go unguarded from my house to my barn, sir. Keithley used to carry his
two-year-old child into court in his arms. Even they would not shoot a
baby. One day he went without the child. That day he died."

I looked at the face which was turned toward me. It was a face from
which had been whipped the knowledge of how to smile. We rode for a
half-mile in silence with only the cuppy thud of hoofs on the soft
earth, the creaking of stirrup leather and the clink of bit rings.

"Why," I asked at last, "don't you leave such a country and establish
yourself where you can have security?"

His angular chin came up with a jerk. His eyes flashed.

"Go away?" he repeated. "Do you think a man wants to be driven from the
country where he and his parents and his children were born? Besides,
sir, my mother belongs to the old order. I was the first to be educated.
She still smokes her pipe in the chimney-corner. She is of the
mountains. She must stay here." He paused, then his words began again
dispassionately, and gathered, as he talked, the fiery resonance of the
instinctive orator.

"If the men who love war, leave lawless countries, who in God's name is
to do the work? The order is changing. What does Kipling say about the
men who blaze trails?

"'On the sand-drift, on the veldt-side, in the fern-scrub we lay,
That our sons might follow after by the bones on the way.'

"These men have made a mockery of the law. It is my desire to punish
them with the law. It is my purpose to do so unless they kill me first.
Why am I representing your company? For the fee? No, sir!... God knows I
need the fee, but I shall also have a bigger compensation. When the new
order comes I shall see Garvin's power crumple. I shall send him to the
gallows or to the penitentiary. That will be my reward." His voice was
again passionate. "The filthy assassin realizes my motive and he sees in
you my allies. Watch him, and safeguard your steps."

CHAPTER XIX

A VOLLEY FROM THE LAUREL.

When we reached the attorney's house the reality of feud conditions
gained corroboration from a hundred small details. Like Garvin's, it
stood in an area stripped of trees and undergrowth. It was a large cabin
of logs and to its original two rooms rambling additions had from time
to time been made. Everywhere a note of the poor and primitive stood out
in uncouth nakedness. The men of the guard were all impoverished
kinsmen, who lived like parasites upon the lawy