Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

When he had gone, Cat-Eye Mayfield smirked and gave an exhibition of miserably poor judgment by trying to take Tot's hand. Tot struck him across the cheek so hard that her fingers left purplish red bars under the sunburn of his skin. For it was because of him that she was cast out, homeless, without a place to lay her head.

"You'd better take yoreself away from here!" She clenched her hands and stamped one little foot. "You shorely better had! I'm done wi' you a-taggin' atter me, you--you sneakin' old rattlesnake of a tattle-teller! I wouldn't marry you to save yore life and mine, too. And this is the last time I'm a-goin' to take the trouble o' tellin' ye, Cat-Eye. Git."

Mayfield quailed before the fire of her finely glittering eyes. He took a few steps backward, watching her as though he feared she would spring upon him and rend his loosely knit body to pieces; then he turned and went straight toward the foot of Lost Trail Mountain. After he had gone a hundred yards, Tot saw him make a careful examination of his rifle.

Now one doesn't examine a gun like that when he means to shoot squirrels, not when he knows already that the gun is loaded and in order. Tot Singleton fell upon the idea that Cat-Eye Mayfield meant to watch the gate for Little Buck Wolfe, and shoot him from ambush. Mayfield was as unscrupulous a man as ever drew life's breath, and this was just the thing for him to do under the circumstances, she knew.

And Little Buck would start for Johnsville at noon!

After having searched the central part of the basin in vain, she decided that to protect him from the danger would be more sensible than to try to warn him of it. Of course, she couldn't go to the Wolfes' settlement. Besides, there was a strong chance of his being killed while trying to protect himself. In another moment she was running hard toward the nearest cabin, which was Grandpap Singleton's, and which, she thanked whatever gods there were, was not more than a quarter of a mile away; and she kept well to cover, in order that her irate father might not see her.

When she burst into the poor little house, the white-headed, white-bearded old hillman was poking the embers in the wide stone fireplace for a baked potato; he, like Granny Wolfe, lived alone and did for himself because he didn't want to be in the way. He looked around and slowly straightened his lean figure, and the fire-blackened hickory stick fell clattering from his unsteady hand.

"Tot Singleton," he demanded anxiously, "what in the name o' Fiddlin' Bob Taylor is the matter o' you?"

"I want yore old rifle, Grandpap," panted Tot.

"Now jest what're you a-plannin' to shoot wi' my old rifle, I'd like to know?"

"A rattlesnake--mebbe."

"A rattlesnake--mebbe! Heh! Take the rifle out o' the rack up thar over the mantel." He motioned toward it. "My pore old arms is so stiff and screaky wi' the rheumatiz 'at I cain't hardly reach up far enough fo' to scratch my pore old head no more."

His granddaughter stood on her bare toes and took down the long-barreled Lancaster muzzle-loader. She ignored the powderhorn and leathern bullet-pouch the Prophet had taken from a peg in the log wall and was holding out to her. The one load that was in the rifle would be enough. Tot, like the rest of the Singletons, didn't miss.

But as she turned toward the door, her grandfather caught her by an arm and held her firmly. His suspicions were at work.

"Wait, Tot, honey," he said. "You've got to tell me about it fust. It hain't no common rattler you're a-goin' to shoot--mebbe!"

She had been afraid to let him know, because of his strict religiousness. The earnest pleading, the deep love for her in his old eyes, now urged her to confide in him. She told it in a few words, for there was precious little time to be wasted.

"And so he's come back here to save his people, Little Buck has." Grandpap Singleton seemed very much affected. "I tell ye, Tot, honey, they needs him, as shorely as you're a foot high. Well, we'll he'p him ef we can. Shorely, a man ort to believe in a-fightin' fo' the right as well as prayin' for it. Heh?"

The Prophet certainly was not in one of his wandering fits now. He caught up a worn felt hat and pulled it low on his white head, and took the rifle masterfully from Tot's hands.

"Come wi' me," he ordered, almost with the snap of youth.

