At seven o’clock, despite entreaties and warnings, Creed mounted his mule and set out for the Turrentine place.

“Don’t you trust nothin’ nor nobody over thar,” Nancy followed him out to the gate to reiterate. “Old Jephthah Turrentine’s as big a rascal as they’ is unhung. No—I wouldn’t trust Judith neither (hush now, Little Buck; you don’t know what granny’s a-talkin’ about); she’s apt to git some fool gal’s notion o’ being jealous o’ Huldy, or something like that, and see you killed as cheerful as I’d wring a chicken’s neck. (For the Lord’s sake, Doss, take these chil’en down to the spring branch; they mighty nigh run me crazy with they’ fussin’ an’ cryin’!) Don’t you trust none on ’em, boy.”

“Why, Aunt Nancy, I trust everybody on that whole place, excepting Blatchley Turrentine,” said Creed sturdily. “Even Andy and Jeff, if I had a chance to talk to them, could be got to see reason. They’re not the bloodthirsty crew you make them out. They’re good folks.”

She looked at him in exasperation, yet with a sort of reluctant approval and admiration.

“Well,” she sighed, as she saw him mount and start, “mebbe yo’ safer goin’ right smack into the lion’s den, like Dan’el, than you would be to sneak up.”

Summer was at full tide, and the world had been new washed last night. Scents of mint and pennyroyal rose up under his mule’s slow pacing feet. The meadow that stretched beyond Nancy’s cabin was a green sea, with flower foam of white weed and dog-fennel; and the fence row was a long breaker with surf of elder blossom, the garden a tangle of bean-vine arbours. The corn patch rustled valiantly; the pastures were streaked with pale yellow primroses; and Bob Whites ran through the young crops, calling.

Creed rode forward. A gay wind was abroad under the blue sky. Every tiniest leaf that danced and flirted on its slender stem sent back gleams of the morning sunlight from its wet, glistening surface. The woods were full of bird songs, and the myriad other lesser voices of a midsummer morning sounded clear and distinct upon the vast, enfolding silence of the mountains.

It seemed beyond reason out in that gay July sunshine that anything dark or tragic could happen to one. But after all man cannot be so different from Nature which produces him, and the night before had given them a passionate, brief, destructive thunder-storm. Creed noted the ravages of it here and there; the broken boughs, the levelled or uprooted herbage, the washed and riven soil, as his mule moved soberly along.

At the Turrentine cabin all was quiet. The young men of the house had been out the entire night before guarding the trails that Creed Bonbright should not leave the mountains secretly. A good deal of moonshine whiskey went to this night guarding, particularly when there was the excuse of a shower to call for it, and the watchers of the trails now lay in their beds making up arrears of sleep. Jephthah stood looking out of his own cabin door when, about fifteen minutes ahead of Creed, Taylor Stribling tethered his half-broken little filly in the bushes at the edge of the clearing, and ran across the grassy side yard.

“Bonbright’s out an’ a-headin’ this way!” he volleyed in a hoarse whisper as he approached the head of the clan.

“Who’s with him?” asked Jephthah, turning methodically back into the room for the squirrel gun over the door.

“Nobody. He ain’t got no rifle. I reckon he’s packin’ a pistol, though, of course. Nancy Cyard bawled an’ took on considerable when he started. Shall I call the boys?”

“No,” returned Jephthah briefly, replacing the clean brown rifle on its fir pegs. “No, I don’t need nobody, and I don’t need Old Sister. I reckon I can deal with one young feller alone.”

He walked unhurriedly toward the main house. Stribling stood looking after him a moment, uncertainly. The spy’s errand was performed. He had now his dismissal; it would not do to be seen about the place at this time. He went reluctantly back to the waiting filly, mounted and turned her head toward a high point that commanded the big road for some distance. A little later Jephthah Turrentine sat in the open threshing-floor porch of the main house smoking, Judith within was busy looking over and washing a mess of Indian lettuce and sissles in a piggin, when Creed rode into the yard.

The ancient hound thumped twice with a languid tail on the floor; Judith, back in her kitchen, stayed her hand, and stared out at the newcomer with parted lips which the blood forsook; Jephthah’s inscrutable black eyes rose to Creed’s face and rested there; nothing but that aspect, pale, desolate, ravaged, the strip of plaster running from brow to cheek, marked the difference between this visit and any other.

