As John Spurrier followed his host between rhododendron thickets that rose above their heads, he found himself wondering what had become of the girl, but when they drew near to an old house whose stamp of orderly neatness proclaimed its contrast to the scattering hovels of widely separated neighbors, he caught a flash of blue gingham by the open door and realized that the Valkyrie had taken a short cut.

The dog, too, had arrived there ahead of its master and was fawning now on the girl, who leaned impulsively over to take the gentle-pointed muzzle between her palms.

“I’m sorry I whopped ye,” she declared in a silver-voiced contrition that made the man think of thrush notes. “Hit wasn’t yore fault no-how. Hit was thet—thet stuck-up furriner. I hates him!”

The setter waved its plumed tail in forgiveness and contentment, and the girl, discovering with an upward glance that she had been overheard, rose and stood for a moment defiantly facing the object of her denunciation, then, as embarrassment flooded her cheeks with color, fled into the house.

The sense of having stepped back into an older century had been growing on John Spurrier ever since he had turned away from the town of Waterfall, and now it possessed him with a singular fascination.

Here was a different world, somber under its shadow of frugality, and breathing out the heavy atmosphere of isolation. The spirit of this strange life looked out from the wearied eyes of Dyke Cappeze as he sat filling his pipe across the hearth, a little later, and it sounded in his voice when he announced slowly:

“It’s not for me to withhold hospitality in a land where a ready welcome is about all we have to offer, and yet you could hardly have picked a worse house to come to between the Virginia border and the Kaintuck ridges.”

Spurrier raised his brows interrogatively, and at the same moment he noticed matters hitherto overlooked. The windows were heavily shuttered and his host sat beyond the line of vision from the open door—with a rifle leaning an arm’s length away.

“Coming as a stranger,” continued Cappeze, “you start without enmities—with a clean page. You might spend your life here and find a sincere welcome everywhere—so long as you avoided other men’s controversies. But you come to me and that, sir, is a bad beginning—a very bad beginning.”

A contemplative cloud of smoke went up from the pipe, and the voice finished in a tone of bitterness.

“I’m the most hated man in this region where hatreds grow like weeds.”

“You mean because you have stood out for the enforcement of law?”

The other nodded, “It has taken me a lifetime,” he observed, “to learn that the mountains are stronger, if not more obstinate, than I.”

“Is that the only reason they hate you?” inquired the visitor, and the lawyer, removing the pipe stem 81 from his teeth, regarded him for a space in silence. Then he commented quietly:

“If you knew this country better, you wouldn’t have to ask that question. In Athens, I believe, they ostracized Aristides because he was ‘too just a man.’”

“Nonetheless, I’m glad I came to you.”

Cappeze smiled gravely. He had a rude sort of dignity which Spurrier found beguiling; a politeness that sprang from a deeper rooting than mere formula.

“Merely coming to see me—once in a while—won’t damn you, I reckon. A man has a license to be interested in freaks. But take my advice, and I sha’n’t be offended. Tell every one that you hold no brief for me and listen with an open mind when they blackguard me.”

Spurrier laughed. “In a place where assassination is said to come cheap, you have at least been able to take care of yourself, sir.”

“That,” said the other slowly, “is as it happens. My partner was less lucky. My own luck may break some day.”

“And yet you go on living here when you’d be safe enough anywhere else.”

“Yes, I go on living here. It’s a land where a man’s mind starves and where the great marching song of the world’s progress is silent—and yet——” Again he paused to draw in and exhale a cloud of pipe smoke. “Yet there’s something in the winds that blow here, in the air one breathes, that ‘is native to my blood.’ Elsewhere I should be miserable, sir, and my daughter——”

He came to an abrupt stop and Spurrier took him 82 up quickly. “She seems young and vital enough to crave all of life’s variety.”

“But she is contented, sir.” The elderly man spoke eagerly as though to convince himself and quiet troubling doubts. “She, too, would rather be here. We know this life and take it as we find it.”

Spurrier felt that the conversation was tending into channels too personal for the participation of a chance acquaintance, and he guided it to a less intimate subject.

“I understand, Mr. Cappeze, that in the campaign just ended, you stumped this district whole-heartedly in behalf of one of the candidates for the circuit judgeship.”

Again the hawk-keen blaze flared in the eyes of his host.

