way his ticket reads. I
doubt if he lives to get there."

The warden and the brakeman both were wrong. The freed man did live to
get there. And it was an emotion which the warden had never suspected
that held life in him all that afternoon and through the comfortless
night in the packed and noisome day coach, while the fussy,
self-sufficient little train went looping, like an overgrown measuring
worm, up through the blue grass, around the outlying knobs of the
foothills, on and on through the great riven chasm of the gateway into a
bleak, bare clutch of undersized mountains. Anse Dugmore had two bad
hemorrhages on the way, but he lived.

* * * * *

Under the full moon of a white and flawless night before Christmas, Shem
Dugmore's squatty log cabin made a blot on the thin blanket of snow, and
inside the one room of the cabin Shem Dugmore sat alone by the
daubed-clay hearth, glooming. Hours passed and he hardly moved except to
stir the red coals or kick back some ambitious ember of hickory that
leaped out upon the uneven floor. Suddenly something heavy fell limply
against the locked door, and instantly, all alertness, the shock-headed
mountaineer was backed up against the farther wall, out of range of the
two windows, with his weapons drawn, silent, ready for what might come.
After a minute there was a feeble, faint pecking sound--half knock, half
scratch--at the lower part of the door. It might have been a wornout dog
or any spent wild creature, but no line of Shem Dugmore's figure
relaxed, and under his thick, sandy brows his eyes, in the flickering
light, had the greenish shine of an angry cat-animal's.

"Whut is it?" he called. "And whut do you want? Speak out peartly!"

[Illustration: HE DRAGGED THE RIFLE BY THE BARREL, SO THAT ITS BUTT MADE
A CROOKED FURROW IN THE SNOW.--_Page 197._]

The answer came through the thick planking thinly, in a sort of gasping
whine that ended in a chattering cough; but even after Shem's ear caught
the words, and even after he recognized the changed but still familiar
cadence of the voice, he abated none of his caution. Carefully he
unbolted the door, and, drawing it inch by inch slowly ajar, he reached
out, exposing only his hand and arm, and drew bodily inside the shell of
a man that was fallen, huddled up, against the log door jamb. He dropped
the wooden crossbar back into its sockets before he looked a second time
at the intruder, who had crawled