you would git to know me in time, if you didn't now."

This was the Red Fox of the mountains, of whom he had heard so
much--"yarb" doctor and Swedenborgian preacher; revenue officer and,
some said, cold-blooded murderer. He would walk twenty miles to preach,
or would start at any hour of the day or night to minister to the
sick, and would charge for neither service. At other hours he would be
searching for moonshine stills, or watching his enemies in the valley
from some mountain top, with that huge spy-glass--Hale could see
now that the brass tube was a telescope--that he might slip down and
unawares take a pot-shot at them. The Red Fox communicated with spirits,
had visions and superhuman powers of locomotion--stepping mysteriously
from the bushes, people said, to walk at the traveller's side and as
mysteriously disappearing into them again, to be heard of in a few hours
an incredible distance away.

"I've been watchin' ye from up thar," he said with a wave of his hand.
"I seed ye go up the creek, and then the bushes hid ye. I know what
you was after--but did you see any signs up thar of anything you wasn't
looking fer?"

Hale laughed.

"Well, I've been in these mountains long enough not to tell you, if I
had."

The Red Fox chuckled.

"I wasn't sure you had--" Hale coughed and spat to the other side of his
horse. When he looked around, the Red Fox was gone, and he had heard no
sound of his going.

"Well, I be--" Hale clucked to his horse and as he climbed the last
steep and drew near the Big Pine he again heard a noise out in the
woods and he knew this time it was the fall of a human foot and not of a
hickory nut. He was right, and, as he rode by the Pine, saw again at its
base the print of the little girl's foot--wondering afresh at the reason
that led her up there--and dropped down through the afternoon shadows
towards the smoke and steam and bustle and greed of the Twentieth
Century. A long, lean, black-eyed boy, with a wave of black hair over
his forehead, was pushing his horse the other way along the Big Black
and dropping down through the dusk into the Middle Ages--both all
but touching on either side the outstretched hands of the wild little
creature left in the shadows of Lonesome Cove.

VII

Past the Big Pine, swerving with a smile his horse aside that he might
not obliterate the foot-print in the black earth, and down the mountain,
his brain busy with his big purpose, went John Hale, by