust, ef ye wants to!"

Wolfe took the basket of food and the pot of coffee with an eagerness that was wholly pitiful.

"Alex," he said tremulously, "I'm so glad to git this here grub 'at I'd ax the blessin' ef I jest knowed what to say. Would you mind a-doin' it fo' me, Alex? I'll sartainly be obleeged to ye."

"Shorely, I will," Singleton agreed gladly.

Old Wolfe ate ravenously, while his companion explained, "Yore folks'd ha' fetched ye somethin' to eat afore now, Buck, but they didn't know whar ye was at. Little Buck never had much of a chanst to tell 'em, I guess. But he told me, and I'm a-goin' to take keer of ye. Little Buck he's in a tight place now, as sartain as hell's hot. Robbin' the safe, he'pin' you men git away from the law, assault and batt'ry on Mr. Fair—dang it, they'll pen him fo' life ef they ketch him! But they ain't likely to ketch him, Buck."

The food in Wolfe's mouth began to taste like wood. He rose there in the cavern's darkness, and made an odd noise in his throat.

"Pore boy—he liked me so much 'at he even named hisself atter me," he choked. "And me—I've treated him like a dawg. Alex, I want ye to do me a big favor. Will ye do it?"

Singleton nodded in the pitchy gloom. "I promise, o' course. Anything on earth."

"Then," Old Buck said shakily, "I want ye to git a mule-killin' hick'ry club, and beat me mighty nigh it to death on my sore back fo' a-bein' what I've been and a-doin' what I've done. Hurry, Alex. I look to ye to keep yore promise."

"I won't do it!"

"You shorely wouldn't be a liar fo' me, Alex!" surprisedly.

"I'd be a durned sight more'n that fo' you, Buck, old feller!"

"By God!" exclaimed Old Buck Wolfe, amazed. "Whar," he asked a moment later, "is Little Buck at?"

"He's jest started on foot through the mountains fo' Virginny," the Singleton leader answered. "He traded me his hoss and saddle and watch fo' a rifle and two hunderd ca'tridges, two blankets, a supply o' grub, a fryin' pan and some tools to eat with, and forty dollars in money. Atter things sawt o' blows over, he'll git on a train thar in Virginny, and go away off to the No'thwest, whar he's a-goin' to make his forchune and pay back all 'at was lost in the fire."

To old Alex, it seemed a very long time before Wolfe spoke again.

"Alex, I want to ax ye about somethin'. It's bothered me a heap. A few weeks ago, I found a little cross cut in the ground afore my still, and another one cut in the bark of a tree, and yit another one cut on my cabin floor. Do ye know how come it them crosses was thar?"

"It was pap," Singleton explained. "He takes spells o' wanderin' in his mind, ye know. He cut 'em a night or two afore you found 'em, and them at the still he'd covered wi' leaves so's you wouldn't see 'em ontel he'd oncovered 'em. Pap is a pow'ful feller to plan ahead, pore old feller. Well, I'll go now, Buck, but I'll be back at the fust good chanst. You be keerful!"

When his friend had gone, Wolfe crept out of the cavern to get away from the tormenting black stillness. The stars were brighter than ever, and a thin veil of frost had settled down over the ashes of the great fires. The deep mystery of the mountain night was everywhere; it awed Old Buck, and for minutes on end he stood as motionless as the blackened tree-shafts about him. He came to himself with a jerk——

"Robbin' the safe," he mumbled, "he never done it. It was hatched up ag'in him."

He went down to the little whisky still that his own hands had built and operated. The mash-tubs and the copper boiler and worm were all white with frost. He touched the boiler, and felt that it was a contaminating thing—it stung him. There welled up in his bosom a great hatred for it.

"It was you," he said bitterly, "'at made me do what I done. And when I gits through wi' you, you ain't a-goin' to look nothin' at all like yoreself!"

Old Buck had forgotten that the sheriff's ultra-cunning deputy might be near him. His injured back, also, was forgotten. He drew an ax from the cold furnace, and with mighty blows destroyed his false god.

Then he bent his two knees to something that was neither a ginseng root, a woodchuck's den, nor a moonshine still.

Little Buck Wolfe seemed much like a soldier fitted out in heavy marching order with his blanket-roll on his shoulder, and his pack on his back, and his rifle in his hand. He stopped and faced about when he had reached the crest of the Big Blackfern. The darkness of the night could not conceal from him the desolation that lay below; he saw it with his eyes shut! The candles in the cabins of the basin's bottom glowed like pale yellow stars in the gloom.

He centered his attention upon the light that shone from the nearest window of old Alex Singleton's cabin, and wondered whether Tot had put it there as a last pitiful shred of farewell to him. He was glad that he had kissed her—it had been an act of impulse—when they parted. The memory of that would be with him, sweet and tender, throughout the years that he must spend buried in the hardest work before the colossal debt could be paid in full. He was convinced now that he really loved Tot Singleton. And he did. He wouldn't have been human if he hadn't. As for marrying her—there was the debt! He couldn't afford to marry.

It was with a painful swelling of heart and throat that he turned away. Just then a feminine voice called his name. He halted quickly and looked around. A slender figure was hurrying up the dim path toward him.

"Tot!" he cried.

"Yes," she panted. "Wait!"

In her hands she carried a rifle. Over one of her shoulders was a blanket-roll that contained two spare dresses and some other things. She wore dark-blue, and about her head and neck was a heavy scarf that Wolfe himself had bought and given her as a birthday present.

"Where are you going, Tot?" he asked, as she drew up before him.

She hung her head. The butt of the repeater that had been the pride of her brother Lon's heart dropped heavily to the ground. Wolfe stepped closer to her, and took one of her hands.

"Where are you going, Tot?" he repeated softly.

She looked up. "I want to go with you!" in a certain desperation, and more or less tearfully. After all, she was more child than woman.

"But——"

Tot Singleton interrupted, "You'll be lonesome away out there in the cold Northwest. You'll need me. I can do so many things for you. I can cook for you, and wash and mend your clothes and keep 'em nice for you, and—and maybe I can comfort you when the blue days come. I couldn't ever bear it back here now, knowin' that you was so far away and so much alone. I—I wa-want you to m-m-marry me and take me with you, Little Buck! I wanted to ask you when you t-t-told me good-by, but I just c-c-couldn't——"

It ended smotheredly. She had recited it; she had been saying that speech over and over to herself all the way up the tortuous side of the Blackfern. But the simple earnestness of even the recital was one of the most striking things that had come into the life of Little Buck Wolfe.

He drew her hand to his breast and caressed it. The action was wholly involuntary.

"I wish I could take you, Tot," he told her sadly. "I know that I'll need you in a thousand ways. But because I do love you, I can't cheat you of the education that is only fairly begun; I can't take you from the worthwhile things and put half my load on your shoulders. Besides, I'm a fugitive now, you know. And there'll be real hardship. I'm not going straight to the Northwest, Tot."

"But you said——"

"Yes," he nodded. "I decided since leaving your father's house that I'd spend the winter in the wilderness that lies about the head of Doe River, which is probably the wildest place in America; it is very rarely that anybody goes in there, even to hunt. You see, Tot, I won't be safe anywhere out in the world until my so-called crimes"—in spite of himself, he winced—"are sort of forgotten. And there's another reason.

"When I was a small boy, Tot, there came to my father's cabin one day a stranger, a youngish man, who was about ready to die. We gathered from his delirious talk that he had come to the mountains for his health. He had with him a funny-looking pointed hammer, and a big magnifying-glass. Just before he passed out, we caught this from his babbling—I haven't forgotten a single syllable of it:

"'It's a trick of fate. Wealth—hundreds of thousands—and I've got to die and leave it all—after having been poor all my life! Fate, old girl, you're a damned trickster.'

"He had mentioned Doe River Wilderness," Wolfe pursued. "My father thought he must have found gold there. Not very long after the stranger's death, my father and my Uncle Brian went to Doe River Wilderness and spent a few days in a half-hearted search for gold. They found nothing that even looked like it.

"Of course, Tot, I know that the sick man might have been the victim of hallucinations. The chances are strong that he was. But as it's best that I stay hidden for a few months, I may as well try my luck; it will keep my mind occupied, anyway. So you see, Tot, there'll be real hardship."

"But you said you loved me," and one of the arms of the innocent temptress crept slowly around his neck. "If you love me, Little Buck, Doe River Wilderness will be the finest place in the world to me; it'll be parad-d-d-dise. And I'd do all I could to make it the finest place in the world for you, too. I'd rather lie down and die than to stay behind! Please, won't you let me go?"

Wolfe was entirely human. His resolve began to tremble.

"You might get sick out there," he said uncertainly. "We might not be able to get a doctor at all."

"I'm never sick, Little Buck," she replied quickly. "As for the hardship, I'm used to that; what mountain woman isn't? Listen. I sent Lon to Johnsville for a marriage license, and I've got it here. We can pass by old Preacher Longley Thrash's cabin, and get him to marry us. Oh, Little Buck, honey, you must—I just can't stay here now. Why, I—I'll be your d-d-dog!"

He stared at her in amazement. She continued.

"If you think I'm oversteppin'—I'd been believin' you loved me; when you kissed me good-by tonight, I knew it, I knew! I told myself you didn't ask me to go with you because you loved me too much to ask me; and that was exactly the way of it. You're lookin' at it wrong. I'll not stand between you and that old d-debt; I'll help you pay it! Can't you see, Little Buck, you ol' dahlin'?"

Her rifle fell to the ground. Both her arms were around his neck and drawing his face down to hers. Among the stars that were mirrored in her sea-blue eyes was the tenderness that few ever look upon save in the eyes of young mothers when they behold first their first-born. Her countenance was enraptured with the spirit of an adoration that was beyond the understanding of mortals, and that was strong enough to defy utterly the rules and conventions of the world.

All this he saw, and it wrought the ordinarily warm feeling he had for her into the grand passion, the great flame that burns never more than once. He knew that she was his mate, his woman, just as she knew that he was her mate, her man; he put his arms around her fine shoulders, and pressed her to him with a fervor that might have frightened another woman.

"And you'll let me go, won't you?" she rejoiced.

"Let you go?" he laughed. "Why, I'd steal you and carry you off now, if you didn't want to go!"

She gave the man who was soon to be her husband a folded paper, which he thrust into an inside pocket. They hastened to the mountaineer minister's home, and were married. According to his custom, old Longley Thrash gave them his blessing, an ax, and a side of acorn-fatted, pepper-cured bacon. Wolfe gave the preacher a banknote.

