ears, as
competent to find his way unseen through a woods country as an Indian,
showed that irresistible and fiercely inquisitive impulse was
offsetting in his mind a deadly apprehension.

In one way only, though, in spite of the accelleration of his eager
curiosity, did he drop his guard, at all, and this was quite apparently
the direct result of high excitement. That he had dropped it he was
clearly quite unconscious, but when his lips moved, now, they more than
once let fall articulate words.

"Ef th' old still's thar ..." they said at one time; then, after a long
pause devoted to worming troublous way through tangled areas of
windfall, they muttered, in completion of the sentence: "... it'll be
th' son that's runnin' it." Another busy silence, and: "Thar was a girl
... th' daughter of...."

Either a spasmodic contraction of the throat at mere thought of the
name--a grimace, almost of pain, which suddenly convulsed the old man's
evil face might well have made a stranger think that his muscles had
rebelled--or an unusually difficult struggle across a fallen tree-trunk
prevented further speech, as, probably, it prevented for the time,
consecutive further thought of old-time memories. His mind was tensely
concentrated on the work of climbing through the tangle of dead trunks
and branches, and, when he had accomplished the hard passage, was turned
wholly from the things which he had been considering by a slight
crackling, as of some one stepping on a brittle twig, at a distance in
advance of him.

Instantly he was on his guard, showing signs quite unmistakable of
deadly fear. He shrank back into the thicket with the speed and silence
of a frightened animal.

The panic which had seized him soon had passed, however, for, within a
few short seconds it was clear to him that the noise which he had heard
had not been made by any one suspicious of his presence or a-search for
him.

Peering cautiously between the slender boles of crooked mountain-laurel
bushes, he soon found a vantage point from which he could see on beyond
the densely woven foliage, and, to his astonishment, found, before he
had thought, possible that he had progressed so far, that he had already
reached the place he sought. Memory had made the way to it a longer one
than it was really, and, in spite of the delays caused by his advancing
age and awkward muscles, long unaccustomed to the work of threading
mountain paths, he had traveled faster than he th