ht when he rode my horse on an errand for me, and was taken for
me."

After an interval of hushed amazement, the commotion broke afresh, and
Boone again raised his hands and awaited its subsiding.

"When a man asks his friends to hold their hands, though their hearts
are justly hot, he has need to prove his own steadfastness. Here is my
promise. Tomorrow Joe Gregory as deputy sheriff, and myself are going to
Tom Carr's house. We are going alone in the full light of day and
without any force of armed men to bolster up our demands. If any enemy
seeks our injury he must do that too in the full light of day. In the
name of the law and not of the mob, we will demand that Saul be turned
over to us. We will accept no lies and no evasions. We will take Saul to
Frankfort and present him to the court that refused to send for him. If
they fail, then, it will be time for _you_ to act. Meanwhile you must
wait. I have never before asked any test of your trust in me. Now those
that believe in me must stand with me, and--" his last words were like
the crack of a cattle whip--"and those that don't must fight me."

With eyes that burned and a breast that pounded, Anne awaited the
reception of that peroration, and for what seemed an endless time there
was no reception at all, except tense silence. The girl closed her eyes
and fancied a pendulum swinging in the dark, and as it registered
seconds her nerves tautened until the impulse to scream became poignant.
Yet she told herself this long silence meant assent--must mean assent.

Then, with an abruptness that made her start, came a voice, not from the
room below, but raised from the roadside in a long halloo, and from
within sounded the staccato challenge, "Who's thar?"

Once more a silence momentary and taut, a silence that hurt, came like a
margin about sound, then the outer voice spoke again:

"Hit's me--Mark Bartleton." That much was steady, but there the
intonation altered and mingled challenge with heartbreak. "I've done
come with my jolt wagon--ter fotch my dead boy home."

Anne covered her face with her hands and shivered behind the door. She
did not need to have her fears confirmed in the growing whisper that
raised itself slowly from the sunken levels of silence. Those words with
the weighty force of their simplicity had crashed upon trembling scales
of indecision, and they trembled no longer. Labour and courage and
effort had gone into Boone's upbuilding dam of persuasion.