choice. Grudgingly the pair accepted exile, which after
all was a more lenient punishment than they had expected or deserved.
Towers was permitted to take leave of his family, but it is doubtful if
the woman regarded that parting as an unmixed affliction.

Slowly the culprits were escorted out to see in the darkness of the
forests other black shapes that wavered fantastically and dreadfully
under the flare and sputter of pine torches. At the middle of a long
column, twisting like a huge snake along deserted roads, they were
escorted into banishment.

The other men in the house were held prisoners until dawn. Then each,
blindfolded and in custody of a separate squad, was taken to a point
distant from his home--and liberated.

The morning came with a crystal clarity and hills locked in a grip of
ice, but the army whose marching song had startled sleeping cabins into
wakefulness had dissolved as though its ghostly existence could not
survive the light of day. Yet behind that appearance and disappearance
had been left an impression so profound that the life of the community
would never again be precisely what it had been before.

A new power had arisen, inexplicable and mysterious--but one that could
no longer be ignored.

With bated breath, around their hearth fires, the timorous and ignorant
gossiped of witchcraft, and sparking swains were already singing to the
accompaniment of banjo and "dulcimore" ballads of home-made minstrelsy,
celebrating the unparalleled achievements of the young avenger of
wrong-doings and his summary punishment of miscreants. They sang of the
man who:

"Riz outen ther night with black specters at his back,
Ter ther numbers of scores upon scores,
An' rid straightway ter ther dwellin' house of Bad Jim Towers,
Who treemored es they battered down ther doors."

More than one mountain girl bent forward listening with heightened
pulses as the lad who had come "sweet-heartin'" her shrilled out his
chorus.

"So his debt fer thet evil Jim Towers hed ter pay,
Fer they driv him outen old Kaintuck, afore ther break of day.
All sich es follers burnin' down a pore man's happy home,
Will hev ter reck ther Bear Cat's wrath an' no more free ter roam."

And perhaps as the lass listened, she wondered if her own home-spun
cavalier might not be going straight from her door to one of those
mysterious meetings where oath-bound men gathered in awful and spectral
conclav