sclosed the whereabouts of Rufe Tolliver and guided the guard to his
hiding-place simply for the reward? He had not yet come to claim it, and
his indifference to money was notorious through the hills. Apparently
there was some general enmity in the old man toward the whole Tolliver
clan, and maybe he had used the reward to fool Hale as to his real
motive. And then Hale quietly learned that long ago the Tollivers
bitterly opposed the Red Fox's marriage to a Tolliver-that Rufe, when a
boy, was always teasing the Red Fox and had once made him dance in his
moccasins to the tune of bullets spitting about his feet, and that the
Red Fox had been heard to say that old Dave had cheated his wife out of
her just inheritance of wild land; but all that was long, long ago, and
apparently had been mutually forgiven and forgotten. But it was enough
for Hale, and one night he mounted his horse, and at dawn he was at the
place of ambush with his horse hidden in the bushes. The rocks for
the ambush were waist high, and the twigs that had been thrust in the
crevices between them were withered. And there, on the hypothesis that
the Red Fox was the assassin, Hale tried to put himself, after the deed,
into the Red Fox's shoes. The old man had turned up on guard before
noon--then he must have gone somewhere first or have killed considerable
time in the woods. He would not have crossed the road, for there were
two houses on the other side; there would have been no object in going
on over the mountain unless he meant to escape, and if he had gone over
there for another reason he would hardly have had time to get to the
Court House before noon: nor would he have gone back along the road
on that side, for on that side, too, was a cabin not far away. So Hale
turned and walked straight away from the road where the walking was
easiest--down a ravine, and pushing this way and that through the bushes
where the way looked easiest. Half a mile down the ravine he came to
a little brook, and there in the black earth was the faint print of a
man's left foot and in the hard crust across was the deeper print of his
right, where his weight in leaping had come down hard. But the prints
were made by a shoe and not by a moccasin, and then Hale recalled
exultantly that the Red Fox did not have his moccasins on the morning
he turned up on guard. All the while he kept a sharp lookout, right and
left, on the ground--the Red Fox must have thrown his cartridge shell
some