f silver, broken into long hissing ridges, where it went
driving over the ragged strata. On the other side, the Hacker's Creek
road lifted out of the ford and went trailing away through the hills. In
the moonlight it was a giant's ribbon.

I had no idea of what Ump was up to, but I should learn no earlier by a
volley of questions. So I thrust my hands into my pockets and waited.

Presently he came clambering up the bank and got into his saddle.

"Well," I said; "did you find any feathers?"

"I did," he answered; "fresh ones from the meanest bird of the flock,
an' he's flyin' low. I think that first turn into the Stone Coal fooled
him. But he will know better by midnight."

Then I understood it was horse tracks he had been looking for.

"How do you know he's trailing us?" I asked.

"Quiller," he answered, "when Come-an'-go-fetch-it rides up an' down,
he's lookin' for somethin'. An' I reckon we're are about ready to be
looked for."

We were clattering up the turnpike while Ump was speaking. All at once,
rising out of the far away hills, I heard a voice begin to bellow:

"They put John on the island. Fare ye well, fare ye well.
An' they put him there to starve him. Fare ye well, fare ye well."

It was Parson Peppers, and of his reverence be it said that no Brother
of the Coast, rollicking drunk on a dead man's chest, ever owned a finer
bellow.

I turned around in my saddle. "Peppers!" I cried. "Man alive! How did
you know that it was the old bell-wether's horse?"

Ump chuckled. "I saw her shod once. A number six shoe an' a toe-piece."

CHAPTER V

THE WAGGON-MAKER

A spring of eternal youthfulness gushing somewhere under the bed of the
mountains, was a dream of the Spanish Main, sought long and found not,
as the legends run. But it is no dream that some of us carry our
inheritance of youthfulness shoulder to shoulder with Eld into No Man's
Country. Such an one was Simon Betts the waggon-maker.

I sat by his smouldering fire of shavings and hickory splinters, and
wondered at the old man in the chimney corner. He was eighty, and yet
his back was straight, his hair was scarcely grey, and his hands,
resting on the arms of his huge wooden chair, were as unshrunken and
powerful, it seemed to me, as the hands of any man of middle life.

Eighty! It was a tremendous hark back to that summer, long and long ago,
when Simon came through the gap of the mountains into the Hills. The
land was full of wo