Because of the hawk-eyed deputy, the couple dared not spend the night anywhere in the Wolfe's Basin country. It was only after more than four hours of brisk walking that they stopped under a giant hemlock that stood beside a dashing creek, and made a bed of boughs and the blankets they had brought.

Two and a half days were required for the completion of their exceedingly unusual wedding journey. They were footsore and weary, and their clothing was somewhat torn, when at last they reached the heart of Doe River Wilderness.

But their eyes brightened at the sight which greeted them there. Before them lay an open and level space of half a dozen acres, which was dotted sparsely with big gray-barked, leafless beeches. In the very center of it was the source of Doe River, a small lake, or great spring, of such depth that the water was bluish-black. Wolfe and his wife went to it, their tired feet swish-swishing in the thin carpet of brown and yellow beech leaves. Had they known that it was here the iron chalice—but they couldn't know.

They threw up a temporary shelter of hemlock boughs. On the next morning, Wolfe set out alone to the eastward, and found his nearest neighbor at a distance of eight miles. This neighbor, for a consideration, agreed to go to Conradsville—which was in North Carolina and twenty-four miles away—for nails, traps, window-lights and a few other articles. Then Wolfe bought a bag of cornmeal from the man, promised to return three days later, and hurried back to his waiting and naturally anxious wife.

Just ten days from the time of their starting their little log cabin, Wolfe nailed the last split board on the roof and finished the lumpy stone-and-clay chimney. It was all very crude, of course. The two narrow doors were made of split-oak slabs; there were but two small windows; the floor of flat stones was rough and uneven; the few pieces of furniture were homemade and unsightly. But the man and the woman who dwelled there loved each other, and were happy in spite of all there was to make them unhappy, and it was home—that dearest of all earth's places.

The days stole into the past rapidly, as joyful days always go, and the last of February came. Wolfe had searched faithfully for the treasure that the stranger of the long ago had babbled about on his deathbed, but to no avail; he had found nothing that in any way resembled gold. The trapping had been good, however, and neighbor Ivins had been accommodating, and Wolfe had succeeded in saving enough money to take him and his wife to Oregon in the spring. As for Tot—Tot was a full blown rose of a woman now, and to her husband, quite properly, the most wonderful person he had ever known.

One of the last of the winter's snows had just ceased to fall. The white blanket was nearly a foot in depth on the ground; it lay heavily upon the branches of the trees. They stood together at one of the small windows, watching the twilight shadows fall in the forest. The full moon peeped above the crest of the long, low mountain that formed the eastern horizon, and heaven's own pure white began to glisten like a field of diamonds. Over the whole scene hung a silence so deep that Wolfe and his wife felt that they could touch it, almost, with their hands.

"So you're through with the gold hunt," Tot murmured.

Her husband nodded slowly, thoughtfully. "It seems useless to go any farther with it. If I hadn't known that gold has been found in these hills now and then for ages, I wouldn't have had the heart to stick to the search these three and a half months. When this snow is gone, if you don't mind, Tot, we'll start for Oregon."

"I don't mind, of course," Tot replied dutifully. "Whenever you think we ought to go, we'll go. Little Buck, the stranger's treasure surely wasn't gold."

Her surmise was correct!

Wolfe suddenly leaned forward and pulled the mealbag window-curtain into place, and led his wife from the window. There was a look of mild concern on his countenance. Tot found herself in the grip of a nameless fear.

"I saw something glint in the moonlight; it was a gun barrel, I think," Wolfe said quietly. "I'll go out and investigate, and I'll let myself out by the back door; drop the bar into place after me, Tot, and don't be a bit afraid."

"Do you think it's an officer?" she whispered breathlessly.

He shook his head. "Probably not. But I'll see, anyway."

But there was the possibility that it was an officer, and Wolfe carried no weapon with him; he would run from the law, but he wouldn't fight it. He went, stooping low, the instinct of the woodsman strong within him, across the open space; as noiselessly as a shadow, he stole along the edge of the forest, going from bush to bush and from tree to tree, and crept up very near to an angular, slouching figure that was peering toward the cabin from behind a huge oak. The unknown had an old-fashioned, single-barreled muzzle-loading shotgun in his hands; it was a gun that no officer would carry, and Wolfe drew a breath of relief.

Then the fellow meant mischief. Of that there was no doubt. It angered Wolfe to see this serpent in his Garden of Eden. He crouched low, and with a spring like that of a panther landed on the back of the unknown and bore him to the snow on his face.

"What are you snooping around here for?" he demanded hotly. "Who are you, anyway?"

He tried to turn the other's face upward. The stranger was strong and wiry; he kept his countenance hidden very effectively. Wolfe rose, seized the man by his collar and jerked him to his feet.

"I'll see you, all right," he growled.

The stranger wheeled with all the quickness of a cat, and struck Wolfe in the chest, staggering him. Wolfe loosed his hold on the man's collar, and struck out hard. His fist met only the air. The unknown turned and ran through the deep snow and into the denser shadows of the woodland, leaving the shotgun lying under the oak. Wolfe followed and caught the fellow by his ragged coat; there was a tearing sound, and something that jingled musically dropped to the snow.

The stranger, seeming spurred by a sudden frenzy of fear, doubled his efforts, ran into a thick copse of underbrush—and escaped.

When Little Buck Wolfe picked up the thing that had dropped with a musical jingle from inside the lining of the mysterious person's coat, he was filled with amazement. It was a canvas bag containing more than twenty-four hundred dollars in banknotes, gold and silver.

The robber who had dynamited the Unaka Lumber Company's safe on the night of the fire had just slipped through his fingers!

Wolfe groveled in the deep snow for the old-fashioned shotgun his antagonist in the struggle of a few minutes before had lost. He found the long muzzle-loader, and hastened to the cabin's front door. Tot let him in, and he told her of his little adventure. They sat down before the wood fire, and counted the money.

"If you were to catch the robber and have him arrested," Tot asked hopefully, "wouldn't it clear you o' the charge o' stealin' this money?"

"Yes, it would clear me of that. But, you see," and Wolfe frowned, "it wouldn't wipe out the charges that I am an accessory after the fact to a felony and—and the other things. Whitney Fair is a hard man, Tot, and he's shrewd. He'd go to any end to make me smoke, on account of the beating I gave him. I couldn't risk going back, if that's what you're thinking about. I believe this would be our best plan:

"Tomorrow, I'll set out after the robber, and follow him by means of his track in the snow. I'll catch him, and we'll take him over to Ivins' place. We'll instruct Ivins to keep him for ten days, and then turn him over to the sheriff at Conradsville. You and I will steal into Conradsville, express the stolen money to Colonel Mason, and immediately afterward board a train for Asheville. In Asheville, you'll buy two fares for the Northwest, and I'll join you on the train; this to break possible pursuit. Ivins likes us, Tot, and he won't let our man talk him into doing anything we don't want done. Eh?"

"You ought to know what's best for us, honey," Tot answered promptly. "But I'll be anxious while you're gone after the robber. You see, it's Cat-Eye Mayfield you're goin' after."

"Of course—that is, it's probable."

"And if you're not mighty careful," seriously, "you'll follow him into a trap of some kind."

Her husband laughed boyishly. "Don't you think I'm capable of matching wits with Cat-Eye Mayfield?" he said. "I'll have the advantage of being armed, you know."

Tot poked the fire before she spoke again. Wolfe noted that her now ruddy face was decidedly troubled.

"It's like fightin' a snake in the dark!" she warned. "Cat-Eye maybe hasn't got any gun; but he's got the cunnin' of a fox, and the cunnin' of an Indian, and the cunnin' of a man born to be a killer all in one. I tell you again, Little Buck, if you're not mighty careful, you'll follow him into a trap. He knows you'll try to track him down, and he'll be ready for you. Remember, that man hates you a lot more than you can ever, ever understand, Little Buck!"

Wolfe laughed at her fears, though in this instance it was she that was the wiser of the two.

"I'll be careful," he promised.

They took a flat stone from the floor next to the hearth, exposing a tiny pit beneath. The canvas bag and its burden went into the pit with their savings money, and the stone was put back into place. Then they saw that the little cabin's doors and windows were securely fastened, and retired for the night.

An hour before the coming of the next dawn found them up and busy with the preparation of breakfast. When Wolfe had eaten, he strapped a full belt of cartridges around his waist, took up his rifle and his hat and a bundle of food, kissed his wife fondly and set out on his journey. The day promised to be clear, but the wind was out of the north and stinging, biting cold.

The footprints led him in an almost straight line to the southward. The robber had deviated only that he might avoid a cliff or a dense thicket of undergrowth. It was very evident that Mayfield, if Mayfield it was, had traveled with a fair knowledge of the wilderness and with some goal definitely in view from the start.

The air became even colder as the day wore on. Wolfe was forced to keep his feet moving at a lively rate, and to frequently beat his gloved hands together, to prevent frostbite. The snow now had a crust that impeded his going somewhat, and made his tramping noisy. He began to be a little nervous because of his everlasting, expectant watching ahead. Wolfe was not a man who bore suspense easily.

By the middle of the afternoon he had covered, he judged, fifteen miles. He now found himself in a perfect jungle of tall virgin timber that would have widened his eyes in admiration had the circumstances been different; it was spread over a rugged, rocky valley that few men, except for Cherokee Indians, had ever entered; the very primitiveness of it was at once both beautiful and terrible. A weird light reigned between the green of the treetops overhead and the white of the snow under foot. There was no sound except for the soughing of the wind through the needles of the gaunt, spectral hemlocks.

It was in here that the man whom Wolfe had been following had made camp. A pile of coals that were still glowing marked the spot. Wolfe paused for less than two minutes to warm his hands over the remains of the unknown's fire, then struck out at a faster gait than ever along the fresher trail; and he remembered Tot's warning, and tried to keep his wits about him.

Then he was suddenly confronted by a little canyon, in the bottom of which flowed a clear and sparkling mountain stream edged with ice. The footprints of the unknown ended abruptly at the brink. He knelt and peered over. The snow on the ledges below him had not been disturbed. His man had crossed, he figured, for there was no backward track—but how?

"He didn't fly over!" muttered Wolfe to himself. "And yet——"

Ever suspecting trickery, he searched the thick woodland around him with his eyes. Everything seemed quite as it should be. Another moment, and his gaze fell upon a great wild vine that hung within arm's reach of him; it ran almost to the top of a tall hemlock, and—it had been cut at a point near the snowy ground.

