was hidden and furtive, but for that reason only the
more dangerous. The riders had failed to free Sam Opdyke, and Sam was in
prison--but the riders were not through. It pleased them to remain
deceptively quiet just now but their meetings, held in secret places,
brought a multiplied response to the roll call. Plans were building
toward the bursting of a storm which should wreck the new dykes and
dams--and the leaders preached unendingly, under the vicarious urging of
Bas Rowlett, that the death of Parish Thornton was the aim and end
beyond other aims and ends.

The riders were not striking sporadic blows now, as they had done at
first, in petty "regulatings." They were looking to a time when there
was to be one ride such as the mountains had never seen; a ride at whose
end a leader living by the river bend, a judge, a Commonwealth's
attorney living in town and the foreman of a certain jury, should have
paid condignly for their offences.

Christmas came to the house in the bend of the river with a crystal
sheeting of ice.

The native-born in the land of "Do Without" have for the most part never
heard of Christmas trees or the giving of gifts, but they know the old
legend which says that at the hour when the Saviour was born in a manger
the bare and frozen elder bushes come to momentary bloom again in the
thickets and the "critters and beasties" kneel down in their stalls,
answering to some dumb mandate of reverence. This, however, is myth, and
the fact is more substantially recognized that at this period the
roisterous ride the highways, shooting and yelling, and the whiskey jug
is tilted and tragedy often bares her fangs.

But Dorothy and Parish Thornton had each other, and the cloud that their
imaginations had always pictured as hanging over the state border had
been dispelled. Their hearts were high, too, with the reflection that
when spring came again with its fragrances and whispers from the south
there would be the blossoming of a new life in that house, as well as
along the slopes of the inanimate hills.

But now on Christmas morning, as Dorothy looked out of a window, whose
panes were laced with most delicate traceries of frost rime, there was a
thorn-prickle of fear in her heart.

Parish came in and stood looking outward over her shoulder, and his
smile flashed as it had done that first day when it startled her,
because, before she had seen it, she had read of just such a smile in a
journal written almost