mplight of the attic a century
and a quarter later.

CHAPTER V

The old Thornton house on Defeated Creek had for almost two decades
stood vacant save for an occasional and temporary tenant. A long time
back a formal truce had been declared in the feud that had split in
sharp and bitter cleavage the family connections of the Harpers and the
Doanes. Back into the limbo of tradition and vagueness went the origin
of that "war".

The one unclouded certainty was that the hatred had grown until even in
this land of vendetta its levy of violent deaths had been appalling
beyond those of other enmities.

Yet, paradoxically enough, the Harpers in the later feud stages had
followed a man named Thornton and the Doanes had fought at the behest of
a Rowlett. Now on the same night that Dorothy read in her attic smoke
rose from the chimney of the long-empty house and a stranger, whose
right of possession no one questioned, was to be its occupant. He sat
now, in the moonlight, on the broken mill-stone that served his house as
a doorstep--and as yet he had not slept under the rotting roof. About
him was a dooryard gone to a weed-jungle and a farm that must be
reclaimed from utter wildness. His square jaw was grimly set and the
hands that rested on his knees were tensely clenched. His eyes held a
far-away and haunted fixity, for they were seeing again the cabin he had
left in Virginia with its ugly picture of sudden and violent death and
the body of a man he hated lying on the blood-stained floor.

The hysteria-shaken figure of the woman he had left alone with that
grisly companionship refused, too, to soften the troubling vividness of
its remembered misery.

He himself had not escaped his pursuers by too wide a margin, but he
_had_ escaped. He had come by a circuitous course to this place where he
hoped to find quiet under his assumed name of Maggard, nor was his
choice of refuge haphazard.

A distantly related branch of his own family had once lived here, and
the property had passed down to him, but the Thornton who had first
owned the place he had never known.

The Kentucky history of his blood was as unfamiliar to him as
genealogies on Mars, and while the night voices sounded in tempered
cadences about him and the hills stood up in their spectral majesty of
moonlight, he sat with a drawn brow. Yet, because the vitality of his
youth was strong and resilient, other and less grim influences gradually
stole over him and