ot no _ex_cess of love fer Kinnard--but I've got yit less fer
still-busters."

Far back where the shingle roof dropped steeply from ridge pole to edge
was a murky recess hidden behind a litter of old bedding, piled up
potatoes and onions. Silently listening and mercifully blotted into
shadow there, Bear Cat Stacy crouched with rifle-barrel thrust forward
and his finger caressing the trigger.

The squad-leader looked about the place with perfunctory eye and then,
seeing the ladder, set his foot upon its lowest rung.

Dog Tate felt a sudden commotion of hammering pulses, but his lids did
not flicker nor his mouth alter its line. Quite unostentatiously,
however, his wife moved toward the front door and stood there blankly
expressionless. Also, Dog laid his hand idly on the ladder as the
visitor climbed upward. If the search proved embarrassing he meant to
kick the support from under the Towers minion, and his wife meant to
bar the door for siege.

But the intruder went only high enough to thrust his head into the
overhead darkness while a match flared and went out. He had seen
nothing, and as he stumped down again the poised finger relaxed on the
rifle trigger, and the Tates breathed free.

"I'm obleeged ter ye," said the searching lieutenant. "Ef ye wants ter
start up yore still ergin, I reckon ye'll be safe. He won't be runnin'
wild fer long nohow."

* * * * *

The Quarterhouse emissaries were raking the hills with an admirable
thoroughness, running like a pack in full cry on the man trail, but
they did not again come so near the fringes of success as when they
missed the opportunity at Dog Tate's house.

In spite of a watchfulness that gave eyes to the hills and ears to the
timber, their quarry left that house and went to his own.

He had no intention of making the mad effort to remain there. The wild
tangle of cliff and forest was his safest refuge now--but there were
two things to be done at home. He wished to have for companionship in
exile his "Lincoln, Master of Men," and he wished to learn if out of
the wholesale desertion of yesterday there had not come back to him
even one or two followers.

So that afternoon he slipped, undetected by his trailers, into and out
of his father's house; and there followed him, though each went singly
and casually to escape detection, some eight or ten men, who henceforth
were to be his secret followers and, he hoped, the nucleus