aight down!" she cried, as
she saw that the baffled mountaineer was trembling on the chasm's edge,
as if preparing for a spring. "Good night, Joe. Take my advice--gin up
th' still, an' all thought of makin' a wife of a girl as ain't willin'."

Half laughing and half crying she ran up the path which wound about
among the thickets on the rocky little island where her rough cabin
stood, secure, secluded.

The mountaineer stood, baffled, on the brink of the ravine. Much
loneliness among the mountains, where there was no voice but his own to
listen to, had given him the habit of talking to himself in moments of
excitement.

"Gone! Gone!" he said. "Gone laughin' at me!" He clenched his fists.
"And it is him as has come atween us!" He turned slowly from the place,
picked up his rifle, slung the game-sack, saggin with the weight of the
dynamite, across his shoulder by its strap, and started from the place.

He had gone but a short distance, though, before he stopped,
considering. Murder was in Joe Lorey's heart.

"She said he war comin' back," he sullenly reflected. "I'll ... lay for
him, right hyar."

He looked cautiously about. His quick ear caught the sound of footsteps
coming up the trail.

"Somebody's stirrin', now," he said. "Oh, if it's only him!"

He slipped behind a rock to wait in ambush.

But it was not his enemy who came, now, along the trail. Horace Holton,
held to the mountains by his mysterious business, had left the others of
the party to go home alone, as they had come, and returned to the
neighborhood which housed the girl who owned the land he coveted.

Joe, suspicious of him, as the mountaineer who makes his living as a
moonshiner, is, of course, of every stranger who appears within his
mountains, stepped forward, suddenly, his rifle in his hand and ready to
be used. He had no idea that the man had been a member of the party from
the bluegrass.

"Halt, you!" he cried.

CHAPTER XI

Holton, full of scheming, was returning up the trail after having said
good-bye to Barbara, Miss Alathea and the Colonel at the railway in the
valley, climbing steadily and skillfully, without much thought of his
surroundings. The locality, familiar to him years before (although he
had at great pains indicated to everyone but Barbara that it was wholly
strange to him) showed but superficial change to his searching,
reminiscent eyes. His feet had quickly fallen into the almost automatic
climbing-stride of th