“You are mistaken, sir,” he declared with heated emphasis. “It was less for a candidate than against one that I worked. The man whom circumstances compelled me to support was a poor thing, but he was better than his adversary.”

“Was it party spirit that prompted you, then?” inquired the guest, feeling that politeness called for some show of interest.

“Sometimes I think,” said the lawyer with a grim smile, “that from some men God withholds the blessed power of riding life’s waves. All they can do is to buffet and fight and wear themselves out. Perhaps I’m that sort. The man who won—who succeeded himself on the bench—is an expedientist. So long as he presides, timid juries will return timid verdicts and the law will falter. I took the stump to brand him before the people as an apostate to his oath. I 83 knew he would win, but I meant to make him wear his trade-mark of cowardice along with his smirk of self-righteousness!”

As Spurrier listened, not to a feudist but to a man who had worn himself out fighting feudism, there came to him like a revelation an appreciation of the bitterness which runs in the grim undertow of this blood.

“I believe,” he suggested, glancing sidewise at the door beyond which he heard the thrushlike voice of the girl, “that you made an issue of a murder case which collapsed—a case in which you had been employed to prosecute.”

“Yes,” Cappeze told him. “Because I believe it to be one in which the officers of the court lay down and quit like dogs. The defendant was a red-handed bully, generally feared—and the law was in timid keeping. I am still trying to have the grand jury call before it the prosecutor, the sheriff, and every deputy who served on that posse. I want to make them tell, on oath, just how hard they sought to apprehend the assassin—who still walks boldly and freely among us—unwhipped of justice.”

Spurrier rose, deeply impressed by the headstrong, willful courage of this old insurgent, whose daughter’s eyes were so full of spring gentleness.

Far up the dwindling thread of a small water course, where the forest was jungle-thick, a log cabin hung perched to a rocky cornfield that tilted like a steep roof, and under its shingles Sim Colby dwelt alone. Since his coming here he had been assimilated into the commonplace life of the neighborhood and 84 the question of his origin was no longer discussed. The time had gone by when even an acquaintance of other days would be apt to calculate that his term of enlistment in the army had not run its full course. Moreover, there were no such acquaintances here; none who had known him before he changed his name from Grant to Colby. The shadow of dread which had once obsessed him had gradually and imperceptibly lightened until for weeks together he forgot how poignantly it had once haunted him. He had painstakingly established a reputation exemplary beyond the tendencies of his nature in this new habitat—since trouble might cause closed pages to reopen.

Now on a November afternoon a deputy sheriff, serving summonses in that neighborhood dismounted at the door where Sim stood with his hand resting on the jamb, and the two mulled over what sparse gossip the uneventful neighborhood afforded.

“Old Cappeze, he’s a-seekin’ ter rake up hell afresh an’ brew more pestilence fer everybody,” announced the deputy glumly.

“What’s he projeckin’ at now?” asked Sim.

“He’s seekin’ ter warm over thet ancient Sam Mosebury case afore ther grand jury. Come ter think of hit, Sim, ye rid with ther high sheriff yoreself thet time, didn’t ye?”

Moodily the other nodded. That was a matter he preferred to leave buried.

“Waal, Cappeze is claimin’ now thet ther possy didn’t make no master effort ter lay hands on Sam. He aims ter hev all ye boys tell ther grand jury what ye knows erbout ther matter.”

The deputy turned away, but in afterthought he 85 paused, thrashing idly with his switch at the weed stalks, as he retailed an almost forgotten item of news.

“A furriner come ter town yistidday, an’ sot out straightway acrost Hemlock Mountain fer old Cappeze’s dwellin’ house.”

“What manner of man war he, Joe?” Sim’s interest was perfunctory. Had he been haled into the grand-jury room in those earlier days, the prospect would have bristled with apprehensions, but now he had behind him the background of respectability and Mose Biggerstaff, who alone knew of his craven behavior as a member of the posse, was dead. Sim felt secure in his mantle of virtue.

“He war a right upstandin’ sort of feller—ther furriner,” enlightened the deputy. “He goes under ther name of Spurrier—John Spurrier.”

As though an electric wire of high tension had broken and brushed him in falling, Sim Colby’s attitude stiffened and every muscle grew taut from neck to ankles as his jaw sagged.

The deputy, with his foot already in the stirrup, missed the terror spasms of the face gone suddenly putty gray. He missed the gasp that contracted the throat and caused its breath to wheeze, and when he glanced back again from his saddle, the other had, with an effort of sheer desperation, regained his outward semblance of composure. He still leaned indolently against the door frame, but now he needed its support, because all his nerves jumped and a confusion like the swarming of angry bees filled his brain.

