ite off
his unspoken retort and turn away. Those witnesses had not heard what
was first said and had learned only what was revealed in the indignant
husband's raised voice at the end.

"Don't aim ter threaten me, Ken. I don't suffer no man ter do thet--an'
don't never darken my door henceforward."

Now it must seem that Thornton had not only threatened but executed, and
no one would suspect the wife.

He saw in his mind's eye the "High Court" that would try the alleged
slayer of John Turk; a court dominated by the dead man's friends; a
court where witnesses and jurors would be terror-blinded against the
defendant and where a farce would be staged: a sacrifice offered up.

There had been in that log house three persons. One of them was dead and
his death would speak for him with an eloquence louder than any living
tongue. There were, also, the woman and Thornton himself. Between them
must lie the responsibility. Conscientiously the fugitive summarized the
circumstances as the prosecution would marshal and present them.

A man had been shot. On the table lay a pistol with one empty "hull" in
its chamber. The woman was the dead man's wife, not long since a bride
and shortly to become the mother of his child. If she had been the
murdered man's deadly enemy why had she not left him; why had she not
complained? But the brother had been heard to threaten the husband only
a day or two since. He was in the dead man's house, after being
forbidden to shadow its threshold.

"Hell!" cried Thornton aloud. "Ef I stayed she'd hev ter come inter
C'ote an' sw'ar either fer me or ergin me--an' like es not, she'd break
down an' confess. Anyhow, ef they put her in ther jail-house I reckon
ther child would hev hits bornin' thar. Hell--no!"

He turned once more to gaze on the vague cone of a mountain that stood
uplifted above its fellows far behind him. He had started his journey at
its base. Then he looked westward where ridge after ridge, emerging now
into full summer greenery, went off in endless billows to the sky, and
he went down the slope toward the river on whose other side he was to
become another man.

Kenneth Thornton was pushing his way West, the quarry of a man-hunt, but
long before him another Kenneth Thornton had come from Virginia to
Kentucky, an ancestor so far lost in the mists of antiquity that his
descendant had never heard of him; and that man, too, had been making a
sacrifice.

CHAPTER II

Sprung fro