The pair of them hurried across the little vegetable plot, and were soon swallowed up by the trees and laurels of the mountainside.

"Ef the's any killin' to be done," muttered the aged mountaineer, "I'll do it myself. You're young, Tot, honey, whilst I'm as old, mighty nigh it, as Methusalem's house cat. But I can yit see how to shoot purty tol'able straight. Heh! Do ye know what they used to call me fo' a nickname when I was a young man? 'Cracker,' that's what. Acause I was a crack shot. It was said I was the man who invented shootin' squirrels in the middle o' the eye!"

Considering that he had long been a sufferer from rheumatism, that scourge of the aged, the pace that Grandpap Singleton set and kept was truly surprising.

When they drew up stealthily behind a scrubby oak and peered down the Lost Trail's side of Devil's Gate, they saw just what they had expected to see. Crouched above a stone the size of a barrel, on which lay his repeating rifle on its side, was Cat-Eye Mayfield, motionless, waiting in a diabolical patience.

"We've got to ketch him mighty nigh in the act itself," whispered Grandpap Singleton, "so's the'll be enough real proof to send him to jail. We hain't got no real proof as yit, ye know, Tot. We'll jest wait here ontel he picks up his rifle, which same he'll do when Little Buck comes in sight, and 'en we'll make him put up his hands and call Little Buck up to arrest him. Heh? Shorely. He's a-plannin' to let Little Buck have it when he slows his hoss to ford the creek down thar."

Tot kept a watch on the trail below, which lay in plain view before her for several hundred yards. A few silent minutes went by; then she motioned to her kinsman to get ready.

She saw him kneel, lay the long barrel across a moss-covered stone, rest one shoulder against the scrubby oak's body, and bend his head until his right cheek touched the rifle's stock. After he had trained the old weapon properly, he raised his white head and turned his eyes upward without spoiling his aim; and Tot heard him speak in the lowest of undertones:

"Lord, ef I haf to do it, You'll onderstand, won't Ye? And ef I am in the wrong, which I'm purty shore I hain't, I ax Ye to fo'give me. Aymen."

The young woman wiped a dimness from her blue eyes, and looked toward the trail again. She bent and whispered nervously:

"He's a-comin' fast. He hain't more'n a hundred steps from the Gate. Now you watch Cat-Eye Mayfield, Grandpap Singleton, and don't you let him k-k-kill Little Buck!"

"You leave it to me!"

Mayfield picked up his rifle, drew the hammer back, and began to settle himself like a cat settling for a spring.

"Drap that 'ar gun, Cat-Eye!" cried Grandpap Singleton.

Tot pulled aside a laurel branch, in order that the would-be assassin might see the frowning muzzle that bore upon him. Mayfield was in no haste to turn his sallow face toward them; he looked at them only long enough to see who they were, and did not drop his rifle. Perhaps it was because he did not believe the religious old man would shoot; perhaps it was because his thirst for revenge was so great at that moment that his narrow mind had in it no room for any other thought.

"Drap that rifle, Cat-Eye!" Grandpap Singleton cried again.

Still Mayfield did not obey. The horseman was now almost to the ford, and reining in. Mayfield's round head seemed to sink halfway into his shoulders--he began to look along the sights.

"Shoot!" Tot urged frantically.

The old Lancaster cracked like a giant's whip. Cat-Eye Mayfield dropped his rifle now. He turned a dumfounded, ashen face toward the two Singletons, and babbled something unintelligible. Then--although the bullet had only passed through the upper part of his right arm, thanks either to Providence or to a dimness in the old mountaineer's eyes--Mayfield sank to the stones. The sight of his own blood had made him limp.

The Prophet rose unsteadily. The strain on his feeble mind was telling. He stretched wide his lean arms, and the bright sun threw his shadow down the incline in the form of an inverted cross.

He called to the man in the Gate, "Come up here, Little Buck Wolfe," thickly, "and arrest me fo' mudder!"