"I see—" Wolfe smiled—"he swung himself across by means of this!"

It was not an unreasonable conclusion. The distance over was not more than thirty feet; the vine's first fastening was on a branch fully twenty yards above. Human destinies sometimes hinge upon the tiniest things; if Wolfe had but noted that there were no footprints on the other side of the little canyon, for instance——

He tested the vine; it held his weight with no sign whatever of giving away. He looked below, and considered; if he fell, he would be hurt: neither the snow that covered the farther half of the canyon's bottom, nor the water that covered the nearer half, would keep him from being hurt if he fell. Therefore, he tested the strength of the vine again. Again it held his weight without the least sign of breaking or tearing loose in the tree overhead.

"I should be able to do anything that the other fellow can do," he told himself.

With that, Wolfe proceeded to fasten his rifle and the bundle of food to his cartridge-belt. Then he took a firm hold on the vine, stepped fifteen steps backward, ran forward swiftly, and launched himself out over the chasm—and the vine parted high in the tree with a sharp snap. He loosed his grip on it and flung out his arms, turned completely twice in the air, and landed hard upon the ice-coated stones beside the rippling creek. A few seconds of spasmodic writhing, a faint moan, and he lay face-downward, motionless and silent.

Had he been unconscious for long, doubtless he would have frozen. Perhaps the penetrating chill helped to bring him to. He sat up dazedly, and dazedly noted that his hat, coat, rifle, cartridge-belt and rations were gone—and that there were dozens of fresh footprints, the same footprints that he had been trailing, in the snow about him.

In spite of his watchfulness, he had fallen into a trap very neatly!

Wolfe tried to get upon his feet then. A fiery streak of pain in his right leg wrung a hoarse cry of pain from him. He dragged himself to the shelter of a nearby overhanging ledge, and on the way came upon his bundle of food; it had been torn from his belt in the fall, and the friendly snow had hidden it from the robber's eyes. He sat up on the dry earth, and hurriedly took stock of his injuries. His forehead was bruised and swollen; six inches above his right ankle there was a fractured bone.

A small heap of driftwood lay nearby. Wolfe took a knife from his pocket, whittled a few handfuls of shavings from a stick of dry heart-pine, and started a fire to keep off the bitter cold. When the wood was burning well, he tied a handkerchief about his throbbing head, removed his right boot and ripped the trousersleg to the knee, and bound his injured limb in a set of crude splints. The pain of the fracture was now as much as he could bear without shrieking.

He stretched himself out on his left side, with his back to the rock wall. Suddenly he realized that he was staring at the smaller end of the wild vine. It had been smoothly cut; his man had been waiting for him in the top of the hemlock that had supported it.

"Of course, that was it!" nodded Wolfe, with a bitter little smile. "I—I might have known."

Perhaps the robber, thinking him done for, had gone away for good. Then he would put out the fire, that the smoke from it might not reveal the fact that he was still alive. Anyway, he must begin dragging himself homeward. If Tot became so uneasy that she followed him, and something happened to her—the thought made Little Buck Wolfe's face as hard as a mask of marble.

But his precaution was for nothing. A pair of opaque, uncanny black eyes watched him toss the burning wood to the snow. He chanced to look toward the hemlock above; he saw Cat-Eye Mayfield standing with one lean shoulder touching the body of the tree. Mayfield wore Wolfe's coat and hat over his own coat and hat; around his slender waist was Wolfe's cartridge-belt, and in his hands was Wolfe's repeater.

The two men glared at each other for a full minute without speaking. Mayfield was proud of his cunning; his villainous triumph was written over his narrow, dark face and in his lustreless eyes. Wolfe was defiant, and so full of rage that every nerve and fibre of him trembled; the veins in his temples stood out and throbbed violently.

"Well?" snapped Wolfe.

"Haw-haw-haw!" laughed Mayfield. "Howdy, and hello! A-judgin' from the way ye've got that 'ar leg o' yore'n fixed up, Little Buck, I'd say ye'd missed yore callin'. Ye'd ort to been a doctor, shorely! Ye could git plenty o' cases o' bots and pip, anyhow—haw-haw-haw!"

Wolfe set his teeth together, and refused to reply. Mayfield became demoniacally sober, and asked abruptly, "How'd ye like to be shot?"

There was certainly no levity anywhere in the question. Wolfe knew very well that he was facing the open jaws of death, knew that his life depended entirely on Mayfield's whim. Mayfield had little to fear. A man's bones might lie there in that wilderness, bleaching and bare, for years upon years before they were found. As for Tot—the man beside the hemlock figured that he could very easily take care of Tot!

"Have ye got any pa'tickler choice about jest whar ye'd ruther be shot?" he inquired with tantalizing calmness.

The man below forced himself to speak steadily: "There's no other way out? You're determined to top it all off with murder; eh?"

"Shorely." Mayfield's opaque eyes narrowed wickedly. "Shorely. I've lived my whole life to git to this one minute. Ef ye wants to say yore little 'Now I Lay Me,' git at it!"

Wolfe shuddered in spite of himself, though he bravely kept the other from seeing it. Death seemed inevitable. If he must go the long, long way, he would go as nearly without pain as he might; besides, he believed that a bold front would go farther than anything else toward saving him—and the wretch should not have the satisfaction of even suspecting that he was afraid.

"Harm Tot, if you dare—and if a man can rise from his grave I'll rise from mine," he said quietly. "Let's see whether you can hit my fingernail, Cat-Eye."

He put the tip of his right forefinger squarely on the center of his badly-bruised forehead. His hot mountaineer blood was thrumming in his ears now.

"Hold it thar!" said Mayfield.

Wolfe held it there. Mayfield drew back the rifle's hammer, and began to take aim without a rest; he was a good enough marksman for that. Wolfe watched Mayfield as though there was something about the villain that fascinated him. A minute passed, an eternity in sixty seconds, and then a spirit of terror seized the man below. The suspense bore down upon him with a weight that was smothering. He felt that he must cry out to Mayfield and implore him to put an end to it. But he kept his lips resolutely closed, and his gaze remained riveted unfalteringly upon the unwinking black eye beyond the sights of his own repeater.

"Huh!" Mayfield grunted suddenly.

There is no doubt that Wolfe's quite terrible gaze had something to do with it—Cat-Eye Mayfield lowered the rifle, and shrugged his narrow shoulders oddly.

"Huh!" he grunted again. "It wouldn't last nigh long enough to suit me, Little Buck."

The pain in Wolfe's injured limb was greater than ever in that moment, but he kept from wincing, for he knew that the other would certainly regard it as an exhibition of fright.

"What do you mean?" he asked sharply.

"Jest what I said; nothin' more, and nothin' less. I'm purty shore I can fix up somethin' 'at'll beat killin' ye this a-way. Yeuh, I'm purty dang shore I can."

"Probably," nodded Wolfe.

"Ye see," Mayfield went on devilishly, "I might hatch up some way to sep'rate you and Tot, or somethin' like that, ye know. Well, I reckon ye hain't never heerd what happened to yore pap and his outfit atter you and Tot left the basin, have ye? Ef ye hain't, I'll find big pleasure in a-bein' the one to tell ye. Hey?"

"What happened to them?"

"Well," and Mayfield caught the repeater into the hollow of an arm and began to chafe his cold hands, "well, Depity Cartwright he ketched yore pap on his knees clost to his moonshine still, which same he'd done tore all to pieces, a-prayin' to beat hell. Cartwright he took off his hat and waited untel Old Buck was through, when he chased Old Buck back to his cave whar he'd been a-hidin' at; and fin'ly Cartwright he ketched yore pap and took him down to the jail at Johnsville. How's that fo' news, Little Buck; hey?"

"It's news, all right," growled Wolfe. "Anything else?"

"Shorely!" grinned Mayfield. "Well, atter he had Old Buck all tight in jail, Cartwright—he's a reg'lar heller!—he watched the Wolfe wimmen; and when they went to their men folks over in the Balsam Cone section, he follered 'em. And 'en Cartwright he went back to Johnsville and got up a big posse, and went back and ketched every one o' the rest o' the clan. How's that fo' news?"

Wolfe had gone ashen. He believed, somehow, that Mayfield had told him the truth. And Mayfield really had.

"The whole outfit of 'em had a trial," the man beside the hemlock went on eagerly, "and they was all sent up to the State prison at Nashville fo' five year!"

That, also, was truth. Violently-suffering Little Buck Wolfe bent his head in gratitude for the silver lining to the cloud; five years was not half the sentence usually meted out for the crime of arson. A beautifully bright spot, too, was the turning of his iron father.

"I reckon you're a-wonderin' why I hain't never caused you to be ketched by the law, hain't ye?"

Mayfield's voice jarred. Wolfe shook his head.

"Not a bit, Cat-Eye. You're wanted, too, and you've no great wish to get anywhere near the authorities."

The man above eyed the man below peculiarly for a moment. Then the man above drawled, "Little Buck, you talk like a book. You look like a book. And you act like a book!"

Wolfe jumped as though he had been struck. His wife had told him that word for word one cold evening when they sat at their fireside; but she had said it admiringly, for she knew it was because he had, as it were, lived on a diet of books for eight years, so hungry had he been for education.

He knew that Cat-Eye Mayfield had eavesdropped at their cabin!

"I didn't tell anybody whar ye was at," said Mayfield. "Acause I had more ag'in ye 'an the law's got. Little Buck," and the lustreless eyes had never seemed so diabolical as now, "I've hated you all o' my life. I've hated ye so long and so much 'at I'm all hate; from the crown o' my head to the sole o' my feet, I'm all hate fo' you. Every dawg has his day, ye know. You've done had yore'n. Now I'm a-goin' to have mine. I'm a-goin' to make you wisht ye'd never been borned. I'm a-goin' to make ye wisht ye could die!"

Wolfe gave him a silent, unflinching stare. Mayfield continued.

"I hain't got it all planned out yit. But I think I can promise ye one thing faithf'ly; you hain't never a-goin to set yore two eyes on Tot Singleton any more."

"You cut-throat!" cried Wolfe.

