who were "branch-water men" dwelling in some remote
pocket of the hills, had withdrawn to their thicketed abodes.

Bud Sellers had pieced two and two together, and though he kept a
Masonic silence on the point, he had reached a conclusion. The house
where Jase Mallows had been nursed back to health after his mysterious
wounding, was not far from the place where he and Brent had been
ambushed. The wound might have been the result of the volley he had
himself fired at the rifle-flash, and if that were true the balance of
that encounter lay in his favor. If it were not true, he had no means
of knowing to whom he owed an unpaid score for his "lay-wayin'."

Only, he must keep an eye on Jase--because if his inference were
correct, Jase would never forget.

Besides the telegraph man, the only other principal, actually or
definitely known to any of Alexander's friends had been Lute Brown, and
upon him they need spend no further thought. A long while after the
tragedy had been played out there by yellow lantern-light, a woodsman
passed the rotting cabin where Lute and his faithful partisan had died.
It was indeed so long after, that there was some difficulty in
identifying the bodies, and an inconclusive coroner's verdict left the
matter stranded in mystery--and so it promised to remain. Privately,
those conspirators, whose lips were sealed as to legal testimony, had
hunted the assassin for several weeks, but without success.
Occasionally, in widely separated places, a haggard and emaciated man
was glimpsed who always escaped unidentified and with ghost-like speed.
Children were frightened with tales of his burning eyes, and in
neighborhood gossip he was spoken of as the "wild man of the woods."

For when Lute Brown's murderer, fleeing for his life, had opened his
parcel and discovered the worthlessness of that for which he had turned
Judas, something snapped in his befuddled brain. He became an Ishmael
driven before the torture of a fixed idea--terror of capture, until one
day his body was found, worn to a skeleton; matted of beard and hair,
and lying with its head in a creek bed at the foot of a cliff over
which the assassin had fallen.

So the Ku-Klux became again only a name.

If, however, the men who had followed Alexander were willing to let
sleeping dogs lie, the other faction had not only the rancor of defeat
remaining with them, but also the incurable itch of uneasy consciences.

At any time that drink loos