sing. There is a 'phone at Chicken
Gizzard, you know."

It seemed rather too exaggerated a system of espionage for probability.

"And telephoning in this country," went on the attorney, "is not so
simple a matter as you might suppose. We have no general system and no
universal exchange. There are telephones or 'boxes' as they are locally
called, connecting three or four houses into separate groups. A
telephone message from my house to Lexington, for example, would have to
be repeated and relayed through a half-dozen 'boxes' before it reached
its destination."

And yet during all that day's ride and all of the next three days there
was never, to my eye, an indication that any man interested himself in
our goings or comings. On the fourth day it was otherwise.

We had covered some twenty-five or thirty miles since breakfast over
roads that were full of climbs and other places where there were no
roads at all. Our spent horses plodded wearily, though the sun hung
close enough over the western highlands to warn us that, unless we
increased our pace, we should be benighted.

We were riding with our ever-present squad of gunmen and our road dipped
to the valley where we should cross that branch of Chicken Gizzard which
bounded the Marcus place at the back. We shook our jaded mounts into a
shambling trot and reached it at that hour which ushers in the short
November dusk. The woods were still and the bark of a belated squirrel
going home from forage broke the silence with a seeming of noisiness.

The creek was shallow and fordable, but to reach the crossing it was
necessary to follow a dizzy bridle path steeply downward and in single
file, between thick growing saplings and laurel. Back of the mountains
the sky held a pale afterglow against which the higher timber sketched
itself starkly. The body of the woods was a dark mass out of which only
the white-barked sycamores showed themselves with any clearness of
individuality.

Beyond the ribbon of water lay Marcus's rotting and weed-choked division
fence. The smoke from his chimney, and the glint at the crack of a
lighted window were visible a half-mile distant.

Our front horses had splashed fetlock deep into the water and halted the
cavalcade to drink when a sudden staccato outbreak ripped the silence.
Three thin jets of rifle fire blinked out with acrid sharpness from the
laurel through which we had just come. The men who had ambushed us must
have lain so close to ou