bills and checks to settle up some accounts. These were sort
of hit-or-miss, between-the-acts affairs, to which he paid little
attention.

To Nelia, however, they represented a rite as valid as any solemn court
procedure could be, for to her river-trained instinct there was no moral
question as to the justice of her claim upon a part of Carline's
fortune. Her later experience, her reading, had taught her that society
and the law also held with the principle, if not the manner of her
primitive method, for obtaining her rights to separate support.

When Carline awakened, Nelia was gone. Nelia had departed that morning,
one of the servants said. The girl did not know where she had gone. She
had taken a box of books, two trunks, two suitcases and was dressed up,
departing in the automobile, which she drove herself.

He had a feeling of alarm, which he banished as unworthy. Finally toward
night he went down to the post office where he found several letters.
One seared his consciousness;

Gus:

Don't bother to look for me. I'm gone, and I'm going to stay gone.
You have shown yourself to be a mere soak, a creature of appetite
and vice, and with no redeeming mental traits whatever. I hate you,
and worse yet, I despise you. Get a divorce get another woman--the
widow is about your calibre. But, I give you fair warning, leave me
alone. I'm sick of men.

Nelia.

CHAPTER III

Elijah Rasba stalked homeward from the still in the dark, grimly and
expectantly erect. Now he was going to have that period of happiness
which he knew was the chief reason for people drinking moonshine
whiskey. He looked forward to the sensation of exuberant joy very much
as a man would look forward to five hours of happiness, to be followed
by hanging by the neck, till dead.

The stars were shining, and the over-ridge trail which he followed was
familiar enough under his feet, once he had struck into it from the
immediate vicinity of the lawbreakers. He saw the bare-limbed oak trees
against the sky, and he heard rabbits and other night runners scurrying
away in the dead leaves. The stars fluttering in the sky were stern eyes
whose gaze he avoided with determined wickedness and unrepentance.

Arriving at his own cabin, he stirred up the big pine-root log, and drew
his most comfortable rocking chair up before the leaping flames. He sat
there, and waited for the hap