brute ... but ther child's got hits life ter live ... an'
hit kain't be borned in no jail house!"

"I reckon--" the response came weakly from the heaped-up covers--"I
reckon hit's _got_ ter be thetaway, Ken."

"By God, no! Yore baby's got ter w'ar a bad man's name--but hit'll hev a
good woman's blood in hits veins. They'll low I kilt him, Sally. Let 'em
b'lieve hit. I hain't got no woman nor no child of my own ter think
erbout ... I kin git away an' start fresh in some other place. I loves
ye, Sally, but even more'n thet, I'm thinkin' of thet child thet hain't
borned yit--a child thet hain't accountable fer none of this."

* * * * *

That had been yesterday.

Now, Kenneth Thornton, though that was not to be his name any longer,
stood alone near the peak of a divide, and the mists of early morning
lay thick below him. They obliterated, under their dispiriting gray, the
valleys and lower forest-reaches, and his face, which was young and
resolutely featured, held a kindred mood of shadowing depression.
Beneath that miasma cloak of morning fog twisted a river from which the
sun would strike darts of laughing light--when the sun had routed the
opaqueness suspended between night and day.

In the clear gray eyes of the man were pools of laughter, too, but now
they were stilled and shaded under bitter reflections.

Something else stretched along the hidden river-bed, but even the
mid-day light would give it no ocular marking. That something which the
eye denied and the law acknowledged meant more to this man, who had
slipped the pack from his wearied shoulders, than did the river or the
park-like woods that hedged the river.

There ran the border line between the State of Virginia and the State of
Kentucky and he would cross it when he crossed the river.

So the stream became a Rubicon to him, and on the other side he would
leave behind him the name of Kenneth Thornton and take up the less
damning one of Cal Maggard.

He had the heels of his pursuers and, once across the state line, he
would be beyond their grasp until the Sheriff's huntsmen had whistled in
their pack and gone grumbling back to conform with the law's intricate
requirements. At that point the man-hunt fell into another jurisdiction
and extradition papers would involve correspondence between a governor
at Richmond and a governor at Frankfort.

During such an interlude the fugitive hoped with confidence to have lost
hims