th. Adam, who could
read the tones of a man's voice, glanced aside and remembered the
quarrel. "Thin ice there, and crackling twigs!" he thought. "Look where
you set your moccasin, Golden-Tongue!" Aloud he said, "You and your
brother came in out of the snow, and read your letters by the fire. It
had fallen thick the day before."

"Yes, I remember. A heavy fall all day, but at night it cleared."

"Yes," went on the other blithely. "I was at Lewis Rand's on Shockoe
Hill, and when I walked home, the stars were shining. What's the matter,
sir?"

"Nothing. Why?"

"I thought," quoth Adam, "that some varmint had stung you." He looked
thoughtfully at the acorn. "You are a schollard, Mr. Cary. Is the whole
oak, root, branch, and seed, in the acorn--bound to come out just that
way?"

"So they say," answered Cary. "And in the invisible acorn of that oak a
second tree, and that second holds a third, and the third a fourth, and
so on through the magic forest. Consequences to the thousandth
generation. You were saying that you were at Mr. Rand's the night of the
nineteenth of February."

"Was I?" asked Adam, with coolness. "Oh, yes! I went over to talk with
him about a buffalo skin and some antlers of elk that he wanted for
Roselands--and the stars were shining when I came away." To himself he
said, "Now why did he start like that a moment back? It wasn't because
the snow had stopped and the stars were shining. Where was _he_ that
night?"

Cary drew a circle in the dust with the handle of his whip. "You were at
Lynch's with Mr. Rand the next afternoon. And immediately after that you
returned to the West?"

Adam nodded. The acorn was yet poised upon his finger, but his keen blue
eyes were for the other's face and form, bent over the drawing in the
dusty road. "Ay, West I went," he said cheerfully. "I'm just a born
wanderer! I can't any more stay in one town than a bird can stay on one
bush."

"A born wanderer," said Cary pleasantly, "is almost always a born good
fellow. How long this time will be your stay in Albemarle?"

"Why, that's as may be," answered Adam, with vagueness. "I'm mighty fond
of this country in the fall of the year, and I've a hankering for an
old-time Christmas at home--But, my faith; wanderers never know when the
fit will take them! It may be to-morrow, and it may be next year."

"You and Mr. Rand are old friends?"

"You may say that," exclaimed the hunter. "There's a connection
somewhere between t