Afterward he groped his way inside and dropped down into a low chair by the hearth. For a long time 86 he sat there breathing stertorously while the untended fire died away to ashen dreariness. The sun went down beyond the pine tops and still he sat dully with his hands hanging over his knees, their fingers twitching in panic aimlessness.

Out of a past that he had cut away from the present had arisen a ghost of hideous menace. Here into the laurel which had promised sanctuary his Nemesis had pursued him.

Two men with the guilt of a murder standing between them had come into a radius too small to contain them both. It was as if they had met on a narrow log spanning a chasm where only one could pass and the other must fall.

If old Cappeze dragged him to the courthouse now, he would be delivered over to Spurrier, waiting there to identify him, as a fox in a trap is delivered to the skinning knife. That must be the meaning of the stranger’s visit to the lawyer.

Sim Colby went to an ancient and dilapidated bureau and from a creaking drawer took out a memento which, for some reason, he had preserved from times not treasured in memory. He carried it to the open door and stood looking at it as it lay on the palm of his hand with the light glinting upon it.

It was a sharpshooter’s medal, for, whatever his military shortcomings, Private Grant had been an efficient rifleman, and as he looked at it now his lips twisted into a grim smile. Then he took his rifle from its corner and, sitting on the doorstep, polished it with a fond particularity, oiling its mechanism and burnishing its bore.

Already Spurrier had made arrangements to ensconce himself under the roof of a house he had rented. Already the faces that he met in the road were, for the most part, familiar, and without exception they were friendly. Quick on the heels of his first disgust for the squalor of this lapsed and retarded life, had succeeded an exhilaration born of the wine-like sparkle of the air and the majestic breadth of vistas across ridge and valley. As he watched mile-wide shadows creep between sky-high lines of peaks, his dreams borrowed something of their vastness.

Through half-closed lids imagination looked out until the range-broken spaces altered to its vision. Spurrier saw white roads and the glitter of rails running off into gossamer webs of distance. Where now stood virgin forests of hard wood he visualized the shaftings of oil derricks, the red iron sheeting of tanks, the belching stacks of refineries, and in that defaced landscape he read the triumph of conquest; the guerdon of wealth; the satisfaction of power.

One afternoon Spurrier started over to the house he had rented, but into which he had not yet moved. The way lay for a furlong or more through a gorge deeply and somberly shaded. Even now, at midday, the sunlight of the upper places left it cloistered and the bowlders trooped along in ferny dampness, where the little waters whispered.

Beside a bulky hummock of green-corroded sandstone the man halted and stood musingly, with eyes downcast and thoughts uplifted—uplifted to the worship of his one god: Ambition. At his feet was an oily sediment along the water’s edge and the gravel was thick with “sand blossom”—tiny fossil formations 88 that are prima facie evidence of oil. Then, without warning, he felt a light sting along his cheek and the rock-walled fissure reverberated under what seemed a volley of musketry.

But the magnified and crumbling effect of the echo struck him with a less poignant realization than a slighter sound and a sharper one. As if a taut piano wire had been sharply struck, came the clear whang that he recognized as the flight song of a rifle bullet, and, whatever its origin it called for a prompt taking of cover.

Spurrier side-stepped as quickly as a boxer, and stood, for the moment at least, bulwarked behind the rock that was so providentially close.

“I’m John Spurrier—a stranger in these parts,” he sung out in a confident voice of forced boldness and cheerfulness. “I reckon you’ve made a mistake in your man.”

There was no answer and Spurrier cautiously raised his hat on the end of a stick with the same deliberation that might have marked his action had it been his own head emerging from cover.

Instantly the hidden rifle spoke again and the hat came down pierced through its band, while the rocks once more reverberated to multiplied detonations.

“It would seem,” the man told himself grimly, “that after all there was no mistake.”

He was unarmed and in no position to pursue investigations of the mystery, but by crawling along on his belly he could keep his body shielded behind the litter of broken stone that edged the brook until he reached the end of the gorge itself and came to safer territory.

Slowly, Spurrier traveled out of his precarious position, flattening himself when he paused to rest and listen, as he had made his men flatten themselves over there in the islands when they were going forward without cover under the fire of snipers.