inmates were unsuspecting; and Steve Marcum and his men were not
far below. A rumbling started under him, while he lay there and grew
faint--the rumble of a stone knocked from the path by a horse's hoof.
Isom tried to halbo, but his voice stopped in a whisper, and he
painfully drew himself upon the rock, upright under the bright moon.
A quick oath of warning came then--it was Crump's shrill voice in the
Brayton cabin--and Isom stumbled forward with both hands thrown up and
a gasping cry at his lips. One flash came through a port-hole of the
cabin. A yell broke on the night--Crump's cry again--and the boy swayed
across the rock, and falling at the brink, dropped with a limp struggle
out of sight.

V.

THE news of Isom's fate reached the miller by way of Hazlan before the
next noon. Several men in the Brayton cabin had recognized the boy in
the moonlight. At daybreak they found bloodstains on the ledge and on a
narrow shelf a few feet farther down. Isom had slipped from one to the
other, they said, and in his last struggle had rolled over into Dead
Creek, and had been swept into the Cumberland.

It was Crump who had warned the Braytons. Nobody ever knew how he had
learned Steve Marcum's purpose. And old Brayton on his guard and in his
own cabin was impregnable. So the Marcums, after a harmless fusillade,
had turned back cursing. Mocking shouts followed after them,
pistol-shots, even the scraping of a fiddle and shuffling on the ledge.
But they kept on, cursing across the river and back to Daddy Marcum,
who was standing in the porch, peering for them through the dawn, with a
story to tell about Isom.

"The critter was teched in the head," the old man said, and this was
what the Braytons, too, believed. But Steve Marcum, going to search for
Isom's body next day, gave old Gabe another theory. He told the miller
how Daddy Marcum had called Isom a coward, and Steve said the boy had
gone ahead to prove he was no coward.

"He had mighty leetle call to prove it to me. Think o' his takin' ole
Brayton all by hisself!" he said, with a look at the yellow, heaving
Cumberland. "'N', Lord! think o' his swimmin' that river in the dark!"

Old Gabe asked a question fiercely then and demanded the truth, and
Steve told him about the hand-to-hand fight on the mountain-side, about
young Jasper's treachery, and how the boy, who was watching the fight,
fired just in time to save Rome. It made all plain at last--Rome's and
Steve's d