ck on the door and all
the windows closed.

For an hour or more he waited, but there was no return of the owner and
Parish carried his search elsewhere.

Bas, he reflected, was busy to-day conferring with those leaders of the
riders from whom he ostensibly stood aloof, and the man who was hunting
him down followed trail after trail along roads that could be ridden and
"traces" that must be tramped. Casual inquiries along the highway served
only to send him hither and yon on a series of wild goose chases.

This man and that had seen Bas Rowlett, and "Bas he seemed right
profoundly shocked an' sore distressed," they said. They gave Thornton
the best directions they could, and as the clan-leader rode on they
nodded sage heads and reflected that it was both natural and becoming
that he should be seeking for Bas at such a time. The man who had been
murdered last night was Rowlett's kinsman and Thornton was Rowlett's
friend. Both men were prominent, and it was a time for sober counsel.
The shadow of the riders lay over the country broader and deeper than
that which the mountains cast across the valleys.

So from early forenoon until almost sunset Parish Thornton went doggedly
and vainly on with his man-hunt. Yet he set his teeth and swore that he
must not fail; that he could not afford to fail. He would go home and
have supper with Dorothy, then start out afresh.

He was threading a blind and narrow pathway homeward between laurel
thickets, when he came to the spot where he and Bas Rowlett had stood on
that other June night a year ago, the spot where the shot rang out that
had wounded him.

There he paused in meditation, summing up in his mind the many things
that had happened since then, and the sinister strands of Rowlett's
influence that ran defacingly through the whole pattern.

Below that shelf of rock, kissed by the long shadow of the mountain, lay
the valley with its loop of quietly moving water. The roof of his own
house was a patch of gray and the canopy of his own tree a spot of green
beneath him. At one end, the ledge on which he stood broke away in a
precipice that dropped two hundred feet, in sheer and perpendicular
abruptness, to a rock-strewn gorge below. Elsewhere it shelved off into
the steep slope down which Bas had carried him.

Suddenly Thornton raised his head with abrupt alertness. He thought he
had heard the breaking of a twig somewhere in the thicket, and he drew
back until he himself was hidd