"And," Mayfield grinned suddenly, "I plum' mighty nigh it fo'got to tell ye this here:

"Ye know a half a gallon o' licker and a half a gallon o' water makes a whole gallon o' licker, when a little tobacker or lye is put in it to stouten it up, don't ye? And it's considered a lowdown trick, as ye also know. Well, a long time ago, yore pap he sent me up to Alex Singleton's atter a gallon o' cawn-lightnin' when his still-worm had friz and bu'sted; and I swiped half o' the licker, and added water an a big leaf o' tobacker to make out. So when yore pap he found the tobacker in the jug, he went straight ater old Alex, which was the startin' o' the fightin' atwixt the Wolfes and Singletons. Some more news, hain't it? Haw—haw—haw! Well, I guess ye can make it to the lake in about three days o' good, hard crawlin' like a lizard. So long to ye, and bad luck!"

He disappeared. The sounds of his footsteps died away quickly, and there was silence save for the rippling of the creek and the soughing of the wind among the needles of the hemlocks.

Wolfe's heart was torn afresh with fears for Tot's safety. Mayfield possessed more cunning than he had been willing to believe; the plot, whatever it was, would be as black as the Pit and, probably, successful. Spurred to the highest degree of desperation, Wolfe stuffed his package of rations inside his shirt, and took a crude crutch from the pile of driftwood; then he began to make his way slowly and painfully down the stream. He soon came upon a rotting tree trunk lying across the creek, and by means of this he went to the other side of the canyon's bottom and to the base of a series of ledges that promised escape.

Twenty minutes later, he was crawling determinedly along the path that his feet and Mayfield's had made in the snow.

That journey through the frozen forest was difficult and terrible. He was forced to halt occasionally to rest himself, and always he built a little fire that he might not take cold while his overworked and trembling muscles were relaxed. He labored on all that night and all the next day, without stopping more than half an hour at a time. When there were yet five miles between him and the great spring that Tot had named "The Lake of Peace," he became utterly exhausted; the physical machine that was him was fine, but it had reached the limit of its endurance.

Since it was not humanly possible for him to go farther without rest and sleep, he made a fire in a sheltered spot and put on wood that would last for hours. This done, he fashioned himself a thin couch of laurel branches, collapsed upon it, and at once was wrapped in a slumber so deep that it was akin to death itself. But vague dreams tormented him when the first keen edge of his exhaustion was worn off; he heard Tot calling to him again and again, and he awoke in a fever of anxiety while it was yet night. He sat up stiffly. He had to go!

When he had eaten the last of the food that his wife had prepared for him, he took up his brushwood crutch and set out to the northward once more. He strove hard to make himself believe that Tot had been neither outwitted nor deceived by the foxlike and dastardly Mayfield. But the fear would not be driven away.

The middle of the afternoon had come when at last he reached the open space that lay around the head of Doe River. His heart ached with apprehension because Tot did not come out to meet him. He opened his lips to call and couldn't speak her name. Fear had made him dumb.

Wolfe crumpled on the icy doorstep. With the palm of one of his half frozen hands he beat against the door. The only answer he had was the dull rattle of the wooden latch. He struggled upward, seized the coonhide latch-string, and gave it a nervous jerk. The door creaked slowly inward. There was no person in the cabin. Wolfe entered on his hands and knees, reached a crude chair beside the hearth, and drew himself into it with difficulty.

A fire burned brightly in the wide stone fireplace, and in a corner of the room lay a little heap of wood with particles of snow still clinging to it; the cabin had not long been deserted, certainly. After he had rested for a few minutes, Wolfe went first to the door at the rear and then to the door at the front, and looked for his wife's footprints in the snow outside. He recognized only the footprints of Cat-Eye Mayfield and himself.

More anxious than ever, he leaned weakly against the jamb, put his cupped hands to his mouth, and shouted.

"Tot! Tot!"

The rockbound hills sent her name back to him in echoes that were worse than maddening.

"Tot!" he called again; and again came the echo, Tot!

Once more he called, and this time the voice that floated back to him was a little broken. He felt that he was about to fall. He crept dizzily to his chair, pushed it closer to the fire and climbed into it, and put out his hands and feet to warm them.

As the cold's numbness left him, his mind became clearer. He began to look about him. Tot's spare clothing lay nicely folded on a shelf beside his own, as usual. Tot's rifle was not in its place over the smoked log mantel. Every cent of their savings and the other money was gone. The bed was rumpled badly on one side. A few scattered bits of food and an unwashed frying-pan on the rough dining-table gave it a distinctly untidy appearance. These tokens offered Wolfe scant reason to hope that his wife was safe. All manner of fearful possibilities came to torture his already over-wrought brain. Perhaps——

His thoughts were broken into rudely by the sounds of masculine footsteps in the crusty snow beyond the doorstep. A rasping voice began to sing a snatch of foolish song:

Wolfe switched his gaze toward the open doorway. Cat-Eye Mayfield entered and stamped the snow from his run-over cowhide boots noisily. In one hand he carried the rusty, old-fashioned, muzzle-loading shotgun that he had lost a few evenings before.

"And so ye got back, did ye?" he said hoarsely; he was suffering from a severe cold in his throat. "I told ye it wouldn't take more'n three days o' good, hard crawlin' like a lizard, didn't I?"

"Where's my wife?" Wolfe demanded.

Mayfield laughed gratingly. It was not forced. Wolfe's anxiety delighted him. He dropped into the other homemade chair and trained the shotgun across his lap, straight at Wolfe's face.

"Where's my wife?"

"Now you jest be keerful 'at ye don't start somethin' 'at ye cain't stop," Mayfield warned, at the same time thumbing back the old muzzle-loader's hammer. It was a clumsy thing. "I'll tell ye whar yore wife is at, Little Buck, in my own good time, and not a minute afore; please git that, will ye?

"I reckon," he went on forthwith, "you're a-wonderin' what I've done about the rifles and the money, hain't ye? Well, I broke Tot's rifle, and throwed it in the lake; I hid yore rifle whar I hid the money. This here old shotgun is all the weapon I want fo' you. I hain't a-wantin' to kill ye. It would end yore mis'ry too soon. I want ye to suffer a long time, and I'm a-goin' to make ye suffer a long time! The' hain't nary grain o' lead in this here old gun. The' hain't nothin' but powder—six loads o' powder, all tamped in tight wi' clay. You couldn't never guess what I'm a-goin' to do with it, so I'll tell ye.

"I'm a-goin' to shoot ye in the face wi' powder, and black it fo' good jest like a nigger's, and put yore eyes out—atter I've told ye what I've got to tell ye. Fust off, you're a-goin' to spend the rest o' yore days a-wanderin' in Doe River Wilderness as blind as a bat, a-eatin' leaves and grass and roots—keerful ther, Little Buck Wolfe, or I'll shoot right now!"

His voice rang with hatred and—insanity! But Wolfe was in no condition to take note of the latter. Wolfe was sitting up straight, his eyes glittering, his hands gripping the sides of his homemade chair as though they would crush the wooden splints. For a moment he seemed about to defy the threatening shotgun and attack its owner in spite of his badly injured leg.

But the wicked eagerness he saw in Mayfield's lean face caused him to relax. He did not doubt that Mayfield would pull the trigger at the slightest provocation. It would be best to wait. If he waited, there might be a chance——

"Tell me about Tot," he said unsteadily. "And if you've harmed her, Cat-Eye——"

"Now don't go so dang fast," broke in Mayfield, crossing his lanky legs without in the least spoiling the shotgun's aim. "I hain't even laid the weight o' my little finger on Tot. I shorely hain't. I managed my revenge another way. It was right cute, too! Well, here's the whole thing. Little Buck; and ef ye tries to git at me whilst I'm a-tellin' it, I'll shoot—and when I shoot, black goes yore face and out goes yore eyes. I hopes ye onderstand me.

"All right," he ran on, enjoying every moment of it. "When I got here, it was sev'ral hours atter night, and the moon it was a-shinin' as bright as day. The' was a light in the cabin window here—to show you the way home, I reckon. I hides myself ahind of a tree, and watches fo' a little while. Tot she'd come to the door every few minutes, and look out. Once she must ha' imagined she'd heerd you a-comin', acause she runs out in the woods a-callin' you.

"'Little Buck, whar are you at, honey?' she says. 'Do come on, honey; you must be half froze,' she says, jest the same as ef you was a kid! Bah!

"But the only answer she got was none. So she goes back in the house here, whar she sets down and cries, jest like wimmen will, ye know—now you be keerful thar, Little Buck. You can see, shorely, I'm mighty nigh it a-dyin' to shoot.

"Well," he continued, "I done already had everything planned out to a fare-you-well finish afore I got here. I took yore rifle down to the aidge o' the lake thar at the big beech, and laid it down half in the water and half out. I throwed yore hat out in the lake, and it floated jest like I'd figgered it would float. I doubles up yore coat, and puts it inside o' my shirt. I hides yore ca'tridge-belt in a clump o' laurel. Then I picks up a great, big rock from the lake's bank and holds it up above my head in both hands, and waits fo' a lull in the wind.

"When the wind it had lulled a little I throwed the big rock out in the lake. It made a pow'ful noisy splash jest like I'd wanted it to do. And 'en I commenced a-bellerin' as loud as I could beller and not bust a lung wide open.

"'Swim Little Buck swim! Kick wi' yore feet and paddle wi' yore hands! Swim! Swim!' I bellers. 'It's pow'ful deep and ef ye don't swim,' I bellers, 'you're shore to drownd!'

"And 'en I kicked in the water wi' one foot, and bellered a little more.

"Well, Tot she comes jest a-flyin' from the cabin here, which was edzactly what I'd looked fo' her to do. What makes some wimmen so dang foolish about one man when the world's full o' menfolks was allus more'n I could onderstand. And in the bright moonlight I could see 'at her face was as white or whiter'n the snow onder her feet. Her hands they was both stretched out in front o' her.

"'Little Buck,' she says, bad skeered, 'whar are you at, honey—whar are you at? says she.

"I goes to meet her, o' course. And I acted as ef I was shore turrible bad excited.

"'He fell in the lake!' I tells her. 'He slipped and fell in the lake! Le's git a rope, or a long pole, and mebbe we can git him out afore he's drownded!' Haw—haw—haw!

"I had—keerful, Little Buck; you cain't slip on me!—had already spotted a pole. I picks it up and runs back to the big beech, and holds it out over the water.

"'Ketch a-holt o' this here, Little Buck!' I squalls. 'Ketch a holt o' this here!' Then I stoops and looks out over the black lake. 'He's done went down,' I says to Tot, who was a-standin' aside o' me a-wringin' her hands. 'Pore boy; I cain't see nothin' but his hat a-floatin' out thar,' I says.

