body, but his eagerness for investigation on that score must wait.
Now he must rejoin the chase and turn it away from such dangerous
nearness to its quarry.

So Tate ran down the bank and shouted. Voices replied and figures
became visible on the farther shore.

"I seed him fall in," came the mendacious assurance of the man who was
playing two parts. "I waded in atter him--but he went floatin' on down
stream."

"Did he look like he mout be alive?" was the anxious query and the
reply came as promptly. "He had every seemin' of bein' stone dead."

For a while they searched the banks, until, having discovered the hat,
they decided to go back and let the final hunt for the body wait until
morning.

But Dog had gone home and roused Joe Sanders, who had come in about
midnight from another group of searchers, and the two of them had
slipped back and recovered the limp burden--to find it still alive.
Between midnight and dawn they carried Bear Cat to the house of Bud
Jason. The wound this time had glanced the skull, bringing
unconsciousness but no fracture. The shock and the hours of lying wet
in the freezing air had resulted in something like pneumonia, and for
days Bear Cat had lain there in fever and delirium.

But the old miller had held grimly on despite the danger of discovery,
and his woman had nursed with her rude knowledge of herbs, until the
splendid reserve of strength, that had already been so prodigally
taxed, proved itself still adequate. He had raved, they told him later,
of shaking hands with someone whom he hated.

"Hev ye raided any more stills?" demanded Bear Cat when at last he had
been able to talk, and Dog, who had been in every day, grinned:

"We 'lowed thet could wait a spell," he assured the crusader. "We had
our hands right full es hit war."

But the morning following Jerry Henderson's funeral, two more coils of
copper were discovered aloft, and one of the men who had composed
Kinnard's relay of messengers was liberated at daybreak after spending
several tedious and unsatisfactory hours lashed to a dog-wood sapling.

* * * * *

If Kinnard Towers had raged before, now he fumed. Heretofore, it had
been a condition of open war or one of acknowledged, even if
precarious, peace. This was a mongrel situation which was neither the
one nor the other, and every course was a dangerous one. The Stacys
held their counsel, neither sanctioning the incorrigible bla