VI

At the sound of the shot, Wolfe looked up quickly. He saw the gaunt old man go tottering to his feet, saw Tot standing with her hands clutching at her calico dress below her throat; but because of the creek's dashing he did not hear the Prophet's agonized cry. Wolfe dismounted, fastened his horse's reins to a sapling, and hurried up the rocky steep.

The young woman and her grandparent had come down to where Mayfield lay groaning.

"He hain't dead," said Tot. "He's jest bad hurt. And you'd shore better take him along to town with ye, Little Buck, and jail him, ef ye don't want to be ambushed some other time."

Poor old Grandpap Singleton fell to his knees beside the man he had shot. "He hain't dead!" he rejoiced. "He hain't dead!" His hands were clasped against his hollow breast. His joy was even more pathetic than his grief had been before it.

Wolfe understood fully. He touched the now quiet figure on the ground with the toe of his boot.

"Get up!" he ordered.

Mayfield rose, his right arm hanging limp at his side. Wolfe ripped the shirtsleeve from the injured member, folded one of his own white handkerchiefs and placed it over the wound, and used the torn-out sleeve for a bandage. Mayfield, who was fast recovering from his fit of weakness, watched every move of the deft, strong fingers with old hatred in his lusterless, uncanny eyes.

The first-aid work was barely finished when the high-pitched voice of Granny Wolfe came from a point a few rods above:

"La, la, la! And so ye got him, durn him, did ye, Grandpap Bill Singleton!"

She limped down to them, her little dog, Wag, happy at her heels.

"Ye needn't to mind a-tellin' me about it, Bill Singleton," she chattered, "a-cause I already know, me a-bein' a good guesser. And so the rawzum-chawin' devil's pup--was a goin' to layway Little Buck, was he? You, Cat-Eye Mayfield, quit that a-lookin' at me like as ef ye could bite my whole head off."

She turned toward her grandson, who greeted her gravely.

"I tried to find you before I left," he said, and then told her of his father's change of heart.

"Consarn his old fool hide!" the old woman exploded.

Wolfe picked up Mayfield's rifle, threw the loaded cartridge out of the chamber, and let the hammer down carefully. Then he held the weapon out toward Tot Singleton.

"Take that home with you," he requested. "Mayfield can get it when he comes back."

Tot didn't take the rifle. Her lower lip began to quiver, and she looked away. "But I cain't never go home no more, Little Buck," she murmured.

"You can't go home!" he exclaimed in amazement.

She told him haltingly why. A very little smile curled Wolfe's mouth at the corners.

"So you, too, are an outcast," he said, half-sympathetically, half-resentfully. "But don't feel so badly about it! We always have our compensations, little girl. I wonder if--will you go along with me, Tot?"

She answered simply, "I'd go anywhar with you."

Grandpap Singleton took the rifle. Granny Wolfe addressed her kinsman:

"Ef you're a-goin' to town, you'd shore better start. I seed yore pap's old blue-tailed hen a-settin' on the fence a-pickin' her feathers this mornin', and I've heerd two treefrogs a-hollerin', and them's all good signs o' rain."

Wolfe shook hands with the two old people, and escorted his prisoner and her who had been his boyhood sweetheart down to the Gate trail, where his horse stood pawing the black earth impatiently.

"Get in the saddle, Cat-Eye," he said. "You're not able to walk."

"I hain't a-goin' to Johnsville--" Mayfield began, when Wolfe tapped his deputy's badge with a forefinger and cut in, "Get in the saddle!"

He pushed his coat back far enough to reveal the butt of a revolver that the high sheriff had found for him and urged him to wear. Mayfield obeyed awkwardly and ungraciously. With Tot Singleton walking trustfully beside him, Wolfe led the horse down the winding Gate trail, which soon entered a dark green tunnel formed of laurel, giant ferns, and hemlock branches.

When they had put three miles behind them, Wolfe said to his companion, "I suppose you've guessed where I'm taking you."

"Yes," with a sidewise glance of admiration at his clearcut profile. "You're a-takin' me to them folks who 'dopted you, over in town. And ef they can make me over into the same sawt they made you into, I--I'll swaller all o' my feelin's ag'inst bein' a charity objeck, and he'p 'em all I can."

