ove the point of junction both the creek and the river were readily
fordable, and Barry could cross them and head straight for his goal.

It was true that to make Tucker Creek he would have to double out of the
Morgan Hills and brush back perilously close to Rickett, but Billy was
convinced that this was the outlaw's plan; for though the Caswell City
fords would be his safest route it would take him a day's ride, on an
ordinary horse, out of his way. Besides, the sheriff had always said:
"Barry will play the chance!"

Billy would have ventured his life that the fugitive would strike
straight for the Creek as soon as he doubled out of Morgan Hills.

Doors began to bang; a hundred pairs of boots thudded and jingled
towards Billy; the noise of voices rolled through the outer hall, poured
through the door, burst upon his ears. He looked up in mild surprise;
the first wave of Rickett's men had swept out of the courthouse to take
the trail of the fugitive or to watch the pursuit; in this second wave
came the remnants, the old men, the women; great-eyed children. In spite
of their noise of foot and voice they appeared to be trying to walk
stealthily, talk so softly. They leaned about his desk and questioned
him with gesticulations, but he only stared. They were all dim as dream
people to Billy the clerk, whose mind was far away struggling with his
problem.

"Pore old Billy is kind of dazed," suggested a woman. "Don't bother him,
Bud. Look here!"

The tide of noise and faces broke on either side of the desk and swayed
off towards the inner office and vaguely Billy felt that they should
not be there--the sheriff's privacy--the thought almost drew him back to
complete consciousness, but he was borne off from them, again, on a wave
of study, pictures. Off there to the east went the fifteen best men of
the mountain-desert on the trail of the slender fellow with the
black hair and the soft brown eyes. How he had seemed to shrink with
aloofness, timidity, when he stood there at the door, giving his name.
It was not modesty. Billy knew now; it was something akin to the beasts
of prey, who shrink from the eyes of men until they are mad with hunger,
and in the slender man Billy remembered the same shrinking, the same
hunger. When he struck, no wonder that even the sheriff went down;
no wonder if even the fifteen men were baffled on that trail; and
therefore, it was sufficiently insane for him, Billy the clerk, to sit
in his office