ountains fairly trembled from the
rolling thunder. As the man was about to clutch the guns, he felt rather
than saw that a tall figure stood between. That instant a flash of
lightning showed John Logan standing there, the boy by his side, and two
ugly pistols thrust forward. The man-hunters were unmasked in the fiery
light of heaven, and Logan knew them for the first time.

"I will not kill you." He said this with look and action that was grand
and terrible. "Take your guns and go! Out into the storm! If God can
spare you, I can spare you. Go!"

And by the lightning's light, the two men, with two ugly pistol-nozzles
in their faces, took their guns and groped and backed down the mountain
into the darkness, where they belonged.

CHAPTER IV.

THE OLD GOLD-HUNTER.

"_For the Right! as God has given
Man to see the Maiden Right!"
For the Right, through thickest night,
Till the man-brute Wrong be driven
From high places; till the Right
Shall lift like some grand beacon light._

_For the Right! Love, Right and duty;
Lift the world up, though you fall
Heaped with dead before the wall;
God can find a soul of beauty
Where it falls, as gems of worth
Are found by miners dark in earth._

Old Forty-nine had not cast his life and lot with John Logan at all. Yet
this singular and contradictory old man stood ready to lay down his
seemingly worthless life at a moment's notice for this boy whom he had
almost brought up from childhood. But he was not living with him in the
mountains. He had done all he could to protect him, to shelter and feed
him, all the time. But now the pursuit was so hot and desperate that the
old man, in his sober moments--rare enough, I admit--began to doubt if
it would be possible to save this young man much longer from the
clutches of the Agents. Indeed, it was only by the sweet persuasion of
Carrie that he had this time been induced to go with her and Johnny up
on the spur of the mountain, and there meet John Logan with some
provisions. From there he was persuaded to go with him to his
hiding-place, high up the mountain, where we left him in the last
chapter.

But the poor old man's head was soon under water again, as we have seen.
That keg of California wine and the few bits of bread and meat, which so
suddenly disappeared in the hands of Dosson and Emens, were all he
happened to have in the cabin when the two chil