work was
over.

We rode south along the ridge, leaving old Christian standing in his
shop door, his face sullen and his grimy arms folded. I flung him a
silver dollar, four times the price of the shoeing. It fell by the shop
sill, and he lifted his foot and sent it spinning across the road into
the bushes.

The road ran along the ridge. A crumbling rail fence laced with the
vines of the poison ivy trailed beside it. In its corners stood the
great mullein, and the dock, and the dead iron-weed. The hickories,
trembling in their yellow leaves, loomed above the fringe of sugar
saplings like some ancient crones in petticoats of scarlet. Sometimes a
partridge ran for a moment through the dead leaves, and then whizzed
away to some deeper tangle in the woods; now a grey squirrel climbed a
shell-bark with the clatter of a carpenter shingling a roof, and sat by
his door to see who rode by, or shouted his jeer, and, diving into his
house, thrust his face out at the window. Sometimes, far beyond us, a
pheasant walked across the road, strutting as straight as a harnessed
brigadier,--an outlaw of the Hills who had sworn by the feathers on his
legs that he would eat no bread of man, and kept the oath. Splendid
freeman, swaggering like a brigand across the war-paths of the
conqueror!

We were almost at the crown of the ridge when a brown flying-squirrel,
routed from his cave in a dead limb by the hammering of a hungry
woodpecker, stood for a moment blinking in the sunlight and then made a
flying leap for an oak on the opposite side of the road; but his
estimate was calculated on the moonlight basis, and he missed by a
fraction of an inch and went tumbling head over heels into the weeds.

I turned to laugh at the disconcerted acrobat, when I caught through the
leaves the glimpse of a horse approaching the blacksmith-shop from one
of the crossroads. I called to my companions and we found a break in the
woods where the view was clear. At half a mile in the transparent
afternoon we easily recognised Lem Marks. He rode down to the shop and
stopped by the door.

In a moment old Christian came out, stood by the shoulder of the horse
and rested his hand on Marks' knee. It was strange familiarity for such
an acrimonious old recluse, and even at the distance the attitude of
Woodford's henchman seemed to indicate surprise.

They talked together for some little while, then old Christian waved his
arm toward the direction we had taken and