Yet the old house seemed to crouch close, to regard him askance from under lowering eyes, as though through all its timbers ran the message that the enemy was here.

“Good morning,” he hailed.

“Howdy. ’Light—’light and come in,” Jephthah adjured him, without rising, “I’m proud to see ye.”

His own countenance was worn and haggard with sleeplessness and anxiety, but with the mountaineer’s dignified reticence he passively ignored the fact, assuming a detached manner of mild jocularity.

Creed, under inspection from six pairs of eyes, though there was only one individual visible to him, got from his mule, tethered the animal, and came and seated himself on the porch edge.

“Aunt Nancy didn’t want me to come over this morning,” he began with that directness which always amazed his Turkey Track neighbours and put them all astray as to the man, his real meaning and intentions.

“Well, now—didn’t she?” inquired the other innocently. “Hit was a fine mornin’ for a ride, too, and I ’low ye’ had yo’ reasons for comin’ in this direction—not but what we’re proud to see ye on business or on pleasure.”

“Are any of the boys about?” asked Creed, suddenly looking up.

“I don’t know adzackly whar the boys is at,” compromised Jephthah, soothing his conscience with the fiction that one might be lying in one bed and another in some place to him unknown. “Was there any particular one you wanted to see?”

“I was looking for Wade,” said Creed briefly, and a silent shock went through one of the men kneeling on the bed inside the log wall, peering through a chink at the visitor.

Judith could bear the strain no longer. Torn by diverse emotions, she snatched up a bucket, ran out of the back door and down to the spring. Returning with it, and her composure somewhat repaired, she dipped a cool and dripping gourdful, walked swiftly through the front room and stood abruptly before Creed, presenting it with almost no word of greeting, only the customary, “Would ye have a fresh drink?”

“Thank you,” said Creed taking the gourd from her hand and lifting his eyes to her face. He needed no prompting now; his own heart spoke very clearly; he knew as he looked at her that she was all the world to him—and that he was utterly lost and cut off from her.

Jephthah, on the porch, and those unseen eyes within, watched the two curiously, while Creed drank from the gourd, emptied out what water remained, and returned it to Judith, and she all the while regarded him with a burning gaze, finally bursting out:

“What do you want to see Wade about? Is it—is it Huldy?”

“Yes, Miss Judith, it’s Huldah,” Creed assented quietly.

“I don’t know as its worth while talkin’ to Wade about that thar gal,” put in Jephthah meditatively. “She sorter sidled off last night and left the place, and I think he feels kinder pestered and mad like. My boys is all mighty peaceful in their dispositions, but it ain’t the best to talk to any man when he’s had that which riles him.”

“Whar is Huldy Spiller?” demanded Judith standing straight and tall before the visitor, disdaining the indirection of her uncle’s methods. “Is she over at you-all’s?”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to Wade about,” returned Creed evasively. “Huldah’s a good girl, and I’m sorry if he thinks—I’d hate to be the one that——”

For a moment Judith stared at him with incredulous anger, then she wheeled sharply, went into the house and shut the door. Creed turned appealingly to the older man. He had great faith in Jephthah Turrentine’s good sense and cool judgment. But the young justice showed in many ways less comprehension of these, his own people, than an outsider born and bred. Jephthah Turrentine was no longer to be reckoned with as a man—he was the head of a tribe, and that tribe was at war.

“I don’t know as that thar gal is worth namin’ at this time,” he vouchsafed, almost plaintively. “Ef she had taken Jim Cal’s Iley ’long with her, I could fergive the both of ’em and wish ye joy. As it is, she’s neither here nor thar. Ef you had nothin’ better to name to my son Wade, mebbe we’d as well talk of the craps, and about Steve Massengale settin’ out to run for the Legislature.”

Creed stood up, and in so doing let the little packet of papers he held in his hand drop unnoted to the grass. He scorned to make an appeal for himself, yet it seemed worth while to let his adversaries know that he was aware what they would be at.

“Who found Blatch Turrentine’s body and removed it?” he asked abruptly.

Blatch’s body,—unknown to his uncle and Judith—at that moment reposing comfortably upon a bed in the loft room adjoining the porch, heaved with noiseless chuckles.

