ced to acknowledge a record tarnished
with misdeeds, but his conscience would have remained clear of that most
depressing sin--bungling the undertaking to which he had set his hand.
Even his delegated murders had been accomplished with tidy and
praiseworthy dispatch. Now he had collaborated with a bungler and
harvested a dilemma. Saul Fulton had selected an executioner whose rifle
ball had targeted itself in a breast not marked for death--yet one which
would none the less cry out for vengeance. Above all, the _contretemps_
had proven most ill-timed, since it coincided with Asa's pardon and
return.

Word of his coming had reached the house of Tom Carr before Asa himself
had ridden away from the livery stable, and that same hour found Saul,
like the general discredited by a _debacle_, an outcast from the support
of his late allies and a refugee in full flight.

Tom conceived that he was doing enough by way of generosity when he
supplied Saul with a horse and a lantern and set him on his way toward
the Virginia boundary. Asa's recrudescence from the burial of prison
walls to the glamour of a delivered martyr brought him to a choice
between standing siege or throwing his Jonah to the whales, and Tom had
not hesitated.

So when the party that rode with the deputy sheriff dismounted at the
door of the Carr house, they found it unreservedly open to them. Tom did
not even waste a lie when he met eyes as uncompromising as though they
were looking across rifle-sights.

"You boys hev come jest a leetle too late," he tranquilly informed them.
"Yore man spent some sev'ral days an' nights with me--but he hain't hyar
now."

"Then,"--it was Boone who put the question, while Asa maintained the
stony-faced silence of a graven image--"then you admit that you took him
in and sheltered him?"

The eyes of the Carr leader had held the open light of candour. Now they
mirrored that of guileless surprise, and both expressions were master
achievements of deceit.

"Why wouldn't I take him in, Boone," he inquired with admirable gravity.
"He 'peared ter be mighty contrite erbout ther way he'd done acted at
Asa's trial. He 'lowed he'd come back home a' purpose ter put sartain
matters before ther new governor thet mout holp Asa git his pardon. Thet
was p'intedly what he said--or words ter thet amount."

Boone smiled his open and ironic disbelief. "And you swallowed that lie,
Tom? It doesn't stand on all fours with your repute for keen wits."