e he could not produce the recusant if he
would. "Cap'n--Cap'n--bear with us--we-uns don't know!"

Ackert stared in snorting amaze, a flush of anger dyeing his red cheeks
a yet deeper red. Of all the subterfuges that he had expected, he had
never divined this. He shifted front face in his saddle, placed his
gauntleted right hand on his right side, and held his head erect,
looking over the wide, rich expanse of the Cove, the corn in the field,
and the fodder in the shock set amid the barbaric splendors of the
wooded autumn mountains glowing in the sunset above. He seemed scenting
his vengeance with some keen sense as he looked, his thin nostrils
dilating as sensitively as the nostrils of his high-couraged charger now
throwing up his head to sniff the air, now bending it down as he pawed
the ground.

"Well, gentlemen, you have got a mighty pretty piece o' country
here, and good crops, too--which is a credit to you, seeing that the
conscription has in and about drafted all the able-bodied mountaineers
that wouldn't volunteer--damn 'em! But I swear by the right hand of
Jehovah, I'll burn every cabin in the Cove an' every blade o' forage in
the fields if you don't produce the man who guided Tol-hurst's cavalry
out'n the trap I'd chased 'em into, or give me a true and satisfactory
account of him." He raised his gauntleted right hand and shook it in the
air. "So help me God!"

There was all the solemnity of intention vibrating in this fierce
asseveration, and it brought the aged non-combatants forward in eager
protestation. The old justice made as if to catch at the bridle rein,
then desisted. A certain _noli me tangere_ influence about the fierce
guerilla affected even supplication, and the "Squair" resorted to logic
as the more potent weapon of the two.

"Cap'n, Cap'n," he urged, with a tremulous, aged jaw, "be pleased to
consider my words. I'm a magistrate sir, or I was before the war run
the law clean out o' the kentry. We dun'no' the guide--we never seen
the troops." Then, in reply to an impatient snort of negation: "If ye'll
cast yer eye on the lay of the land, ye'll view how it happened. Thar's
the road "--he waved his hand toward that vague indentation in the
foliage that marked the descent into the vale--"an' down this e-end o'
the Cove thar's nex' ter nobody livin'."

The spirited equestrian figure was stand-ing as still as a statue;
only the movement of the full pupils of his eyes, the dilation of the
nostrils