y. As yet I was
chiefly concerned with my own affair and anxious to learn at first hands
the cost to me of my father's connection with the Regulators.

Touching this, I was not long kept in ignorance. Of all the vast demesne
of Appleby Hundred there was no roof to shelter the son of the outlawed
Roger Ireton save that of this poor hunting lodge in the mighty forest
of the Catawba, overlooked, with the few runaway blacks inhabiting it,
in the intaking of an estate so large that I think not even my father
knew all the metes and bounds of it.

I shall not soon forget the interview with the lawyer in which I was
told the inhospitable truth. Nor shall I forget his truculent leer when
he hinted that I had best be gone out of these parts, since it was not
yet too late to bring down the sentence of outlawry from the father to
the son.

It was well for him that I knew not at the time that he was Gilbert
Stair's factor. For I was mad enough to have throttled him where he sat
at his writing table, matching his long fingers and smirking at me with
his evil smile. But of this man more in his time and place. His name was
Owen Pengarvin. I would have you remember it.

For a week and a day I lingered on at Queensborough, for what I knew
not, save that all the world seemed suddenly to have grown stale and
profitless, and my life a thing of small account. One day I would be
minded to go back to my old field-marshal and the keeping of the Turkish
border; the next I would ride over some part of my stolen heritage and
swear a great oath to bide till I should come to my own again. And on
these alternating days the storm of black rage filled my horizons and I
became a derelict to drive on any rock or shoal in this uncharted sea of
wrath.

On one of these gallops farthest afield I chanced upon the bridle-path
that led to our old hunting lodge in the forest depths. Tracing the path
to its end among the maples I found the cabin, so lightly touched by
time that the mere sight of it carried me swiftly back to those happy
days when my father and I had stalked the white-tailed deer in the hill
glades beyond, with this log-built cabin for a rest-camp. I spurred up
under the low-hanging trees. The door stood wide, and a thin wreath of
blue smoke curled upward from the mouth of the wattled chimney.

Then and there I had my first welcome home. Old black Darius--old when I
had last seen him at Appleby Hundred, and a very grandsire of ancients
now-