Old Jephthah’s eyes narrowed. “We ’low that ye might answer that question for yo’self,” he said coolly. “Word goes that you’ve done hid the body, so murder couldn’t be proved.”

The visitor sighed. He was disappointed. He had hoped the old man might have admitted—to him—that Blatch had not been killed.

“Mr. Turrentine,” he began desperately, “I know what you people believe about me—but it isn’t true; I’m not a spy. When I came upon that still, I was running for my life. I never wanted to know anything about blockaded stills.”

“Ye talked sort o’ like ye did, here earlier in the evenin’,” said the old man, rearing himself erect in his chair, and glaring upon the fool who spoke out in broad daylight concerning such matters.

“I didn’t mean that personally,” protested Creed. “I wish to the Lord I didn’t know anything about it. I’m sorry it chanced that I looked in the cave there and saw your son——”

“You needn’t go into no particulars about whar you looked in, nor what you seed, nor call out no names of them you seed,” cut in the old man’s voice, low and menacing; and around the corner of the house Jim Cal, where he had stolen up to listen, trembled through all the soft bulk of his body like a jelly; and into his white face the angry blood rushed.

“Wish ye didn’t know nothin? Yes, and you’ll wish’t it wuss’n that befo’ yo’re done with it,” he muttered under his breath.

“I don’t intend to use that or any other information against a neighbour and a friend,” Creed went on doggedly. “But they can’t make me leave the Turkey Tracks. I’m here to stay. I came with a work to do, and I mean to do it or die trying.”

The old man’s head was sunk a bit on his breast, so that the great black beard rose up of itself and shadowed his lower face. “Mighty fine—mighty fine,” he murmured in its voluminous folds. “Ef they is one thing finer than doin’ what you set out to do, hit’s to die a-tryin’. The sort of sentiments you have on hand now is the kind I l’arned myself out of the blue-backed speller when I was a boy. I mind writin’ em out big an’ plain after the teacher’s copy.”

Creed looked about him for Judith. He had failed with the old man, but she would understand—she would know. His hungry heart counselled him that she was his best friend, and he glanced wistfully at the door through which she had vanished; but it remained obstinately closed as he made his farewells, got dispiritedly to his mule and away.

Judith watched his departure from an upper window, smitten to the heart by the drooping lines of the figure, the bend of the yellow head. Inexorably drawn she came down the steep stairs, checking, halting at every step, her breast heaving with the swift alternations of her mood. The door of the boys’ room swung wide; her swift glance descried Wade’s figure just vanishing into the grove at the edge of the clearing.

The tall, gaunt old man brooded in his chair, his black eyes fixed on vacancy, the pipe in his relaxed fingers dropped to his knee. Up toward the Jim Cal cabin Iley, one baby on her hip and two others clinging to her skirts, dodged behind a convenient smoke-house, and peered out anxiously.

Judith stepped noiselessly into the porch; the old man did not turn his head. Her quick eye noted the paper Creed had dropped. She stooped and picked it up unobserved, slipped into the kitchen, studying its lines of figures which meant nothing to her, caught up her sunbonnet and, glancing warily about, made an exit through the back door. She ran through a long grape-arbour where great wreathing arms of Virgin’s Bower aided to shut the green tunnel in from sight, then took a path where tall bushes screened her, making for the short cut which she guessed Creed would take.

Down the little dell through which she herself had ridden that first day with what wonderful thoughts of him in her heart, she got sight of him, going slowly, the lagging gait of the old mule seeming to speak his own depression. The trees were all vigorous young second growth here, and curtained the slopes with billows of green. The drying ground sent up a spicy mingling of odours—decaying pine needles, heart leaf, wintergreen berries, and the very soil itself.

Bumblebees shouldered each other clumsily about the heads of milk-weed blossoms. Cicada droned in long, loud crescendo and diminuendo under the hot sun of mid forenoon. A sensitive plant, or as Judith herself would have said, a “shame briar,” caught at her skirts as she hastened. Dipping deeper into the hollow, the man ahead, riding with his gaze upon the ground, became aware of the sound of running feet behind him, and then a voice which made his pulses leap called his name in suppressed, cautious tones. He looked back to see Judith hurrying after him, her cheeks aflame from running, the sunbonnet carried in her hand, and her dark locks freeing themselves in little moist tendrils about her brow where the tiny beads of perspiration gathered.

