he picket fence of his own place
and saw the front of the cube-like house, standing before him, streaked
with the dark of the logs and the white of the chinking. About it was
the patch of scythe-cleared ground as blue as cobalt in the bright
night, and back of it the inky rampart of the mountainside.

But as he approached the door of the cabin the silver bath of light
picked out and emphasized a white patch at its centre, and he made out
that a sheet of paper was pinned there.

"I reckon Rowlett's done left me some message or other," he reflected as
he took the missive down and went inside to light his lantern and build
a fire on the hearth--since even the summer nights were shrewdly
chilling here in the hills.

When the logs were snapping and he had kicked off his heavy boots and
kindled his pipe, he sprawled luxuriously in a back-tilted chair and
held his paper to the flare of the blaze to read it.

At first he laughed derisively, then his brows gathered in a frown of
perplexity and finally his jaw stiffened into grimness.

The note was set down in crudely printed characters, as though to evade
the identifying quality of handwriting, and this was its truculent
message:

No trespassin'. The gal ain't fer _you_. Once more of goin' over
yon and they'll find you stretched dead in a creek bed. This is
writ with God in Heaven bearin' witness that it's true.

CHAPTER VI

Cal Maggard sat gazing into the blaze that leaped and eddied fitfully
under the blackened chimney. In one hand drooped the sheet of paper that
he had found fastened to his door and in the other the pipe which had
been forgotten and had died.

He looked over his shoulder at the door which he had left ajar. Through
its slit he could see a moonlit strip of sky, and rising slowly he
circled the room, holding the protection of the shadowy walls until he
reached and barred it. That much was his concession to the danger of the
threat, and it was the only concession he meant to make.

Into this place he had come unknown and under this roof he had slept
only one night. He had injured no man, offended no woman or child, yet
the malevolent spirit of circumstance that had made a refugee of him in
Virginia seemed to have pursued him and found him out.

Perhaps Rowlett had been right. The Harper girl was, among other
mountain women, like a moon among stars. Her local admirers might hate
and threaten one another, but against an intruder