ing lights of the
late afternoon, his face wore a grim smile, and when he had come to a
point determined by some system of his own, he dropped to a
low-crouching posture and continued his journey a step or two at a time,
with a perfection of caution, and with eyes and ears strained in
expectancy.

Across a gray-green hummock of sandstone, so villainously matted with
blackberry briars that a pointer-dog would have balked at its edge, he
hitched himself forward on his belly. From there he could look down on
the road he had abandoned--and the thick bushes that fringed it, and
there he lay, silent and flat as a lizard, scanning the lower ground.

A less acute and instinctive eye would have made little of it all, save
the variegated colours of the foliage, but after a while he picked out a
scrap of grey-brown buried deep and motionless under the leafage, much
like the hue of the earth itself. His smile became more sardonically set
and his muscles tensed as his rifle barrel was thrust forward. But he
still sprawled there hugging the earth, and finally hushed voices stole
up to him.

"... He's got ter pass by hyar ef he holds ter ther highway.... I reckon
he don't hardly suspicion nothin'." Then a second voice spoke Asa's name
and linked it with foul expletives, yet save for the gray patches in the
brush almost as hard to see as a rabbit crouched in dry grass there was
no visible sign ... no warning.

Asa's face blackened. His thumb lay on the hammer of his rifle and his
thoughts ran to bitter turmoil.

"I _'lowed_ them Blairs hed hit in head ter lay-way me this evenin'," he
mused. "I jest _felt_ hit in my bones, somehow."

The hatred in his veins pulsed and simmered. Here he lay behind them and
above them, while they lurked in ambush waiting for him to pass in front
and below. One shot from his rifle and Jett Blair would never rise. His
face would sag forward--that was all--and as his companion scrambled up
in dismay, he too would fall back. Asa could picture the expression of
astonished panic that would gleam in his eyes for the one brief moment
before he too crumpled. Asa's finger tingled with an itch which only
trigger-pressure could cool and appease.

Yet slowly and resolutely he shook his head. "No," he told himself, "no,
hit won't hardly do. Thar's one murder charge a'hangin' over me now--an'
es fer _them_, thar's time a'plenty. I hain't no-ways liable ter
fergit!"

CHAPTER II

Backward he edged to t