“You dropped this,” she panted, offering the paper when she came abreast of him.

For a moment she stood by the old mule’s shoulder looking up into the eyes of his rider. It was the reversal of that first day when Creed had stood so looking up at her. Some memory of it struggled in her, and appealed for his life, anyhow, from that fierce primitive jealousy which would have sacrificed the lover of the other woman.

“I—I knowed the paper wasn’t likely anything you needed,” she told him. “I jest had to have speech with you alone. I want to warn you. The boys is out after you. They ain’t no hope, ef the Turrentines gits after you. Likely we’re both watched right now. You’ll have to leave the mountains.”

Creed got quickly from the mule and stood facing her, a little pale and very stern.

“Do you hold with them?” he asked. “I had no intention of killing Blatch. The quarrel was forced on me, as they would say if they told the truth.”

“Well, they won’t tell the truth,” said Judith impatiently. “What differ does it make how come it? They’re bound to run ye out. Hit’s a question of yo’ life ef ye don’t go. I—I don’t know what makes me come an’ warn ye—but you and Huldy had better git to the settlement as soon as ye can.”

Creed saw absolutely nothing in her coupling of his name with Huldah Spiller’s, but the fact that both were under the displeasure of the Turrentines. She searched his face with hungry gaze for some sign of denial of that which she imputed. Instead, she met a look of swift distress.

“I’ve got to see Wade about Huldah,” Creed asserted doggedly. “I promised her—I told her——”

Judith drew back.

“Well, see Wade then!” she choked. “There he is,” and she pointed to the wall of greenery behind which her quicker eyes had detected a man who stole, rifle on shoulder, through the bushes toward a point by the path-side.

“What do I care?” she flung at him. “What is it to me?—you and your Huldy, and your grand plans, and your killin’ up folks and a-gittin’ run out o’ the Turkey Tracks! Settle it as best ye may—I’ve said my last word!”

Her breast heaved convulsively. Bitter, corroding tears burned in her flashing eyes; rage, jealousy, thwarted passion, tenderness denied, and utter terror of the outcome—the time after—all these tore her like wild wolves, as she turned and fled swiftly up the path she had come.

The pale young fellow with the marred, stricken face, standing by the mule, looked after her heavily. Those flying feet were carrying away from him, out of his life, all that made that life beautiful and blest. Yet Creed set his jaw resolutely, and facing about once more, addressed himself to the situation as it was.

“Wade—Wade Turrentine!” he called. “Come out of there. I see you. Come out and talk to me.”

With all the composure in life Wade slouched into the opening of the path.

“You’ve got good eyes,” was his sole comment. Then, as the other seemed slow to begin, “What might you want speech with me about?” he inquired.

“It’s about Huldah,” Creed opened the question volubly now. “You love her, and she loves you. She came over to warn me because we are old acquaintances and friends, and I guess she don’t want you to get into trouble. Is it true that her life is not safe if she stays here on the mountain?”

Wade’s pleasant hazel eyes narrowed and hardened.

“You’re a mighty busy somebody about things that don’t consarn ye,” he remarked finally.

“But this does concern me,” Creed insisted. “I can’t be the cause of breaking up a match between you and Huldah——”

He would have gone further, but Wade interrupted shaking his head.

“No—I reckon you cain’t. Hit’d take more than you to break up any match I was suited with. Mebbe I don’t want no woman that’s liable to hike out and give me away whenever she takes the notion.”

“Oh, come now, Wade,” said Bonbright, with good-natured entreaty in his voice. “You know she wouldn’t give you away. She didn’t mean any harm to you. I’ll bet you’ve done plenty of things twice as bad, if Huldah had the knowing of them.”

“Mebbe I have,” agreed Wade, temperately, and suddenly one saw the resemblance to his father. “Mebbe I have—but ye see I ain’t the one that’s bein’ met up with right now. I ain’t carin’ which nor whether about Huldy Spiller; but you’ve got to walk yo’self from the Turkey Tracks—and walk sudden and walk straight, Mr. Creed Bonbright—or you’ll come to more trouble with the Turrentines. I tell ye this in pure good will.”