were vested with full authority to halt whomsoever approached.

While the newcomer sat, waiting in his saddle, Boone Wellver vaulted lightly down from fence rail to gravel roadway and, standing there as slim yet as sturdy as a hickory sapling, raised one hand towards the mule's flank, but arrested it midway as he inquired, "Thet critter o' yourn—hit don't foller kickin', does hit?"

"Stand clear of its heels," cautioned the man hastily. "I've known this beast only since morning—but as acquaintance ripens, admiration wanes. What's your name?"

"Boone Wellver. What's yourn?"

"Mine is Victor McCalloway. Does your father live near here?"

"Hain't got no daddy."

"Your mother, then?"

"Hain't got no mammy nuther."

The stranger gazed down from his saddle with interested eyes, and under the steadiness of his scrutiny Boone was smitten with an abrupt self-consciousness.

"Don't you belong to any one at all?" The question was put slowly, but the reply came with prompt and prideful certitude.

"I'm my own man. I dwells with a passel of old granny folks an' gray-heads, though." Having so enlightened his questioner, he added with a ring of pride, as though having confessed the unflattering truth about his immediate household, he was entitled to boast a little of more distant connections:

"Asa Gregory's my fust cousin by blood. I reckon ye've done heered tell of him, hain't ye?"

Across the face of Victor McCalloway flitted the ghost of a satirical smile, which he speedily repressed.

"Yes," he said briefly with non-committal gravity, "I've heard of him."

To the outer world from which McCalloway came few mountain names had percolated, attended by notability. A hermit people they are and unheralded beyond their own environment—yet now and then the reputation of one of them will not be denied. So the newspaper columns had given Asa Gregory space, headlines even, linking to his name such appositives as "mountain desperado" and "feud-killer."

When he had shot old John Carr to death in the highway, such unstinted publicity had been accorded to his acts—such shudder-provoking fulness of detail—that Asa had found in it a very embarrassment of fame.

But the boy spoke the name of his kinsman in accents of unquestioning admiration, and Victor McCalloway only nodded as he repeated,

"Yes, I've heard of him."

Then as the traveller gathered up his reins to start onward, a tall young man came, with the swing of an elastic stride, around the next turn and, nodding to the boy, halted at the mule's head. He was an upstanding fellow, of commanding height, and the tapering staunchness of a timber wedge. He carried a rifle upon his shoulder and his clear-chiselled face bore the pleasant recommendation of straight-gazing candour. His clothing was rough, yet escaped the seeming of roughness, because it sat upon his splendid body and limbs as if a part of them—like a hawk's plumage. But it was the eyes under a broad forehead that were most notable. They were unusually fine and frank; dark and full of an almost gentle meditativeness. Here was a native, thought the man on the mule, whose gaze, unlike that of many of his fellows, was neither sinister nor furtive. Here was one who seemed to have escaped the baleful heritage of grudge-bearing.

Then McCalloway's thought was interrupted by the voice of the boy declaring eagerly: "This hyar furriner 'lows ter ride over ter Cyrus Spradlin's dwellin' house. We've jest been talkin' erbout ye—an' he's already done heered of ye, Asa!"

The tall man on foot stiffened, at the announcement, into something like hostile rigidity, and the velvet softness of eye which, a moment ago, a woman might have envied, flashed into the hard agate of suspicion.

He stood measuring the stranger for an uncompromising matter of moments before he spoke, and when words came they were couched in a steely evenness of tone. "So ye've heerd of me—hev ye?"

He paused a moment after that, his face remaining mask-like, then he went on:

"I reckon whatever ye heered tell of me war either right favourable or right scandalous—dependin' on whether ye hed speech with my friends—or my enemies. I've got a lavish of both sorts."

McCalloway also stiffened at the note of challenge.

"I never talked to any one about you," he rejoined crisply. "I read your name in newspapers—as did many others, I dare say."

"Yes. I reckon ye read in them papers thet I kilt Old Man Carr. Wa'al, thet war es true es text. I kilt him whilst he was aimin' ter lay-way me. He'd done a'ready kilt my daddy an' I was ridin' inter Marlin Town ter buy buryin' clothes—when we met up in ther highway. Thet's ther whole hist'ry of hit."

"Mr. Gregory," the older man said slowly with an even courtesy that carried a note of aloofness, "I've neither the right nor the disposition to question you on personal matters. I reserve the privilege of discussing my own affairs only so far as I choose, and I recognize the same right in others. My final opinions, however, are not formed on hearsay."

The brown eyes softened again and the features relaxed. "I reckon," commented Asa with a touch of shame-faced apology in his tone, "thar warn't no proper call fer me ter start in straightway talkin' erbout myself nohow—but when a man's enemies air a'seekin' ter git him hung, hit's liable ter make him touchy an' mincy-like. Hit don't take no hard bite ter hurt a sore tooth, no-ways."

Victor McCalloway inclined his head. "I stopped here," he explained, "to ask directions of this lad. These infernal roads confuse me."

"I reckon they do be sort o' mystifyin' ter a furriner," assented the mountaineer, who stood charged with murder, then he added with grave courtesy: "I'll go back ter ther fork of ther highroad with ye an' sot ye on yore way ef so be hit would convenience ye any."

As mounted traveller and unmounted guide went on toward the rounded cone of Cinder Knob it seemed to loom as far away as ever, masking behind its timbered distances the unseen trickle of Hominy Mill Creek, where Cyrus Spradling dwelt.

But to right and left, ever the same, yet ever changing; sombre in shadowed gorge and bright of sunlit crest, lay the broken, forested hills. Their horizons gathered in tangled depths of timber—shadowed hiding places of chasms—silences and a brooding spirit of mystery.

At length a sudden elbow in the twisting way brought them face to face with two rifle-bearing men. They were gaunt fellows, tall but slouching and loose of joint. Their thin faces, too, were saturnine and ugly with the cast of vindictiveness.

"Howdy, Asa," accosted one and, with a casual nod, the guide responded, "Howdy, Jett," but in the brief silence that followed, broken by the wheezy panting of the mule, McCalloway fancied he could discern an undernote of tension.

"This here man," went on Asa Gregory, jerking his head backward, as if in answer to an unuttered query, "gives ther name of McCalloway. I hain't never seed him afore this day, but he's farin' over ter Spradling's an' I proffered ter kinderly sot him on his way. I couldn't skeercely do no less fer him."

The two nodded and when some further exchange of civilities had followed, passed on and out of sight. But for a while after their departure Asa stood unmoving with his head intently bent in an attitude of listening—and though his rifle still nestled unshifted in its cradling elbow, the fingers of the trigger hand twitched a little and the brown eyes were again agate-hard. Finally the guide's mouth line relaxed from the straight tautness of whatever emotion had caused that stiffening of posture, and the lips moved in low speech—almost drawlingly soft of cadence.

"I reckon they've done gone on," he said, as if speaking to himself; then lifting his eyes to his companion, he explained briefly. "Not meanin' no offence, I 'lowed hit war kinderly charitable ter ye ter let them fellers know ye jest fell in with me accidental like. They