aintuck: an' when he starts back thet enemy's right like ter be
watchin' ther trail thet leads home."

Dorothy held his eyes steadily when she questioned him with a name, "Bas
Rowlett?"

Will Turk shook his head as he responded deliberately: "Whatever I knows
come ter me in secrecy--but hit was at a time when I miscomprehended
things, an' I sees 'em different now. I didn't say hit was Bas Rowlett
ner I didn't say hit wasn't nuther, but this much I kin say. Whoever
this feller is thet aims ter layway Ken, he aims ter do hit in Virginny.
Seems like he dastn't ondertake hit in Kaintuck."

Dorothy drew a breath of relief for even that assurance, and for the
duration of a short silence Turk again paced the floor with his head
bent and his hands at his back, then he halted.

"You go on home termorrer an' leave Ken hyar," he enjoined, "he wants
ter see his sister free on bail afore he leaves, anyhow. When he gits
ready ter start back I'll guide him by a way I knows, but one a woman
couldn't handily travel, an' I'll pledge ye he'll crost over ter
Kaintuck es safe as he come."

So on the morrow Dorothy rode with the same cavalcade that had escorted
her to Virginia, and near sunset a few days later, when low-hanging
clouds were sifting down a thick veil of snow and the bare woods stood
ghostly and white, Bas Rowlett lay numb with cold but warm with
anticipation by the trail that led from the county seat in Virginia to
the gap that gave a gateway into Kentucky.

He huddled under a tangle of briars, masking an ambuscade from which his
rifle could rake the road and his eyes command it for a hundred yards to
its eastern bend, and he had lain there all day. Kenneth Thornton would
ride that trail, he felt assured, before dark, and ride it alone, and
here, far from his own neighbourhood, he would himself be suspected of
no murderous activity.

But as Bas lay there, for once prepared to act as executioner in person
instead of through a hireling, Kenneth Thornton and Will Turk were
nearing the state border, having travelled furtively and unseen by a
"trace" that had put the bulk of a mountain between them and ambuscade.

The winter settled after that with a beleaguering of steeps and broken
levels under a blockade of stark hardship. Peaks stood naked save for
their evergreens, alternately wrapped in snow and viscid with mud.
Morning disclosed the highways "all spewed up with frost" and noon found
them impassably mired. Night brou