"That's the spirit!" he said with a good deal of enthusiasm. "You stick to that!"

Wolfe hired a light vehicle at the first farmhouse, and they reached quiet, lazy Johnsville an hour after the fall of darkness. It was a fine, starry night; contrary to Granny Wolfe's prediction, it hadn't rained. They went straight to the big, old-fashioned white house of the Masons, which lifted its gables so proudly above its setting of maples that one was inclined to wonder whether it wasn't scoffing at the heavy mortgage that was upon it!

The colonel and his wife were sitting on the unlighted veranda. He was tall, straight, gallant, courteous. She was rather little, gentle, sweet, a born mother who had never had any children. They were of the old South.

"Father," said the adopted son, as the trio reached the foot of the veranda steps, "here's a man with a pretty bad arm. Call Doctor Rice, won't you?"

Colonel Mason didn't wait to ask questions. He ran toward the phone, switching on the veranda lights as he passed through the hallway. The trio walked up the steps. Tot Singleton blinked in the strange white glow that shone from two frosted globes on the veranda ceiling. Cat-Eye Mayfield glared like an animal in a corner. Wolfe approached Mrs. Mason, who was at the same time approaching him.

"This is Miss Singleton, mother," he said. "I--I thought you wouldn't mind caring for her a little while as you cared for me for so long."

The colonel's little wife turned to Alex Singleton's daughter, took her hands, bent forward and kissed her on the brow. Tot stared; then a tear traced a crooked line down the road-dust of either cheek. No other woman had ever kissed her, not even her own stout, whistling mother, that she remembered. In that instant her whole weary, fiery mountain heart gave itself in everlasting love and devotion to Mrs. Mason.

"Let's go into the house, dear," softly said the older woman.

They went in. The colonel hastened back to the veranda.

"Rice is coming," he announced. To Mayfield, "Please sit down, sir."

The three of them sat down. The colonel slyly studied the wounded man's face, and he found it interesting. Soon the doctor arrived.

Rice dressed the hillman's arm in record time, and was paid on the spot for his services--by the young fellow he had always known as Arnold Mason. Wolfe then went with Mayfield into the dining room, where they had supper. Immediately after they had finished the meal, Mayfield was shown to a bedroom upstairs and in the back half of the house.

"Don't bother to run away," and Wolfe smiled a very pleasant smile. "You may go home tomorrow. I won't give you any trouble over trying to pot me; you see, I understand fully just how hard a prison term is for any mountain man! You won't try to do me harm in the future, will you? I want you to promise me that."

"Shore," Mayfield nodded. "I promise. You're a good feller, Little Buck, a dang good feller."

Mayfield had expected anything but mercy. But he was not too bewildered to grind his teeth and fling a vile, whispered curse at the door when Wolfe closed it behind him.

When Wolfe went back to the veranda, the lights had been cut off to keep away a swarm of annoying summer beetles. He saw that the colonel and a slender figure in white sat in rockers near the front steps.

"Miss Singleton--who wants me to call her Tot, like everybody else does--" began Colonel Mason, "has told me about the difficulties you had and--er, expect to have. It looks bad, Arnold; there's no denying it. You can't arrest and imprison your own people, of course. Frankly, I don't quite see how you're going to manage it, son."

Wolfe stepped to the veranda post and put his back to it.

"You've always believed in me," he said earnestly. "I want you to continue to believe in me. I'm not to the barrier yet. There are six miles of narrow-gauge road to be built before the barrier is reached--the Devil's Gate, you know. No use worrying over things in the distance, father, eh? This is what I've got to do--when I get to the barrier, I'll cross it, or go under it, around it, or through it. I don't know how. I know only that it must be done."

"By George, sir!" The colonel brought a hand down on his knee for emphasis. "Of course, I'll keep faith in you! That pass--the Devil's Gate--was beautifully named, wasn't it? But there's one thing, Arnold, I must ask you to remember. That your life is of more value to us, infinitely, than our money. Don't forget it, son."