"'And you pushed him in, you brute!' says Tot, all a-sobbin'. 'Go in and try to git him out, Cat-Eye!' she says.

"'I didn't push him in,' says I; 'but I'll do all I can to git him out. It may gi' me my death o' cold,' I says, 'but I wouldn't mind anything fo' yore sake, little gyurl!'

"Keerful thar——

"And wi' that, I yanks off my old ragged coat and throws it and my old ragged hat to the snow, and dives right in head-foremos'. The water it wasn't so awful cold, it a-bein' nothin' but a monst'ous big spring—springs is allus cold in the summer and warm in winter, y' know—but it made me hoarse in my talk, as ye've done noticed, I reckon. I've been a-doctorin' my throat the best I could; but I'm still hoarse——"

"Never mind stretching it out like that!" Wolfe interrupted angrily. "Go on with it!"

Mayfield grinned a broad, evil grin. He was enjoying to the fullest his hour of triumph.

"Why," he leered, "you're danged anxious to have it over with and git yore face burnt black and yore eyes burnt out, hain't ye?

"All right; as I said, I dived into the lake and found 'at the water wasn't so cold atter all. I paddled and kicked ontel I'd worked my way deep down in the lake. Thar I took yore coat out from the inside o' my shirt, ketched it by the bottom, and let myself come back to the top o' the water. The minute my head pops up into the wind, it mighty nigh freezes off, o' course. How I spluttered and puffed and blowed! Tot was a-standin' on the bank onder the beech; she was a-leanin' out toward me.

"'Did ye find him?' she says, anxious-like. 'Did ye find Little Buck fo' me? Oh,' she says, 'don't ye dare to tell me you never found him, Cat-Eye!'

"I swims to Tot, and reaches yore coat up to her.

"'He'd lodged ag'in a rock ledge down thar,' I tells her, wi' my teeth a-chatterin' from the cold wind. 'I ketched him by the bottom o' the coat; but he slipped out of it, and rolled off o' the rock ledge, and sunk on down, hundreds o' feet in 'at black hole! He's gone, pore little gyurl,' I says. 'He's gone forever. What a pity it was he couldn't swim!' I says.

"And Tot she stands thar a-starin' at me wi' them 'ar big, fine, purty blue eyes o' her'n filled wi' the tarment o' hell itself. I'll own up 'at I did feel jest a bit mean over what I was a-doin'—you ta' keer, or I'll pull the trigger and put out yore blasted eyes! Don't you make nary 'nother move like as ef ye was a-goin' to jump at me, neither; do ye onderstand me?

"Well, I crawls a-drippin' out in that turrible cold wind, and says to Tot, 'As I'm jest about to freeze to death,' says I, 'I reckon I'd better run to the fire.'

"Git his hat fo' me,' begs Tot.

"I jumps in the lake and brings her yore hat. She wanted to know ef I'd done every blessed thing I could do to save ye, and I swore I shorely had. I went to the house, and stirred up the fire, and stood afore it, a-turnin' fust one side to it and 'en t'other. Tot she didn't foller me to the house. I watched her through a window. She stood out thar in the awful cold, wi' yore wet coat and hat pressed to her bosom, fo' two solid hours afore she moved a single inch.

"And I says to myself, I says, 'Mebbe I hain't a-gittin' even and square wi' you fo' a-turnin' me down and a-takin' that 'ar light-headed artickle you took fo' a husband! Mebbe I hain't a-gittin' even and square wi' you!' I says to myself. I——"

"You yellow-hearted scoundrel!" Wolfe exploded.

"Ta' keer! Ta' keer!" Mayfield cautioned. "You hain't in no p'sition to be a-callin' me ugly names. I never did like to be called ugly names, and I hain't a-goin' to put up with it."

Wolfe sank back in his chair. "All right," he said, "get the rest of it out of you."

"Well," the other pursued, "I knowed wimmen was scatter-brained and foolish when they was in love. I know the wimmenfolks and their ways, y' see. I'd figgered it out 'at Tot she would drownd herself to be wi' you in death. Wimmen's awful crazy when they're in love. And 'specially these here mountain wimmen. You know how they loves when they loves at all. So as I watched Tot through the window, I shorely expected to see her jump in the lake and go down. But she didn't. She fin'ly come to the house and set down afore the fire. Yore coat and hat was still in her arms, and they was froze stiff now—yore coat and hat was. Her face it was all pinched and blue wi' the cold.

"When she'd warmed up a little, she says to me, 'Tell me how it happened.'

"'It was this a-way,' says I. 'Little Buck he follered me over to a creek, and ketched me thar. He was a-bringin' me in, and we was a-walkin' along aside o' the lake, and his foot slipped on the ice. You know all o' the rest,' I says.

"'You pushed him in, you brute!' she says to me. 'You pushed him in, you brute!'

"'That's pow'ful foolish talk, little gyurl,' says I. 'You hain't got no right to 'cuse me o' sech a thing, atter I resked my life a-tryin' to git him out. It makes me feel plum' bad,' I says.

"But she stuck to it 'at I was the cause o' yore death, and all the argyfyin' I could do didn't change her notions a dang bit. And fin'ly I tells her this here:

"'Have it yore way, like wimmenfolks allus does,' I says. 'You can shoot me ef ye want to. I promise ye I won't raise a hand to keep ye from it,' I was jest a-bluffin', ye onderstand.

"'The only reason I hain't already shot ye,' Tot says, 'is 'at I'm afeard blood on my soul, even the blood of a rattlesnake like you, might keep me from a-goin' to Little Buck when I die. Even the blood of a snake is red,' says she.

"And I won't never fo'git how she looked when she told me that. Ef it hadn't ha' been fo' my hate fo' you, Little Buck Wolfe, I'd ha' quit right thar, shorely.

"Well, I laid down on the floor afore the fire, and soon drapped off to sleep. When I woke up, daylight was a-breakin'. Tot she was still a-settin' thar a-holdin' yore wet clo'es to her bosom. Her breath it was a-comin' wheezy and quick, and she had a scratchy sawt o' cough; her eyes they was as bright as coals o' fire, and her face was a-burnin' wi' fever.

"You contemptible devil!" cried Wolfe, every nerve in his body at taut as a violin string.

"Keerful now!" said Mayfield, his finger feeling for the trigger. "You hain't in any p'sition to be a-callin' me ugly names."

Wolfe quieted himself by a supreme effort. "Tell the rest," he urged.

It was all very plausible, just the thing, in fact, for Mayfield to do. Therefore, it did not occur to Wolfe that the wretch had lied to him—and the wretch hadn't.

"The' hain't a dang bit o' use in a-bein' so allfired fidgety," said Mayfield. "I'll git to the p'int in my own good time. I'm a-holdin' it off a purpose to see you wriggle. It's the biggest kind o' fun to me, to see you wriggle like a worm in hot ashes.

"All right. Well, as soon as it was broad daylight, Tot she gits up and goes out to the bank o' the lake whar she thought you'd went in at. I watched her through the window. I seed her stoop down clost to the water and pick up yore rifle, which I'd laid thar to fool her. She made shore it was yore'n, and took it to her bosom wi' yore coat and hat. Atter a little while o' standin' thar a-starin' down into the lake, she comes back to the house. She was a-staggerin' now; she was as wild as a rabbit in her head, jest plum' delirrus, and she commenced a-talkin' to you.

"'Little Buck,' she says, 'whar are you at, honey? I want you now,' she says. 'Why don't you answer me, Little Buck? Whar are you at? Why don't you come to me? Why don't you come to yore Tot?' she says; and she sobs a little at the last.

"And I knowed as I listened to her a-talkin' that a-way 'at my big vict'ry was at hand. Then I heerd her say, reel soft, this here:

"'I remember—I remember, now. How lonesome you must be down in that black hole without me!' she says—ta' keer thar, Little Buck Wolfe, ta' keer!

"Tot she goes to the table and puts down yore rifle, hat and coat. She takes a little Bible-book from the mantel, and puts it in her bosom. I watches her clost. She went out to the big beech aside o' the lake. I follered her, a-keepin' whar she wouldn't notice me. She turned her burnin' eyes uppards, and raised both arms. I seed the light o' the risin' sun sparkle on the di'mont o' the ring 'at was on her finger. Her copper-colored hair it looked like gold. I bit the inside o' my mouth ontel it bled, acause I was somehow afeard.

"'I'm a-comin' to ye, honey,' she says delirruslike. 'It's better to lay down thar in that etarnal night wi' you 'an to live on in this lonesome, lonesome world. Open yore arms fo' me, Little Buck,' says she, 'like ye used to—I'm a-comin' to be wi' you, my own!' she says.

"And she walked straight down in the water and went onder; and the last I seed o' her was one little, white hand——"

"One little, white hand—" Wolfe interrupted in a terrible voice. He could govern himself no longer—he straightened on his sound leg and sprang, his hands before his eyes to protect them from the powder. There was an oath from the lips of Mayfield, and immediately afterward came a great flash and a great roar. Wolfe found himself groping in a stifling white cloud of powder smoke—but he had not been burned in the least degree!

He dropped to his hands and knees and peered under the slowly-lifting cloud. He saw Cat-Eye Mayfield lying supine on the floor, with the old shotgun across his narrow chest. He crept forward, meaning to kill the unspeakable reptile with his bare hands—meaning to strangle the wicked life out.

When he reached Mayfield, he saw that the shotgun, which had been loaded beyond its power of resistance, had split for eight inches at the breech—and Mayfield's lean face was burned as black as that of an Ethiopian; his eyes were perfectly and incurably blind! The monster of his own foul brain's creation had turned upon him.

Wolfe uttered a cry that makes the finest description puny. He seized the other's slender throat in a viselike grip. The blind eyes stared toward him. Then he recalled the words of Tot.

"Even the blood of a snake is red."

His hands left Mayfield's neck. He rose and limped out of the cabin, and went to the big beech that stood beside Tot's beautiful Lake of Peace. There he saw many of his wife's small footprints in the snow——

Lying in the edge of the water, he found a dark blue shawl that she had been wont to wear about her shoulders when the weather was cold. Beside it lay a tortoise-shell comb. A branch that hung low over the lake had kept for him a few strands of hair that was of the color of dark copper. He wrung the water from the shawl and put it, with the other little treasures, on the snow beside him. Almost he wished, now, that he had killed Mayfield——

A sudden weird, skittering shriek split the air like a knife. He turned his head quickly. Through the mist of his sorrow he saw blind Cat-Eye Mayfield rushing toward the lake. Mayfield's thin lips were parted and jerking; his blackened face was contorted and hideous. No man may be himself when he has suffered as young Wolfe had suffered; Wolfe laughed thickly, oddly, mimicking the hoarse laugh that was Mayfield's.

