gossip with
cowardice.

Passers-by, across the way, halted and held their breath. The more
timid glanced about for shelter should gun-play ensue, but after an
instant Ratler Webb turned grudgingly aside and stepped down into the
outer road. Bear Cat Stacy walked on, stiffly erect, and he did not
turn his head for a backward glance.

Ratler halted where he stood, dangerously snarling, and his hand
fumbled for a moment under his coat. He challengingly swept the faces
of all men in sight, and murmurs of laughter, which had broken out in
sheer relief at a relaxed tension, died as abruptly as they had begun.
Every pair of eyes became studiously inattentive.

* * * * *

Through the crowds that overflowed the town moved one figure who seemed
more the Ishmaelite than even the disgraced Ratler.

Men who had, in the past, plotted against each other's lives to-day
"met an' made their manners" with all outward guise of complete amity,
yet this one figure walked ungreeted or recognized only with the curt
nod which was in itself a modified ostracism. It must be said of him
that he bore the baleful insistence of public enmity with a
half-contemptuous steadiness in his own eyes, and a certain bold
dignity of bearing. Mark Tapier--mongrelized by mountain pronunciation
into Tapper--was the revenue officer and behind him, though operating
from remote distance, lay the power of Washington.

To comprehend the universal hatred of the backwoods highlander for the
"revenue" one must step back from to-day's standard of vision into the
far past and accept that prejudice which existed when as legalistic a
mind as Blackstone said: "From its original to the present time, the
very name of excise has been odious to the people of England," and when
Dr. Johnson defined the term in his dictionary as: "A hateful tax
levied upon commodities ... by wretches hired by those to whom excise
is paid."

Such a "wretch" was Mark Tapper in the local forum of public thought; a
wretch with an avocation dependent upon stealth and treachery of broken
confidences; profiting like Judas Iscariot upon blood-money.

Yet before the first day of "Big Meeting time" had progressed to noon,
Mark Tapper sat in close and secret conference with the strongest and
most typical exponent of the old order of the hills.

Into the side door of the Court-house strolled Kinnard Towers at
ten-thirty in the morning. From the jailer, who wa