of a larger
force.

The next morning in both Stacy and Towers territory, hickories and
walnuts and sycamores burst into copper fruitage. The hills were alive
with armed search-parties, liquor-incited and vowing vengeance, yet
through their cordons he moved like some invisible and soundless
creature, striking and escaping while they raged.

At ever-changing points of rendezvous he met and instructed his
mysterious handful of faithful supporters, struck telling blows--made
fresh raids and seemingly evaporated.

From all that Towers could learn, it appeared that Bear Cat Stacy was
operating as a lone bandit. Yet the ground he seemed to cover
single-handed was so wide of boundary and his success so phenomenal
that already he was being hallowed, in country-side gossip, with
legendary and heroic qualities. In that Towers read a serious menace to
his own prestige; until he ground his teeth and swore sulphurously. He
organized a larger force of human hounds and fired them more hotly with
the incentive of liquor and greed for promised reward. The doors of Old
Lone Stacy's house, tenanted now only by the wife of the prisoner and
the mother of the refugee, were endlessly watched by unseen eyes.
Around the cabin where Jerry Henderson lay lingering with a tenuous
hold on life, lounged the men posted there by Joe Stacy, and back in
the timbered slopes that frowned down upon its roof crouched yet other
shapes of butter-nut brown; shapes stationed there at the behest of the
Quarterhouse.

Going in and out among these would-be avengers and learning all their
plans, by dint of a pretendedly bitter hatred of Bear Cat Stacy, were
such men as Dog Tate and Joe Sanders, spying upon the spies.

Old Bud Jason at his little tub-mill and Uncle Israel at his general
store secretly nodded their wise old heads and chuckled. They knew
that, hushed and undeclared, a strong sentiment was being born for the
boy who was outwitting scores of time-seasoned murder hirelings. But
they shook their heads, too--realizing the deadly odds of the game and
its tragic chances.

One afternoon after a day sheeted in cold rain that sometimes merged
into snow, Bear Cat crept cautiously toward the sagging door of the
abandoned cabin which had, on another night, housed Ratler Webb. It had
been a perilously difficult day for the man upon whose head Towers had
set the price of a river-bottom farm. Like a hard-run fox he had
doubled back and forth under relentless pu