oftly, "I'm beholden ter every one of ye! Even ef we
fails 'atter all, hit hain't because we didn't try hard and we hain't
done yit."

Two of the men to whom she spoke were gazing at her with rapt eyes.
O'Keefe was riding on that moonlit night at the gallop of bold dreams,
and in his mind were visions of wedding and infare. Halloway's
thoughts would perhaps have suffered by comparison, but in desire and
the wild dream they were no less strong, and later when he and Brent
lay on the same palet, in the cock-loft of a log house, he heaved a
deep sigh and gave rein to his fancy.

"I'm going away from here," he announced, "and God knows I shall miss
her as a man misses the brilliance of tropic seas and the luster of
tropic skies."

"I thought you boasted that you meant to stay," commented Brent
drowsily, but Halloway went on and soon he was talking to an unhearing
and unconscious bed-fellow.

"I did--but I'm not a sheer fool. I told you that I had gauged my
entrance with a nicety of judgment for dramatic values. I shall
regulate my exit with the same sense. She likes to think herself a
man, which means that she hasn't waked up yet, but some day she will."

He paused and his own voice became heavy with coming sleep. "She's had
adventures that she won't forget--if I go away--her imagination will be
at work. Later when Spring comes and the sap rises--and the birds--the
birds----" There the voice trailed off into the incoherence of slumber.

Jase Mallows was sleeping, too, at that hour, and it was only by a
lucky chance that it wasn't his final sleep. The terrain over which
the group of highwaymen had been operating had centered about the mine
shaft just back of the Wolf-Pen Gap. The distances between all the
points involved had been short of radius save as prolonged by the
broken formation of mountain and chasm, of precipice and gorge. There
were caves and thickets and the Gap itself was what local parlance
termed a "master shut-in."

When the chief body of alleged Ku-Klux operators had trailed out of the
mine shaft, they had removed their masks and scattered into the
raggedness. They could, if need exacted, have remained there for days,
safe from discovery, each in his separate hiding place. One unfamiliar
with this country of eyrie and lair, wonders at the stories of men
hiding out successfully, but one who knows it marvels only that any man
who has taken to the wilds is ever captured.

One of the las