that a man had
been shot.

He rode past the bag without seeing it, for Lorraine had thrust it far
back under a stocky bush whose scraggly branches nearly touched the
ground. So he came at last to the creek, swollen with the night's
storm so that it was swift and dangerous. Lone was turning back when
John Doe threw up his head, stared up the creek for a moment and
whinnied shrilly. Lone stood in the stirrups and looked.

A blaze-faced horse was standing a short rifle-shot away, bridled and
with an empty saddle. Whether he was tied or not Lone, could not tell
at that distance, but he knew the horse by its banged forelock and its
white face and sorrel ears, and he knew the owner of the horse. He
rode toward it slowly.

"Whoa, you rattle-headed fool," he admonished, when the horse snorted
and backed a step or two as he approached. He saw the bridle-reins
dangling, broken, where the horse had stepped on them in running.
"Broke loose and run off again," he said, as he took down his rope and
widened the loop. "I'll bet Thurman would sell you for a bent nickel,
this morning."

The horse squatted and jumped when he cast the loop, and then stood
quivering and snorting while Lone dismounted and started toward him.
Ten steps from the horse Lone stopped short, staring. For down in the
bushes on the farther side half lay, half hung the limp form of a man.

CHAPTER V

A DEATH "BY ACCIDENT"

Lone Morgan was a Virginian by birth, though few of his acquaintances
knew it.

Lone never talked of himself except as his personal history touched a
common interest with his fellows. But until he was seventeen he had
lived very close to the centre of one of the deadliest feuds of the
Blue Ridge. That he had been neutral was merely an accident of birth,
perhaps. And that he had not become involved in the quarrel that raged
among his neighbours was the direct result of a genius for holding his
tongue. He had attended the funerals of men shot down in their own
dooryards, he had witnessed the trials of the killers. He had grown up
with the settled conviction that other men's quarrels did not concern
him so long as he was not directly involved, and that what did not
concern him he had no right to discuss. If he stood aside and let
violence stalk by unhindered, he was merely doing what he had been
taught to do from the time he could walk. "Mind your own business and
let other folks do the same," had been the family sloga