"Haw-haw-haw!"

The sightless man fell to his hands and knees and began to grope for the edge of the lake. Soon he had found it. Then he straightened and turned his hideous face—a singular thing, and inexplicable—as squarely toward Little Buck Wolfe as though he had eyes to see him.

"I'm a-goin' to give up what the' is left o' me to make you suffer more!" Mayfield gibbered. "I'm a-goin' to lay down thar in 'at black hole wi' her—wi' Tot Singleton—I'm a-goin' to be buried in the same grave wi' her, yore wife, and he'p yeself ef ye can!"

Yes, the man was insane. Hatred had absorbed all his faculties.

Wolfe stood like a work in bronze, and stared. Mayfield ran into the water, cursing as he went, and sank like a stone, down, down, down to darkness eternal. Wolfe even went whiter as he watched the bubbles and lessening ripples that marked the spot where the worst man in the world had died that his devilish triumph might be a little greater.

His lips moved, and it was to say this, brokenly, "My cup—of bitterness—is brimming. Why, my God, why?"

He made his way back to the lonesome cabin. He threw the burst shotgun out to the snow, which hid it mercifully, and tossed Mayfield's slouch hat into the fire.

There was a little of sweet, sad comfort in handling the things that had been his wife's. When he could no longer bear to look upon them, he pushed a chair to the cabin's front doorway and sat down, unmindful of the cold, and absently watched the chilled sun sink behind the snowy forest.

A great silence was about him. There was not even a wind to sigh in the tops of the giant hemlocks. It was quite as though he were the sole inhabitant of some lost, dead world.

When darkness had fallen, Wolfe closed the door and went to the low-burned fire.

He slept none that night, none the following day, and became pitifully thin and haggard. Loss of sleep and grief's steady gnawing had made him half-delirious. Hallucinations began to distress him. A dozen times he imagined he heard Tot's voice calling to him from the bluish-black depths of the lake. He imagined that he saw her ghost-white hand thrust above the water, and that it beckoned to him. Then came Mayfield's triumphant, taunting laugh, and he saw the lusterless blind eyes staring at him through a window——

"I must put an end to this," he told himself in a whisper, when night had come again. "I'll go to bed, and I'll go to sleep. Tomorrow I'll hunt for the money and my rifle. When I'm able to walk, I'll go to Conradsville, and from there on—on."

He went to bed and he went to sleep. When he woke the next morning, he felt stronger, though his grief was as poignant as it had ever been. He determined that he would bear his burden bravely; Tot would want him to do that, if she could know.

Seven hours he spent in a search for the money and his rifle, and found neither. Mayfield, he told himself, might have carried the money to the bottom of the lake with him.

Thirty very long days went by. Winter had passed, and the first breath of spring had come. Puccoons and pale-green ferns were beginning to peep from the rich black earth in sheltered spots. The buds of the hickories were swelling, and squirrels were rioting among them.

"Tomorrow I'll go," said Wolfe to himself. "I'll start early. With the help of a cane, I can walk pretty well."

It was during the last of the sunset hour. He sat in a chair just inside the front doorway, watching the dull-gold sun without seeing it as it burned a hole through the fringe of jackpines that grew along the crest of the western mountain. Then he bent his head to his breast and began to think. He knew that the hardest good-by of his life was at hand.

A little red ant that lived under the doorstep crawled up Wolfe's boot, up his leg, and to the back of his hand. Wolfe frowned, jerked up his head, brushed the insect away, and began to stare toward the sinking dull-gold sun again.

Thanks to the little red ant, he saw a flicker of officer-blue in the distance!

A fever of fear seized him. How relentless Whitney Fair was! Of course, Fair had sent this man after him—of course! He rose so abruptly that he overturned his chair, caught up a cane and a bundle that contained provisions, his spare clothing and the clothing that Tot, his wife, had left—he would never part with that, never—and rushed out by way of the back door. As rapidly as he could go he crossed the open space and entered the eastern half of Doe River Wilderness. At the edge of the thick forest, he paused long enough to fling out a hand toward the lake in farewell.

When he had reached the crest of a ridge half a mile from the lake, he looked back. The man in officer-blue was entering the cabin by the front doorway.

Wolfe hurried on breathlessly, going straight toward Virginia. He walked nearly all of that night, guiding his movements by the stars, and slept the next day hidden in a dense thicket of laurel and ivy. Not until he had placed forty rugged, hard-won miles between him and the head of Doe River, did he dare to travel in the daytime. His debt to the law must wait—until his debt to man was paid!

In an extremely wild section just across the Tennessee-Virginia State line, he ran upon a logging-camp that was sorely in need of a woods foreman. He decided that there was small chance of his being apprehended in this out-of-the-way place, so he asked for the job for one month and got it.

The pay was good, and in the four weeks he saved enough money to defray all expenses of the journey to the Northwest. Then he hastened to the nearest railway station, bought a fare, and caught a westbound train.

The Wolfes had been in the State's prison at Nashville a little more than four years. They now stood convinced that they had erred, that they had wilfully violated a law that was absolutely just, and they were atoning like men. There was about them none of the grimness, none of the moroseness, none of the sullen bitterness that is usually found in the hillman when he has had iron bars and walls of stone placed between him and his liberty. If they pined for home and the great dim-blue mountains with their trees and rocks and sparkling streams, there was certainly no outward sign of it.

Only one of them had felt the cold touch of the white plague, the scourge that so frequently cuts short the life of the imprisoned mountaineer. This was Brian Wolfe's son, Charley, who was not much more than a boy for all of his six feet in height. But Charley didn't whine about it; to have whined about it, to him, would have been the part of a yellow dog. In point of fact, Charley Wolfe kept his afflictions so well hidden that no one else even suspected it.

It was pitiful how he did that. In the daytime he staved off the telltale cough by means of a force of will that was truly remarkable; at night he buried his head in the folds of his blankets and smothered the cough. He laughed lightly at his increasing thinness and at the hectic flush that glowed in his cheeks in the afternoons—when anybody chanced to mention it.

Christmas Day came snowy and cold, with a biting north wind. The spirit of peace and good-will had found its way through the high and forbidding stone walls of the penitentiary. The convicts were not kept in their cells, nor were they made to work, on this day. Even Bully McCrary, who had been an incorrigible and the fighting man of the prison before the coming of the Wolfes, cried "Merry Christmas!" to every person he met—which included his former sworn enemy, a sad-eyed, intelligent fellow nicknamed and named Pale Tom Ledworth.

Now it was customary for the Fiddling Governor, Tennessee's best loved man, to give the inmates of the State's prison a fine dinner on Christmas Day; and on this occasion, he had decided that he would drive out to say grace over it himself.

He arrived half an hour before noon-time. The warden met him at the office door, bowed almost reverently, for the Governor was a man whose faults were so magnificently human that they were almost virtues, and greeted him with the compliments of the season. He entered, drew off his overcoat and gloves, and sat down before the glowing stove.

Just then Old Buck Wolfe, an iron gray giant whom stripes seemed altogether unable to disgrace, appeared before the door of heavy iron-lattice that stood between the office and the prison proper. His range of vision did not take in the distinguished visitor.

"Warden," said he, "will you please see if you can't get a fiddle for me—just for this one afternoon, sir? I used to fiddle. I don't think I've forgot how. If it's not asking too much, that is."

The warden looked toward his caller.

"It's Christmas Day, Warden," the Governor said. "Get one if you can. I think I can understand how a fiddler feels when he hasn't touched a fiddle for several years. Who is it, Warden?"

"The chief of the Wolfes, sir."

At that the Governor rose, went to a desk, sat down beside it and reached for a telephone receiver. He asked for his residence, got the connection, and ordered that his own fiddle be sent at once to the penitentiary!

Old Buck Wolfe turned away the gladdest and proudest man in the sovereign State of Tennessee.

When he had gone, the Governor asked of the warden, "How are these mountaineers behaving now?"

"Men couldn't conduct themselves better than our mountaineers, sir," the warden answered. "They've done finely, all of them. The old man had a fight soon after his arrival here, but we couldn't blame him for it; he was very much in the right, sir. I'd be glad to tell you about that fight."

"I'd be glad to hear about it, Warden."

"The Wolfes," the prison official began, "had just finished putting on their first stripes when the supper gong rang. We marched them to a table that was all taken up on one side by Bully McCrary and his following. They had always made trouble among the other prisoners, the McCraryites had, and we kept them to themselves when it was convenient.

"Old Buck talked in mountaineer dialect then—Pale Tom Ledworth has since taught the Wolfes how to read and write and speak correctly, as well as a great many other things; oh, they've made the best of their prison term! Well, as I was saying—Old Buck looked across the table, straight at McCrary, drew his shaggy brows, and drawled this:

"'You fellers over thar bend yore heads down'ards a little. I am now a-goin' to ax the blessin'. The' hain't no use in a-bein' damned hawgs jest acause we happens to be here in the penitenchy.'

"McCrary and his outfit roared with laughter, and began to make sport of Old Buck Wolfe. Old Buck's eyes flashed like the fire of powder. He turned to his kinsmen and said, 'See 'at not more'n five o' them weasels over thar jumps on me at oncet.'

"Then he went straight across the table and its dishes, and collared McCrary; and before the guards could stop the fight, McCrary had received a mighty good pounding. I—I guess the guards were not in much of a hurry to interfere, to tell the truth about the matter; you see, sir, Bully McCrary was only getting what was coming to him.

"Old Wolfe went around to his place at the table, sat down, and eyed the McCrary crowd sharply.

"'You fellers over thar bend yore heads down'ards a little,' he repeated very quietly. 'I am now a-goin' to ax the blessin'. The' hain't no use in a-bein' damned hawgs jest acause we happens to be here in the penitenchy.'

"Every prisoner in the mess-hall bowed his head. So did the guards. And so, for that matter, did I. Since that time, Old Buck has said grace at every meal. He's held up his banner like a soldier, and most of the others have flocked to it. He was born to leadership, I'd say, born to rule. He's a king of his kind, sir."