There followed a few minutes of silence save for the night song of a mocking bird somewhere in the maples. Then Tot Singleton, who now wore shoes and stockings and a white dress that Mrs. Mason had found for her, sat up straight in her chair and addressed the dimly-shining officer's shield.

"Let me tell you, Little Buck," she said, "you'll shorely wish you'd put Cat-Eye Mayfield in jail the minute you got to town. I'd bet my life ag'in a safety-pin 'at Cat-Eye Mayfield ain't in the house right now. As long as he can go whar he pleases, yore life ain't wo'th nothin'. I tell you, after you've done what you've done tonight fo' him, he'd foller you to the bottomest hole in Tophet to git to shoot you in the back. Hate you? Why, he's hated you ever sence he can rickollect. It's all the' is to him, that hate fo' you. As Grandpap Singleton says, the sourest vinegar in the world is made out o' molasses--a-meanin', o' course, hate made out o' l-love. Cat-Eye thinks he l-loves me, y' know----"

If the lights had been on, they would have seen that she was blushing terribly; she had made a bad mess, she thought, of telling them how it was.

The last word had barely left her lips when there came from the velvety darkness of the lawn the voice of an eavesdropper, a snake, Mayfield himself, who had stolen out by way of the back stairs:

"Ef ever she told the truth in all o' her borned days, Little Buck Wolfe, she told it then. Ye might as well make yore fun'ral 'rangements afore ye come into the hills ag'in, acause I'll certainly git you!"

Wolfe ran down the steps and disappeared in the blackness. Colonel Mason flashed on the veranda lights, and brought out a shotgun. But Mayfield and the night were too closely akin, and they failed to catch even a glimpse of him.

"I have always held out," muttered the colonel, when they had again gathered on the veranda, "that there was no man without a little that was good somewhere in his make-up. I admit now that I was mistaken."

Little Mrs. Mason came out then. She put a hand on Tot's arm.

"I've got a room ready for you upstairs," she said. "Would you like to go to bed now? You must be pretty tired."

"Yes'm," Tot replied absentmindedly.

She displayed no interest whatever in the beautiful blue-and-white bedroom that the good woman at her side told her to consider her own. She barely noticed the dainty night-dress that Mrs. Mason took from a drawer and hung across the back of a chair for her. Wondering at her sudden abstraction, the colonel's wife smiled a gentle, "Good night, my dear!" and left her to herself.

Tot Singleton was thinking of Mayfield. She had long ago given up trying to stop hating him; he wouldn't let her stop hating him. For years he had dogged her like a shadow; she hadn't been able to go anywhere, it seemed, without his following her. A thousand times he had profaned the sacred spot under the whispering willow--with his feet, with his voice, with his opaque and uncanny eyes, with his thoughts. Over and over she had tried to insult him, in order that she might be rid of him; but there was, apparently, nothing about him that could be insulted. No, he wouldn't let her leave off hating him!

And now Mayfield was free again; free to wait in the laurels beside the trail, or behind a stone above it, with his coward's soul red with the spirit of murder, and a rifle in his hands.

Little Buck Wolfe would go to the mountains in the morning to bring Mayfield back; he would be shot from ambush; the cost of his kindliness and his fearlessness would be his life. She was absolutely sure of it, and her conclusion was certainly not far-fetched. Well, she would save Wolfe again. She was one of the very few persons in the world who could approach Cat-Eye Mayfield, now that he knew the hand of the law was against him, without great danger of being killed. She herself would arrest Cat-Eye. If he didn't submit to arrest, she would--but he would submit. It would be easy enough to find him. The mountains and their dense forests were as an open book to her; no man of the Wolfes Basin country knew them better.

To the outsider, the decision of this unlettered, but strong-souled young daughter of the hills is perhaps rather startling. But to Tot there was nothing so very extraordinary about it. To her, duty was duty, and nothing more--or less.

