ive here at the foot of the mountain. Our cattle are stolen and run
across the border into Maryland. We are tired of it and we intend to
stop it.

"Our lives and our property are menaced by a set of reckless desperate
devils that we have determined to hunt down and hang to the first tree
in sight. We did not send for you. You pushed your way in here; and now,
if you are afraid of breaking the law, you can ride on, because we are
going to break it--if to hang a pair of murderous devils is to break
it."

I was astonished at my uncle's decision.

"Well," he said, "if the law must be broken, I will stay and help you
break it!"

"Very well," replied Ward; "but don't get a wrong notion in your head,
Abner. If you choose to stay, you put yourself on a footing with
everybody else."

"And that is precisely what I want to do," replied Abner, "but as
matters stand now, every man here has an advantage over me."

"What advantage, Abner?" said Ward.

"The advantage," answered my uncle, "that he has heard all the evidence
against your prisoners and is convinced that they are guilty."

"If that is all the advantage, Abner," replied Ward, "you shall not be
denied it. There has been so much cattle stealing here of late that our
people living on the border finally got together and determined to stop
every drove going up into the mountains that wasn't accompanied by
somebody that we knew was all right. This afternoon one of my men
reported a little bunch of about a hundred steers on the road, and I
stopped it. These two men were driving the cattle. I inquired if the
cattle belonged to them and they replied that they were not the owners,
but that they had been hired to take the drove over into Maryland. I did
not know the men, and as they met my inquiries with oaths and
imprecations, I was suspicious of them. I demanded the name of the owner
who had hired them to drive the cattle. They said it was none of my
damned business and went on. I raised the county. We overtook them,
turned their cattle into a field, and brought them back until we could
find out who the drove belonged to. On the road we met Bowers."

He turned and indicated the man who was working with the rope halter.

I knew the man. He was a cattle shipper, somewhat involved in debt, but
who managed to buy and sell and somehow keep his head above water.

"He told us the truth. Yesterday evening he had gone over on the
Stone-Coal to look at Daniel Coopman's cattle. He