be much said about the wastrel father."

"Perhaps," suggested the other, "you are a little less than just."

"I dare say. She'll be a heart-breaker before long now--and listen,
man"--Masters came a step nearer--"don't make any mistake about me
either. When she's here, the bottle goes under lock and key. I play the
game where she's concerned."

Colonel Wallifarro nodded slowly. "I know that, Larry," he hastily
answered. "I know that. If the breach hadn't widened too far, I'd go as
far as a man could to bring your family together again under one
roof-tree."

"That's no use, of course," admitted Masters with a dead intonation.
"Only remember that down here where I'm chained to my little job, life
ain't so damned gay and sunny at best--and don't begrudge me my
liquor."

CHAPTER XII

During those following months, when Asa Gregory lay in jail, first in
Frankfort, then in Louisville, as a prisoner of state, who had been
denied bail, the boy back in the laurel-mantled hills smouldered with
passionate resentment for what he believed to be a monstrous injustice.
In his quest of education he sought refuge from the bitter brooding that
had begun to mar his young features with its stamp of sullenness. Asa
had killed men before, but it had been in that feud warfare which was
sanctioned by his own conscience. Now he stood charged with a murder
done for hire, the mercenary taking off of a man for whom he had no
enmity save that of the abstract and political. Upon his kinsman's
innocence the boy would have staked his life, and yet he must look
helplessly on and see him thrown to the lions of public indignation.

Of Saul, he hardly thought at all. Saul was small-fry. The Commonwealth
would treat him as such, but upon Asa it would wreak a surcharged anger,
because to send Asa Gregory to the gallows would be to establish a
direct link between the Governor who had pardoned him and mountain
murder-lust.

Already the Secretary of State had been disposed of with a promptitude
which, his friends asserted, savoured rather of the wolf pack than the
courtroom. The verdict had been guilty, and his case was now pending on
a motion for rehearing.

Already, too, a stenographer, who had been in the employ of the fugitive
Governor, had been given a life sentence and had preferred accepting it
without appeal to risking the graver alternative of the gallows.

As he lay in jail waiting until the slow grind of the law-mill should
brin