till appeared so sane--he
was a type that confounded. No wonder for these reasons and as a tribute
to his infernal shrewdness he was known far and wide as the Red Fox
of the Mountains. But Hale was too tired for further speculation and
presently he yawned.

"Want to lay down?" asked the old man quickly.

"I think I do," said Hale, and they went inside. The little old woman
had her face to the wall in a bed in one corner and the Red Fox pointed
to a bed in the other:

"Thar's yo' bed." Again Hale's eyes fell on the big Winchester.

"I reckon thar hain't more'n two others like it in all these mountains."

"What's the calibre?"

"Biggest made," was the answer, "a 50 x 75."

"Centre fire?"

"Rim," said the Red Fox.

"Gracious," laughed Hale, "what do you want such a big one for?"

"Man cannot live by bread alone--in these mountains," said the Red Fox
grimly.

When Hale lay down he could hear the old man quavering out a hymn or two
on the porch outside: and when, worn out with the day, he went to sleep,
the Red Fox was reading his Bible by the light of a tallow dip. It is
fatefully strange when people, whose lives tragically intersect, look
back to their first meetings with one another, and Hale never forgot
that night in the cabin of the Red Fox. For had Bad Rufe Tolliver, while
he whispered at the gate, known the part the quiet young man silently
seated in the porch would play in his life, he would have shot him where
he sat: and could the Red Fox have known the part his sleeping guest was
to play in his, the old man would have knifed him where he lay.

X

Hale opened his eyes next morning on the little old woman in black,
moving ghost-like through the dim interior to the kitchen. A wood-thrush
was singing when he stepped out on the porch and its cool notes had the
liquid freshness of the morning. Breakfast over, he concluded to leave
the yellow mule with the Red Fox to be taken back to the county town,
and to walk down the mountain, but before he got away the landlord's son
turned up with his own horse, still lame, but well enough to limp along
without doing himself harm. So, leading the black horse, Hale started
down.

The sun was rising over still seas of white mist and wave after wave
of blue Virginia hills. In the shadows below, it smote the mists into
tatters; leaf and bush glittered as though after a heavy rain, and down
Hale went under a trembling dew-drenched world and along a tumbling
s