When Mrs. Mason rapped lightly at the door of the blue-and-white bedroom on the following morning, she received no response. She opened the door and went in, and found the bed not only empty, but undisturbed. Shortly afterward, the colonel's wife found that Tot's calico dress was gone; and in its place lay the white garments and the shoes and stockings that Tot had worn the evening before.

Mrs. Mason hurried downstairs and met Wolfe in the hallway. He seemed anxious.

"Mother," his voice troubled, "when I woke this morning, my revolver was gone from my holster, and the deputy shield from my coat. What do you suppose became of them? Do you think Mayfield----?"

"I believe I can explain, Arnold," she interrupted breathlessly. "The girl, too, is gone!"

"After Mayfield!" he cried.

"I have no doubt of it, Arnold. She probably thinks your officer badge gives her plenty of authority!"

VII

There was a heavy step on the veranda. A big and poorly-dressed man, wearing a sunburned black beard and carrying a rifle by its muzzle, appeared on the threshold.

"Whar's my little gyurl?" he asked jerkily.

The colonel's wife looked with instant pity upon him. There was something very forlorn about Alex Singleton, the repentant. His gaunt and haggard face, his ragged clothing, his run-over cowhide boots, all were covered with the dust of travel. Just under his eyes, which were wide and hungry-looking, his cheeks were mottled faintly, and it was chiefly by this pathetic little token that Mrs. Mason read the story of his remorseful sorrow. He stared straight at her; he appeared to be wholly unaware of the presence beside her of old Buck Wolfe's son.

"Whar is she at?" he asked again, this time almost in a whisper.

"She went back to the hills last night," Mrs. Mason answered kindly.

"I'd ort to be shot fo' a-runnin' her off," muttered Alex Singleton. In louder tones, "Might I ax ye fo' a big drink o' whisky, mis'?"

Mrs. Mason's eyes twinkled. "I think we have some. Sit down and wait, and I'll go for it."

It was then that she noticed that his left shirtsleeve had been ripped open to the shoulder; that a rawhide thong did service as a tourniquet just above his left elbow; and that his left forearm, wrist and hand were swollen and discolored.

"Copperhead bit me as I was a-creepin' through a fence jest outside o' town," the mountaineer explained apologetically. "Got me afore I knowed it was anywhar nigh me. That's what I wanted with a big drink o' whisky, mis', it a-bein' good fo' snakebite."

"Oh, you must have Doctor Rice!" the little woman cried frightenedly. Already she was fairly pushing him toward a veranda chair that Wolfe had hurriedly provided; he sat down as obediently as a child would have done. "Arnold, phone Doctor Rice----"

"But there's no time to be lost in waiting for Rice, mother," said Wolfe. "Look at that arm! I can treat snakebite; I've got some potassium permanganate that I bought to take to the hills with me----"

He ran to his bedroom and returned with a small bottle. Alex Singleton rose angrily.

"I hain't a-goin' to let _you_ do it!" he declared.

"You'll have to," replied Wolfe. "You don't want to die, do you?"

"But thar's whisky----"

"Whisky," old Buck Wolfe's son interrupted, "is as bad as it is good. It stimulates the heart action, but it spreads the poison through the system rapidly. This permanganate--we just cut right through the marks of the fangs with a knife; then we draw out as much poison as will come; then we fill the wounds with this stuff, and pretty soon you'll be as good as new. You see, you evidently got the tourniquet on quick, which is a big thing."

"Me, a Singleton, and you, a Wolfe?" The mountain man was suffering much. He was a stranger in a strange land, dazed and bewildered, and heart-broken because of his treatment of his only daughter. He weakened.

"You'd do that fo' me, a Singleton? Ef you would, I hain't a-goin' to be lowdown enough to keep ye from it. Yank out yore knife and cut the whole danged arm off, Little Buck, ef ye want to!"

He held out the swollen, discolored hand. Wolfe took a sharp knife from his pocket, and with it split the fang-marks two ways. With his mouth he succeeded in drawing out some of the virulent yellow poison. After that he filled the wounds with permanganate crystals. The colonel came up and tried to help.

