y home ter see my woman, an' bid her fare over ter her folks
in Virginny."

CHAPTER XXIII

Bear Cat Stacy had gone with George Kelly to the house where his wife
was awaiting him that night, and though he had remained outside while
the husband went in, it was not hard to guess something of what took
place. The wife of only a few months came out a little later with eyes
that were still wet with tears, and with what things she was going to
take away with her, wrapped in a shawl. She stood by as George Kelly
nailed slats across the door. Already she had put out the fire on the
hearth, and about her ankles a lean cat stropped its arched back.

Bear Cat had averted his face, but he heard the spasmodic sob of her
farewell and the strange unmanning rattle in the husband's throat.

It was a new house, of four-squared logs, recently raised by the kindly
hands of neighbors, amid much merry-making and well-wishing and it had
been their first home together.

Now it was no longer a place where they could live. For the man it
would henceforth be a trap of death, and the wife could not remain
there alone. It stood on ground bought from Kinnard Towers--and not yet
paid for.

Kelly and his wife paused by the log foot-bridge which spanned the
creek at their yard fence. In the gray cheerlessness, before dawn, the
house with its stark chimney was only a patch of heavier shadow against
ghostly darkness. They looked back on it, with wordless regret, and
then a mile further on the path forked, and the woman clutched wildly
at her husband's shoulders before she took one way and he the other.

"Be heedful of yoreself, George," was all she said, and the man
answered with a miserable nod.

So Kelly became Turner's companion in hiding, denied the comfort of a
definite roof, and depending upon that power of concealment which could
only exist in a forest-masked land, heaped into a gigantic clutter of
cliffs and honey-combed with natural retreats.

But two days after his wife's departure, he was drawn to the place that
had been his home by an impulse that outweighed danger, and looked down
as furtively as some skulking fox from the tangled elevation at its
back.

Then in the wintry woods he rose and clenched his hands and the muscles
about his strong jaw-bones tightened like leather.

The chimney still stood and a few uprights licked into charred
blackness by flame. His nostrils could taste the pungent reek of a
recent fire upon