elf in a taciturn and apathetic wilderness of peak-broken land where
his discovery would be as haphazard an undertaking as the accurate
aiming of a lightning bolt.

But mere escape from courts and prisons does not assure full measure of
content. He had heard all his life that this border line separated the
sheep of his own nativity from the goats of a meaner race, and to this
narrow tenet he had given unquestioning belief.

"I disgusts Kaintuck'!" exclaimed the refugee half aloud as his strong
hands clenched themselves, one hanging free and the other still grasping
the rifle which as yet he had no intent of laying aside. "I plum
disgusts Kaintuck'!"

The sun was climbing now and its pallid disk was slowly flushing to the
wakefulness of fiery rose. The sky overhead was livening to turquoise
light and here and there along the upper slopes were gossamer dashes of
opal and amethyst, but this beauty of unveiling turrets and gold-touched
crests was lost on eyes in which dwelt a nightmare from which there was
no hope of awakening.

To-day the sparsely settled countryside that he had put behind him would
buzz with a wrath like that of swarming bees along its creek-bed roads,
and the posse would be out. To-day also he would be far over in
Kentucky.

"I mout hev' tarried thar an' fronted hit out," he bitterly reflected,
"fer God in Heaven knows he needed killin'!" But there he broke off into
a bitter laugh.

"God in Heaven knows hit ... _I_ knows hit an' _she_ knows hit, but
nairy another soul don't know an' ef they did hit wouldn't skeercely
make no differ."

He threw back his head and sought to review the situation through the
eyes of others and to analyze it all as an outsider would analyze it. To
his simplicity of nature came no thought that the assumption of a guilt
not his own was a generous or heroic thing.

His sister's pride had silenced her lips as to the brutality of this
husband whose friends in that neighbourhood were among the little czars
of influence. Her suffering under an endless reign of terror was a
well-kept secret which only her brother shared. The big, crudely
handsome brute had been "jobial" and suave of manner among his fellows
and was held in favourable esteem. Only a day or two ago, when the
brother had remonstrated in a low voice against some recent cruelty, the
husband's wrath had blazed out. Witnesses to that wordy encounter had
seen Thornton go white with a rage that was ominous and then b