Shortly afterward a messenger arrived with the fiddle and bow in a leathern case. The Governor took the case and put it on the desk at his side. The ringing of the gong announced that dinner was ready, and Warden Gray escorted the State's high light to the big mess-hall. They found the convicts seated at the long tables, which were well laden with the good things to eat one expects on Christmas Day.

Then the chief executive bared his head and raised one fine, white hand. In clear and impressive tones he repeated the old-fashioned blessing that he had heard so many thousands of times back in his boyhood home in Happy Valley.

Old Buck Wolfe echoed fervently the "Amen!" and added in the voice of a Goliath, "God bless the Governor!"

Pale Tom Ledworth rose and held up his glass of innocent wine in a hand that wasn't quite steady.

"The Governor," he cried, "God bless him!"

The other prisoners went to their feet and lifted their glasses high.

"The Governor," they cried, "God bless him!"

It rang and rang and rang.

Tennessee's best-loved man was suffering keenly at the heart. He was thinking of the lonesome and desolate homes of these men who were paying their debts to the law and to society, of the saddened firesides and empty chairs of this Christmas Day. He was thinking of the longing of women, and the prayers of women, and of the heavy crosses men make their mothers bear—their mothers, the finest fighters in the world.

"Warden," he whispered, his eyes bright and twinkling, "you'd better get me out of here."

"This way, sir."

The two of them went back to the office, sat down, and silently watched the whirling snow through the windows. When dinner was over, they went again to the mess-hall, and the Governor placed his fiddle and bow in the hands of Old Buck Wolfe.

"If you can play 'Buffalo Gals,'" he smiled, "play it. It comes very near to being my favorite jig."

"It's mine, my favorite," the big hillman exclaimed happily, "by a long shot!"

He handled the beloved instrument with reverence. It seemed that he feared his knotty, work-hardened hands would scar it. On his countenance was the light of a rapture that the owner of that fiddle, being himself a fiddler, understood. Old Wolfe began to play his favorite; his left foot kept time on the stone floor, and his huge body swayed rhythmically to and fro. Soon every other person present was tapping the floor with a restless foot. There is no gloomy note in "Buffalo Gals."

When the delighted mountaineer's wrists and fingers had become too weary to function properly, he lowered the instrument amid much applause. Then somebody lifted the cry, "One little tune from the Governor!" Others took it up, and it became a roar.

The Fiddling Governor took the fiddle and tightened two of its strings a trifle.

Because it was Christmas Day, the day of peace on earth and good will toward men.

"What shall it be, boys?" His eyes twinkled pleasurably.

Bully McCrary never made a greater mistake, though it came out all right in the end.

"Home, Sweet Home, if you please, sir," he begged.

The State's leading official rubbed his chin thoughtfully. Of course, he did not want to play that; there were those who would feel very much upset, if he did—why, it would be torture. But McCrary's gaze pleaded so hard; the melodramatic McCrary was ready to preach, pray, shout hallelujahs, sing, dance, or fight. The Governor put the fiddle into place and began, striving purposely to give a poor interpretation. But his fingers trembled in spite of him, rendering a delicate and soulful vibrata. The prisoners stared toward one another with wide, friendly eyes. Then, one by one, they began to stare toward the floor.

Only a few bars had been played when Charley Wolfe, who had tried manfully to be a credit to his name, who had so bravely hidden all signs of his affliction, crumpled to his knees and cried out in the musical hill dialect two unbidden words in one—"Goddle-mighty!"

Just that.

The Governor quickly passed his fiddle and bow into the hands of the warden, knelt beside Charley Wolfe, and swept back from the clammy brow the thick, dead-black hair. He lifted the lean face, saw a trace of red at each corner of the quivering, sensitive mouth, and knew. Charley Wolfe no longer had a secret.

"He's got the bugs, sure," very sympathetically said Bully McCrary, who also had seen. "He's got 'em, sure."

"Warden," the Governor asked, "how much is there left of this boy's sentence?"

"Let's see: with eight months counted off for good behavior—about three more months, sir."

The executive went to his feet. "I'll see that he's pardoned at once, Warden. While the matter is being arranged, keep him in the hospital; and tell the doctors to give him plenty of medicines and instructions when he starts for home—don't forget it."

"If you don't mind," Charley Wolfe murmured, rising with his father's help, "I'd like to stick it out, sir. I consider that this is a debt I owe. A Wolfe always pays his debts, and tells the truth, and keeps his word. I—I want to stick it out."

"You're going home," frowned Old Buck. "You've got to go, so you can get well. We'll be there with you, in about three more months. Don't say anything against it, Charley."

He was still the chief of the Wolfes. There was no disobeying him. Before the sick young man's mental vision there flashed scenes of home and loved ones and the majestic dim-blue mountains with their trees and rocks and sparkling streams. A great longing came to him, the longing he had fought away so many times. He caught the Governor's hand.

Three months later, the rest of the Wolfes walked proudly out of the State's prison and started for the railway station. They were dressed in the clothing of Southern gentlemen, and they attracted no little attention on the street.

"Say, but we're sure goin' to miss 'em," remarked Bully McCrary to Pale Tom Ledworth. "Look at Warden Gray; even him, he's got that I-wonder-will-I-ever-be-happy-again look on him. Say, take this from me, Pallid, them was all men, them Wolfes."

"It's not being free that makes them so glad," Pale Tom replied in his soft voice. "They had a letter from home this morning, and it told them that Charley was improving rapidly. That's what makes them so glad."

It came to pass in June.

There alighted from an early morning train in Conradsville, North Carolina, a tall and muscular, smooth-faced and sober-visaged, youngish man wearing boots that were laced high in front, a suit of blue serge, a blue flannel shirt, a slim, black tie, and a broad-rimmed black hat. He sent his baggage on to Johnsville, Tennessee, bought for himself a week's supply of traveling rations, and set out immediately, on foot and alone, for the heart of Doe River Wilderness.

It was, of course, Little Buck Wolfe, the Arnold Mason that was. He had been in the great Northwest, dealing in timberlands, for a little more than seven years.

His rise had not been meteoric, but it had been steady. He began by obtaining an option on a wide and finely-timbered boundary of woodland; soon afterward, he won the interest of a group of Eastern lumbermen, and arranged a transfer that gave him a cash base to build upon. Gradually he became known as a timber Midas. In the seven years he had cleared enough money to pay back all that had been lost in the Wolfe's Basin fire, and he was now on his way to pay it. Then the law could have him, if it still wanted him. But first he had to visit the little cabin that stood on the shore of the lake that was the source of Doe River.

During all that time, he had not written once to Colonel and Mrs. Mason. He considered his reason for not writing a very good one, indeed. Whitney Fair was post master at Johnsville. Wolfe's fear of being arrested before his purpose was accomplished had become an obsession, overshadowing everything, except the purpose itself. And then, the fine humility of the man had convinced him that without the money necessary to pay the colossal debt he was a nonentity, nothing, non-existent.

He reached Doe River at a point some two miles below the lake shortly before midnight. This bank of the stream was for the most part cliffs, and, as there was no visible way of effecting a crossing, the remainder of the journey to the cabin would of necessity have to be made in the daytime. Wolfe lighted a fire under a tree, rolled himself in his blanket, and went to sleep.

Early the next morning he rose and climbed down to the crystal-clear river's brink to bathe his face and hands. As he turned from the edge of the stream, he saw, lying on a nearby low ledge of the cliff, where some high water had left it years before, a bare and bleaching human skeleton.

Wolfe stood aghast, dumb, frozen. It had come from the lake, of course, but whose—which was it? Was it the skeleton of a man, or that of a woman?

He approached it slowly, knowing not whether to bless it or to curse it, to hold it sacred or to hate it. Then he saw on one of the arm bones, the unmistakable mark of a bullet, and he knew; it was the mark of the bullet that poor old Grandpap Singleton had fired that long gone day in Devil's Gate to save his, Wolfe's, life. The bones were those of Cat-Eye Mayfield.

The realization clenched Wolfe's fists iron hard, sent him as white as a man in the grip of certain death. He would stone the accursed thing—he would crush to bits all that was left of that most unspeakable of wretches.

No, he wouldn't. He would do as Tot would have him do if she could know; this had been the motto, the balance-wheel, the guiding light of his seven years in exile. With his hands he made a hole in the soft black earth at the cliff's base, and buried the skeleton. When it was done, he felt glad that he had obeyed the finer impulse. And it was a consolation to know that Mayfield had been cheated of the last mean part of his triumph.

Wolfe looked up and down the river's banks for the other skeleton, and didn't find it. When one has drained the iron chalice, Fate is very apt to be merciful!

The little cabin was much dilapidated. Half the stone-and-clay chimney had tumbled down before the eternal onslaughts of wind and rain; a storm had carried away a fourth of the split-board roof. Ferns and rattleweed grew over the doorstep as though trying to bar the way to feet that might profane. Wolfe crossed the feeble green barrier, and entered his holies of holies, the place that had seen enacted his life's one perfect chapter. The interior was damp and musty and mildewed. The rafters were lined with the tiny homes of mudwasps. A copperhead lay coiled comfortably in the little pit where they had kept their savings hidden; he killed the snake with one shot from his revolver and threw it out.

There were a few mementoes of the gloriously happy days. A rusted table knife, a rusted spoon, a broken dish, two mother-of-pearl buttons, a rusted wire hairpin, a rotting mealbag window-curtain that Tot's own fingers had hemmed. He fondled them for a little while, a sort of Pagan worship in his eyes; then he put them down on the mildewed table and went out and sat in the lush grass beside the bluish-black lake for a long time. The milestones of his life trooped back to him there, passed before him one by one, like soldiers in review.

Two days and two nights he spent there in the silence.

He set out for Wolfe's Basin at daybreak of a fine morning. Yellowhammers and squirrels were making love and quarreling everywhere in the forest about him. Bright-winged butterflies were busily sipping honey from the tiny blossoms of the rattleweed; wild bees were humming about the pink-eyed bloom of the ivy and the white and waxen cups of the laurel flowers. It was springtime for every living thing on earth but him.

After walking hard all that day and all the next and one hour more, he reached the rugged, pine-fringed crest of a mountain that he believed to be his home mountain, the Big Blackfern. He strained his eyes to the westward, trying to make out in the darkness the shape of bald and majestic Picketts Dome above the Lost Trail. He saw dimly a peak that he believed to be Picketts Dome.

Then he went on, and halted at a point from which he could look down into the long, broad valley that lay below. In a building that stood in the center of that valley, there was a series of lighted windows.

