ge Brierly looked about with a quick alertness. The sound
of the rustling leaves and crackling twigs might mean a friend's
approach, they might mean the coming of one of the very enemies whom the
song had hinted at so lightly, but against whom all the people of the
mountains keep perpetual watch, they might even mean a panther, hungry
after his short rations of the winter and recklessly determined on a
meal at any cost.

But it was Joe Lorey's face which greeted her as she abruptly turned to
see. His coon-skin cap, his jerkin and trousers of faded blue-jeans, his
high, rusty boots matched perfectly with his primitive environments. As
he appeared only the old-fashioned Winchester, which he carried cradled
in his crooked elbow, spoke of the Nineteenth century. His face, though
handsome in a crudely modelled way, had been weather-beaten into a
rough, semi-fierceness by the storms through which he had watched the
mountain-passes during the long winter for the raiders who were ever on
his trail. The slightly reddened lids of his dark, restless eyes, told
of long nights during which the rising fumes of moonshine whisky
stealthily brewing in his furtive still, cave-hidden, had made them
smart and sting. Even as, smilingly, he came up to the strangely mounted
maid, there was on his face the strong trace of that hunted look which
furtive consciousness of continual and unrelenting pursuit gives to the
lawbreaker--even to the lawbreaker who believes the laws he breaks are
wrong and to be violated without sin and righteously.

"That you, Joe?" said the girl. "You skeered me."

"Did I?" he replied, grinning broadly. "Didn't plan to."

From far below there came the crash of bursting powder. Quick and lithe
as a panther the man whirled, ready with his rifle. The girl laughed.

"Nothin' but the railroad blastin' down there in the valley," she said
with amusement. "Ain't you uset to that, yet?"

"No," said he, "I ain't--an' never will be."

His tone was definitely bitter. Never were the "sounds of progress more
ungraciously received than there among the mountains by the folk who
had, hedged in by their fastnesses, become almost a race apart,
ignorant of the outside world's progressions and distrustful and
suspicious of them.

"Where you goin', Madge?" he asked, plodding on beside the lurching ox.

"I ain't tellin'," she said briefly. "But you can go part ways--you can
go fur as th' pasture bars."

"Why can't I go as fur as yo