ssibility, it's not to be lightly dismissed. You
must not ride alone, hereafter."

Boone laughed. "For five years old Parson Fletcher never went abroad
without the escort of an armed bodyguard. He even built a stockade
around his house, but they got him. Jim Garrard was shot to death while
militiamen stood in a hollow square about him. Precautions of that sort
don't succeed. They are only a public confession of fear, and in
politics a man can't afford such an admission. All I can do is to be
watchful."

"Have you a guess as to who the man is behind this enmity?"

Boone nodded as he rose and went to the mantel where the pipes and
tobacco lay.

"Here and there of late I've heard a name mentioned that hasn't been
much discussed for years--the name of a man who has been away."

McCalloway shot a keenly searching glance at his companion as he
interrogatively prompted,

"You mean--?"

"I mean Saul Fulton. Yes."

Victor McCalloway went to the hearth and kicked a smoking log into the
flame. He turned then with the sternly knit brows of deep abstraction
and weighed his words before giving them utterance.

"You have need to remember, my boy," he began gravely at last, "how deep
the tap-root of heredity strikes down even when the tree top stretches
far up into the sky."

"Meaning--?"

"Meaning, my dear boy, that I can't forget the black hatred in your eyes
one day in the woods when I wrestled with that vengeance fire
smouldering deep in your nature. You haven't forgotten that afternoon,
have you? The day when you promised that until you came of age you would
put aside the conviction that Saul Fulton was your man to kill?"

"I haven't forgotten it, sir."

As Boone answered, the older man thought that, if something in the blue
pupils stood for any meaning, he might also have added that neither had
he entirely conquered the bitterness of that earlier time. Then Boone
went on slowly:

"I kept my word, but you wouldn't have me go so far in turning the other
cheek as to let him kill me--by his own hand or that of a
hireling--would you?"

The gray eyes of the tall soldier held both sternness and reminiscence,
but the reminiscence was all for something that brought a painful train
of thought. Those were eyes that seemed looking back on smoking ruin,
and that sought out of disastrous experience, to sound a warning. Into
Boone's mind flashed a couplet:

"The Emperor there in his box of state, looked grave as though