tucked his riding-crop under one arm and stood watching them,
buttoning his tan gloves. Then with the butt of his crop he rubbed a dry
spot of mud from his leather puttees, freed the incrusted spurs, and
turned towards the door, pausing there to look back.

"I hate to leave it this way," he said, impulsively. "I want to live in
peace with my neighbors. I mean to make no threats--but neither can I be
moved by threats.... Perhaps time will aid us to come to a fair
understanding; perhaps a better knowledge of one another. Although the
shooting and fishing are restricted, my house is always open to my
neighbors. You will be welcome when you come--"

The silence was profound as he hesitated, standing there before them in
the sunshine of the doorway--a lean, well-built, faultless figure, an
unconscious challenge to poverty, a terrible offence to their every
instinct--the living embodiment of all that they hated most in all the
world.

And so he went away with a brief "Good-morning," swung himself astride
his horse, and cantered off, gathering bridle as he rode, sweeping at a
gallop across the wooden bridge into the forest world beyond.

The September woods were dry--dry enough to catch fire. His troubled
eyes swept the second growth as he drew bridle at a gate set in a fence
eight feet high and entirely constructed of wire net interwoven with
barbed wire, and heavily hedged with locust and buck-thorn.

He dismounted, unlocked the iron gate, led his horse through,
refastened the gate, and walked on, his horse following as a trained dog
follows at heel.

Through the still September sunshine ripened leaves drifted down through
interlaced branches, and the whispering rustle of their fall filled the
forest silence. The wood road, carpeted with brilliant leaves, wound
through second growth, following the edge of a dark, swift stream, then
swept westward among the pines, where the cushion of brown needles
deadened every step, and where there was no sound save the rustle of a
flock of rose-tinted birds half buried in the feathery fronds of a white
pine. Again the road curved eastward; skirting a cleft of slate rocks,
through which the stream rushed with the sound of a wind-stirred
woodland; and by this stream a man stood, loading a rusty fowling-piece.

Young Burleson had retained Grier's keepers, for obvious reasons; and
already he knew them all by name. But this man was no keeper of his; and
he walked straight up to him, bid