"It's Sunday night, and that's a church," he said to himself. "I've lost my way. There's no church in Wolfe's Basin. That must be Beechwood. Perhaps—wait! Maybe I've——"

A fine hope broke into his heart; he was no very religious man—churches went with civilization's advance, always. When he reached the level land it was late, and there was not a light to be seen anywhere; a perfect stillness reigned. He found himself walking along a graveled street between two rows of vine-covered cottages. The mingled perfume of honeysuckles and roses was well-nigh intoxicating. He passed between a church and a schoolhouse, both of which were painted white.

There was a wide concrete bridge that had been built across a rippling, tinkling creek. He went over and turned up the stream, looking for a stately willow that stood over a bar of white sand. If he could but find the willow, he would know.

He found it, and he knew!

For the present, this was enough. He would wait until morning to meet his people. Besides, he dreaded having to tell the Singletons about poor Tot. He stretched his weary figure out on his blanket, and watched the bright stars—Grandpap Singleton's promises—through the branches of the patriarchal tree until he went to sleep. He dreamed then that he sat on a burning desert with a heavy cup in his hand; and that a woman, in flowing white, came and took the cup from him, and dashed it away.

Little Buck Wolfe woke in a cold sweat. It was hard for him to go to sleep again.

When he woke again, broad daylight had come. He rose, combed his hair with his fingers, put on his hat, and looked about him. Nearby stood an especially home-like cottage with an inviting veranda in front. All manner of sweet, old-fashioned flowers bloomed in the spacious yard. He went slowly toward it.

Sitting in a deep and comfortable veranda rocker, he saw a very old woman in dark-figured calico; she wore a red bandanna about her perfectly white head, and there was a long-stemmed clay pipe in her toothless mouth. It was Granny Wolfe, yet alive.

"Buck, is 'at you?" she asked shrilly as he approached. "'Pears like it's yore walk, and 'pears like it hain't. But whoever it is, come right on in and set down here wi' me. Hey?"

She was now almost blind. The strapping figure of her grandson was only a blur to her eyes.

Wolfe bent over her. "Don't you know me, grand—grammaw?"

The poor old creature did not recognize his voice. "Not from Adam's off ox, nor a side o' sole-leather!" she cried. "You're a stranger to me, shorely! And might I ax, dad-burn it, what ye're a-sellin'—lightnin'-rods, sewin'-machines, patent churns, spec's, potater-peelers, or hillside plows; hey?"

Wolfe dropped into a chair facing hers, and picked up one of her pitifully thin hands.

"I—I'm Little Buck, grammaw," he said, a trifle unsteadily.

She pulled her hand away quickly. "Stuff! Stuff!" she exclaimed. "It's a durned pore joke, stranger! Little Buck, pore boy, he's been dead a long time. And ef ye try to spring 'at joke on me ag'in, I'll bust ye acrost the forrard wi' my stick—ef I don't, I wisht I may drap dead right here in my tracks, and never git another breath!"

Wolfe shrugged, then he asked anxiously, "Are the Masons still living? And who—who has died here in the last seven years?"

"The Masons is both alive. Hain't been but one grown pusson died here in the last seven year; 'at was pore old Grandpap Bill Singleton, the Prophet. Pore old Bill! Yes, he's done went up to his little shelter in the skies."

The assurance that both his fathers and both his mothers still lived filled Wolfe's heart with thankfulness. "If you'll only listen, grammaw," he pursued, "I'll prove to you that I'm Little——"

"Hush yore mouth!" she cut in angrily. "I hain't a-goin' to listen to no sech danged fool talk! But—" and she lowered her creaking voice to a whisper—"but I mustn't be so consarned loud. The widder woman I live with here she's a-sleepin', and she mustn't be woke up. Pore gyurl, she set up mighty nigh it the whole night wi' Lon Singleton's little boy, Robert Bob, who went and et a whole wagon-load o' green apples yeste'day."

"So Lon is married?"

"Why, shore; he married Hallie Wolfe, o' course," rather irritably. "He was the fust pusson 'at ever married a Wolfe and kep' his own name. But sence then, the's been sev'ral Singletons married Wolfes and kep' their own names, jest as the's been sev'ral Wolfes married Singletons and kep' their names. I can tell ye, stranger, them 'ar Singletons is good folks, every one of 'em."

Wolfe looked thoughtfully out across the bottom of the great basin. Suddenly he realized that he was staring at one of a series of yawning holes that had been made in the base of the Blackfern. Those holes had not been there seven years before, certainly. He asked his grandmother about them.

"Iron," said the old woman.

"Iron!"

"Yes, iron." Three puffs at her clay pipe. "What they calls magnetic iron ore, and the finest in Ameriky—says the Colonel. Both mountains is chuck a-bustin' full of it. My son, Buck, he found it whilst he was hid in a cave from the law. The depity he chased Buck back in the cave a hundred yards, and thar Buck found it. It was the treasure the dyin' stranger talked about a long, long time ago, and which Buck he allus thought was gold."

Her grandson gasped. She went on in her garrulous way.

"The colonel he took a-holt of it. He borried money from the bank, and bought t'other side o' both mountains, bought out t'other part owners o' the lumber comp'ny, and built the narrer-gauge railroad on down to the big blast furnace at Johnsville. This here—this here—er, what'n the devil was I a-talkin' about' anyhow? Oh, yes—iron. I never slep' none last night. Why, yes—the colonel he paid the bank back mighty soon, I'm a-tellin' ye, Mister!

"The colonel he gives all o' us Wolfes and Singletons work at plum' scan'lous good pay. Bless the bones of him, he built us a church and a schoolhouse, and brung in a fine teacher and a fine preacher; and he put up a big gen'al store and a post office fo' us, too. Utopia, 'at's the name o' the post office. Utopia, Tennessee. Purty, hain't it? And the colonel he gi' us all land in the name o' pore Little Buck, and he he'ped us to build dandy houses like these ye see. Se we're all happy 'cept fo' one thing, which is the losin' o' pore Little Buck. God rest the ashes o' him!

"Mister, I—" Again she caught herself and lowered her voice. "Durn my old pickcher, I allus was a fool fo' talkin'. Why, I bet I've done woke her up." (It was a safe bet) "I wisht these here drotted boys'd keep them wagon-loads o' green apples out o' their blasted little bellies, so's she could stay home o' nights whar she belongs. Anybody gits sick—she's the nuss and doctor."

The heart of Wolfe throbbed wildly. His most roseate hopes, long lost, had never touched so perfect a fulfilment of his dream, his big dream. If only he had Tot! If only she could know! The insufferableness of it made him weak. He slumped down a trifle in his chair.

The front door's screen opened and closed softly, and he heard the pattering of small feet beside him. It was a very little boy, chubbily-built; he was strutting proudly in his first pair of knee-trousers, real knee-trousers.

"Good morning, Judge!" smiled Wolfe.

"Good mawnin', suh!" the very little boy said sweetly, in a grown-up fashion that was delightfully ludicrous—and Wolfe knew then that the child had been much associated with old Colonel Mason, Southern gentleman. Granny Wolfe jumped out of the edge of a nap.

"Why, Bobolink!" she cackled. "You've come out here to show off yore new britches, you honey-dumplin'! His name, Mister, is Bob Taylor Wolfe; but the's so danged many Bob Taylor Wolfe's here in Utopia 'at we calls him mostly Bobolink to make a diffunce. He's got another name, too, which, down in the hearts of us, we likes the best; I think it was his granpaw, Old Buck, my son, who put him up to it. Now, Bobolink, tell the stranger yore other name."

It came promptly, "Littlest Buck Wolfe."

Little Buck Wolfe went as white as chalk. He looked straight into the boy's wide, serious, unflinching eyes, and the light broke suddenly—he was looking into his own eyes. But he dared not hope. It couldn't be. Tot was dead; she had been dead for seven eternities of years. Still——

It was at that moment that the Littlest Buck Wolfe's mother came to the door. She was round-figured, mature, magnificent; her face was that of a Madonna; her hair was of the color of dark copper.

Her husband shot up straight.

"Tot!"

After they had succeeded in convincing Granny Wolfe that she had been talking to her own grandson, Wolfe told the story of the tragedy, as he knew it, that had taken place at the lake that was the source of Doe River.

"Mayfield deceived us both," said Tot. "Most of what he told you was true. But instead of going down in the lake, I took the stolen money and my rifle and came back here to prove your innocence of the charge of robbing the company's safe. Mayfield had been threatening to kill me if I didn't marry him and run away to Virginia with him. I escaped by some means, I never could remember just how, for I was really sick and delirious; I got back here only after days and days of wandering. How he must have hated you, to die as he did! But he was blind.

"And the man in officer-blue was Lon, my brother!" she went on. "He had himself made a deputy-sheriff, and went to hunt Cat-Eye Mayfield. He didn't take any irons along; he meant to kill Mayfield. And that miserable little ant—what a tiny, tiny thing to keep us apart for so long! But life is like that."

"Well, we won't be separated again," said Wolfe, "unless Whitney Fair has me prosecuted for helping my people get away."

"Whitney Fair is dead, and his family don't live in Johnsville any more," Tot replied. "I'm sure nobody else will remember it against you."

In which she was correct.

News of Little Buck Wolfe's return spread rapidly. The people of Utopia hastened to welcome him; the Masons came up in a little passenger car carried by the daily ore train. It was a gala day, a Christmas, a July Fourth, and a Thanksgiving Day, all in one.

When the pointed shadow of Picketts Dome was reaching for the crest of the Big Blackfern, Wolfe stole away with his wife to pay his respects, as it were, to the one soul that had not been there to greet him. Tot led the zigzag way up the bald peak, upon which the ironwood cross still stood. They gathered sheafs of waxen-white laurel bloom, and later they put these in reverence on a mound between the great cross and a great boulder, the last earthly resting place of Grandpap Singleton, who had been called the Prophet.

"There, look," Tot said in the hushed voice of one who speaks in an atmosphere of holiness. She pointed. "The colonel had that done."

High on the even face of the huge stone had been cut in bold letters;

GRANDPAP WILLIAM SINGLETON

He, too, had drained life's iron chalice bravely. Wolfe's eyes dimmed.

And below the name, in the old hill dialect, had been chiseled in smaller letters this gem from the Prophet's crude philosophy, which well might ring down the centuries to come:

To Them As Thinks The' Ain't No God The' Ain't None, So Far As They're Concerned

By DANFORD G. BRITTON