he
had flung his challenge to the vested rights of tradition and forfeited
clan sponsorship. Every hand was against him.

His way carried him past the Quarterhouse itself and near the
hitching-rack he halted, crouched low against the naked briars and dead
brush-wood. Among the several beasts fastened there was a gray horse
more visible than its darker companions, which he recognized as
belonging to Black Tom Carmichael. Yet Black Tom had been otherwise
mounted to-day when he had ridden away from Little Slippery with
Kinnard Towers.

Obviously the fresh animal stood saddled for a new journey--probably a
mission of general warning. Bear Cat drew back into the invisibility of
the steep hillside to watch, and it was only a short time before the
door of Kinnard's own house, on the opposite slope, opened. Towers
himself he only glimpsed, for the chieftain did not make a practice of
offering himself as a target by night, framed in lighted doorways.

But Black Tom came down the path to mount and ride away, and Bear Cat
struck off at right angles through the woods. The horseman must follow
the road he had taken to the next crossing, and the pedestrian could
reach the place more quickly by the footpath. Having arrived, he lay
belly-down on a titanic bowlder in time to hear the cuppy thud of
unshod hooves on the soft road and, a little later, to see Black Tom
dismount and hitch.

Carmichael turned into the woodland trail without suspicion. He was on
territory which should be safe, and he walked with a noisy carelessness
that swallowed up what little sound Turner Stacy could not avoid as he
followed.

By the simple device of playing shadow to the man in front Bear Cat
drew so near to the still that he could both see and hear, though the
last stage of the journey through the interlocked thickets he
accomplished with such minute caution that Black Tom sat by the fire
with a tin cup of white liquor in his hand before his follower lay
ensconced a stone's throw away. It was a nest of secrecy, buried from
even a near view by the tops of felled hemlock which would hold their
screen of foliage throughout the winter.

Edging the narrow circle of firelight, walls of rock and naked trees
were sketched flat and grotesque against the inky void beyond them. Two
figures in muddied overcoats huddled close to the blaze, and Black Tom
was reciting the events of the day over on Little Slippery.

"They didn't p'intedly aim ter harm Bear Cat