are to go by here unless he knew you were out," she said
quickly.

"That's what gets me," he said, scratching his grizzled head. "I've been
kind o' thinkin' o' him all day, and one of them Chinamen said he saw
him at Sawyer's Crossing. He was a kind of friend o' Pete's wife. That's
why I thought yer might find out ef he'd been there." Salomy Jane
grew more self-reproachful at her father's self-interest in her
"neighborliness." "But that ain't all," continued Mr. Clay. "Thar was
tracks over the far pasture that warn't mine. I followed them, and they
went round and round the house two or three times, ez ef they mout hev
bin prowlin', and then I lost 'em in the woods again. It's just like
that sneakin' hound Larrabee to hev bin lyin' in wait for me and afraid
to meet a man fair and square in the open."

"You just lie low, dad, for a day or two more, and let me do a little
prowlin'," said the girl, with sympathetic indignation in her dark eyes.
"Ef it's that skunk, I'll spot him soon enough and let you know whar
he's hiding."

"You'll just stay where ye are, Salomy," said her father decisively.
"This ain't no woman's work--though I ain't sayin' you haven't got more
head for it than some men I know."

Nevertheless, that night, after her father had gone to bed, Salomy Jane
sat by the open window of the sitting-room in an apparent attitude of
languid contemplation, but alert and intent of eye and ear. It was a
fine moonlit night. Two pines near the door, solitary pickets of the
serried ranks of distant forest, cast long shadows like paths to the
cottage, and sighed their spiced breath in the windows. For there was no
frivolity of vine or flower round Salomy Jane's bower. The clearing was
too recent, the life too practical for vanities like these. But the moon
added a vague elusiveness to everything, softened the rigid outlines
of the sheds, gave shadows to the lidless windows, and touched with
merciful indirectness the hideous debris of refuse gravel and the gaunt
scars of burnt vegetation before the door. Even Salomy Jane was affected
by it, and exhaled something between a sigh and a yawn with the breath
of the pines. Then she suddenly sat upright.

Her quick ear had caught a faint "click, click," in the direction of the
wood; her quicker instinct and rustic training enabled her to determine
that it was the ring of a horse's shoe on flinty ground; her knowledge
of the locality told her it came from the spot where the tra