Debate seemed impracticable, but
his annoyance was not lessened as he recognized in the clear eyes of
the young woman a half-suppressed mockery of scorn and triumph.

Henderson stooped and hefted his pack again to his shoulders, adjusting
it deliberately. If it must be retreat, he wished at least to retire
with the honors of war. The girl's expression had piqued him into
irascibility.

"I'd heard tell that folks hereabouts were civil to strangers," he
announced bluntly. "And I don't give a damn about whatever secret
you're bent on hiding from me."

Then he turned on his heel and started, not rapidly but with a
leisurely stride to the road. He seemed to feel the eyes of the girl
following him as he went, and his spirit of resentment prompted an act
of mild bravado as he halted by the rotten line of fence and
unhurriedly tightened the lace of a boot.

"Hasten!" barked the warning voice from the laurel, but Henderson did
not hasten. He acknowledged the disquieting surmise of a rifle trained
on him from the dense cover, but he neither looked back nor altered his
pace. Then he heard a gun bark from the shrubbery and a bullet zip as
it found its billet in a tree trunk above his head, but that he had
expected. It was merely a demonstration in warning--not an attempt on
his life. As long as he kept on his way, he believed hostilities would
go no further.

Without venturing to use his eyes, he let his ears do their best, and a
satirical smile came to his lips as he heard a low, half-smothered
scream of fright break from the lips of the girl whom he could no
longer see.

And, had he been able to study the golden-brown eyes just then, he
would have been even more compensated, for into them crept a slow light
of admiration and astonished interest.

"He ain't nobody's coward anyways," she murmured as the figure of the
unknown man swung out of sight around the bend, and some thought of the
same sort passed through the mind of the elderly man in the thicket,
bringing a grim but not an altogether humorless smile to his lips.

"Wa'al, I run him off," he mused, "but I didn't hardly run him no-ways
_hard_!"

Jerry Henderson had borne credentials from Uncle Israel Calvert who
kept a store on Big Ivy, and he had been everywhere told that once
Uncle Billy had vised his passports, he would need no further
safe-conduct.

In the encounter at the cornfield there had been no opportunity to show
that bill of health and it was only af