anding existed and an obligation,
acknowledged by its membership in the oath of allegiance.

If ever at any time, day or night, shine or storm, such an occasion
developed as carried the urge of emergency, each rider must forthwith
repair to his designated post, armed and ready for instant action.

This prearranged mobilization must follow automatically upon the event
that brought the need, and it involved squad meetings at various points.
In its support a system of signalling and communication had been
devised, whereby separated units might establish and hold unbroken
touch, and might flow together like shattered beads of quicksilver.

Unless Sim Squires was profoundly mistaken, such a time had come.

But Sim went with a heavy heart of divided allegiance. He dared not
absent himself, and he knew that after last night's happening the space
of twenty-four hours could scarcely pass without bringing the issue of
decisive battle between the occult and the open powers that were warring
for domination in that community.

He realized that somehow a hideous blunder had been committed and he
guessed with what a frenzy of rage Bas Rowlett had learned that the
organization into which he had infused the breath of life had murdered
one of his two confidential vassals.

At the gorge that men called a "master shut-in", which was Sim's
rendezvous for such an emergency meeting, he found that others had
arrived before him, and among the faces into which he looked was that of
Rick Joyce, black with a wrath as yet held in abeyance, but promising
speedy and stormy eruption.

The spot was wild beyond description, lying in the lap of mountains that
had in some day of world infancy been riven into a mighty boulder-strewn
fissure between walls of sheer and gloomy precipices.

It was a place to which men would come for no legitimate purpose; a
place which the hounded bear and deer had avoided even when hard driven,
and inviting only to copperhead, skunk, and fox. About it lay
"laurel-hells" thick-matted and gnarled, briars that were like
entanglements of barbed wire, and woods so black of recess that bats
flew through their corridors of pine at midday. But these men had cut,
and used familiarly, tortuous and hidden zig-zags of entry and exit,
and they came separately from divergent directions.

When Sim arrived they were waiting for their informal quorum, but at
last a dozen had assembled and in other places there were other dozens.
Eac