rt to forget her nightmare imaginings and
saw only more fantastic visions of a body sliding from its saddle and
lying still in the creek bed trail.

She rose at last and paced the room, but outside in the road her gaze
fell on old Aaron who was uneasily pacing, too, and in his drooping
shoulders and grimly set face she read no encouragement to hope. That
morose and pessimistic figure held her gaze with a fascination of terror
and she watched it until its pacing finally carried it around a twist of
the road. Then she went out and stood under the tree which in its
wordlessness was still a more sympathetic confidant than human beings.

She dropped on her knees there in the long grass at the roots of the
straight-stemmed walnut and for the first time some spark of hope crept
into her bruised soul. She began catching at straws of solace and had
she known it, placing faith and reliance in the source of all the
danger, yet she found a vestige of comfort in the process--and that was
something.

"I'd done fergot," she exclaimed as she rose from her knees. "Most like
Bas Rowlett's thar--so he'll hev one friend thet men won't skeercely
das't ter defy. Bas'll stand by him--like he done afore."

CHAPTER XVIII

Riding with the weariness of a long convalescence, Parish Thornton
passed the house where for two days only he had made his abode, and
turned into an upward-climbing trail, gloomily forested, where the
tangle brushed his stirrups as he rode. On a "bald-knob" the
capriciousness of nature had left the lookout of an untimbered summit,
and there he drew rein and gazed down into the basin of a narrow
creek-valley a mile distant, where, in a cleared square of farm land, a
lazy thread of smoke rose from a low roof.

That house was his objective, and from here on he must drop downward
through woods which the eye could penetrate for only a few paces in any
direction; where the poison ivy and sumac grew rank and the laurel and
rhododendron made entanglements that would have disconcerted a bear. He
realized that it was a zone picketed with unseen riflemen, and advisers,
who were by no means alarmists, had told him that he could not pass
through it alive. Yet he believed there was the possibility, and upon it
he was staking everything, that so long as he rode openly and with the
audacity of seemingly nickel-plated self-confidence, these watchers by
the way would, in sheer curiosity, pass him on to those superiors within
the