e arrived on the familiar ground of his own neighborhood, his hunger
had become an acute pain and his weariness amounted to exhaustion.
Incidentally, he had slipped once and wrenched his ankle. Within a
radius of two miles were two houses only, Lone Stacy's and Brother
Fulkerson's. The Stacy place would presumably be watched, but Brother
Fulkerson would not deny him food and shelter.

Painfully, yard by yard, he crept down the mountainside to the rear of
the preacher's abode. Then on a tour of reconnaissance he cautiously
circled it. There were no visible signs of picketing and through one
unshuttered window came a grateful glow of lamplight.

He dared neither knock on the door nor scratch on the pane, but he
remembered the signal that had been Bear Cat Stacy's. He had heard the
boy give it, and now he cautiously repeated, three times, the softly
quavering call of the barn-owl.

It was a moonless night, but the stars were frostily clear and as the
refugee crouched, dissolved in shadow, against the mortised logs of the
cabin's corner, the door opened and Blossom stood, slim and straight,
against the yellow background of the lamp-lit door.

She might have seemed, to one passing, interested only in the
star-filled skies and the starkly etched peaks, but in a low voice of
extreme guardedness she demanded, "Bear Cat, where air ye?"

Henderson remembered that Turner, too, was "hiding out" and that this
girl had the ingrained self-repression of a people inured to the perils
of ambuscade. Without leaving the cancellation of the shadowed wall he
spoke with a caution that equaled her own.

"Don't seem to hear me ... just keep looking straight ahead.... It's
not Bear Cat.... It's Henderson ... and they are after me.... So far
I've escaped ... but I reckon they're following." He had seen the
impulsive start with which she heard his announcement and the instant
recovery with which she relaxed her attitude into one of less tell-tale
significance. "Thank God," breathed the pursued man, "for that
self-control!"

He detected a heart-wrenching anxiety in her voice, which belied the
picture she made of unruffled simplicity as she commanded in a tense
whisper, "Go on, I'm hearkenin'."

"Go back into the house," he directed evenly. "Close the window
shutters ... then open the back door...."

She did not obey with the haste of excitement. She was too wise for
that, but paused unhurriedly, humming an ancient ballade, as though the