"We'll loosen your thong at intervals," smiled Wolfe. "There's some poison in that arm that the permanganate won't reach, but it won't hurt much if we let it into the circulation a little at a time. It's the shock of the whole dose, you know, that kills."

Some hours later, the leader of the Singletons put out his good right hand.

"Boy," he said with a great deal of feeling, "you've got one friend, anyhow, which no time, nor no change, nor no thing on earth can ever take away from ye. I want ye to shake wi' me, Little Buck."

They shook.

"Now will ye please tell me, ef ye know," Singleton went on, "how come it Louisiany left here in the night?"

Wolfe told him briefly.

"Cat-Eye Mayfield!" growled the big hillman. "Well, I reckon I'm a-goin' to haf to kill Cat-Eye sometime. Goodness knows I hates to do it, but fo' pore little Louisiany I will, as shore as green apples. Le' me tell ye this here, folks--thar's the lowdownest man 'at ever stuck a boot-track on the face o' the world."

After two more hours, the rawhide thong was removed entirely. Singleton's constitution was like iron. He rose, and took up his rifle and hat.

"I guess I'll be a-movin' toward home," he drawled softly. "I feel good enough to thrash my weight in wildcats now. I shore won't fo'git this."

"Better wait until tomorrow," advised the always hospitable colonel.

"I'll go with you," said Wolfe. "Tot may need help, you know. We'll separate at the Gate, in order that my people----"

"No!" old Alex broke in stoutly. "You cain't go to the mountains now. Mayfield would be plumb shore to snipe ye off, plum' shore. You must stay here fo' three days, at least. I tell you, I knows jest edzactly what I'm a-talkin' about, Little Buck."

"But he wouldn't have got away, if I hadn't been such a boob!" frowned Wolfe. "It's up to me, as the saying is, to bring him back."

Singleton shook his head. "Oh, no! Ef I'm a-goin' to be yore friend, you must le' me have my way about it. Don't be a-skeered but what Louisiany can take blamed good keer o' herself. Cat-Eye, he wouldn't hurt her, anyhow. He knows me too dang well to hurt her. And so good-by to ye all!"

Half a minute later, he had left the house and was hurrying toward the great, dim-blue ranges.

The young general manager of the new Unaka Lumber Company began immediately the building of his toy railroad. Before twilight of the next day, more than a dozen tents had been staked on a level spot near where Wolfes Creek flowed under the C. C. & O., and the mountain air was filled with the songs of weary negro laborers. Early on the following morning, under the supervision of a young foreman named Weaver, the narrow roadbed began to creep toward the basin. The hills everlastingly rang with the staccato of the axe, the keen tenor of the saw, and the low bass thunder of exploding dynamite as tree after tree and ledge after ledge of stone fell victims of the hand of progress.

Late in the afternoon of the day following, Wolfe left the work entirely in charge of his foreman, and started to Johnsville for news. No person had passed by way of the trail that led down the creek from Devil's Gate, but those for whom he had been watching might possibly have taken another trail.

He found no news awaiting him in Johnsville. Nothing more had been seen or heard of the Singletons or of Mayfield. Wolfe feared that some evil had befallen Tot. Before he went to bed that night, he decided that he would be in the hills at daybreak on a search for her.

Colonel Mason wished to accompany his foster-son, but he awoke too late. Whereupon he gallantly wagered his wife a silk dress against a peach pie that he would overtake Arnold before he reached Devil's Gate--and he won the peach pie.

VIII

A slender, barefooted feminine figure in a torn and bedraggled, blue-dotted calico dress stood motionless behind the twisted body of a wind-swept jackpine on the crest of a baby mountain miles from Wolfe's Basin. Her face was thin from starving, and her coppery hair matted and tangled, but in the depths of her blue eyes there was fire. An Army-type revolver hung heavily from her right hand. Over her heart shone an officer's shield. She was slyly watching the side of another baby mountain, on the crest of which lay lightly the dying, golden summer sun.

The yellow disc sank out of sight, and shadows began to thicken in the valley before her. Still she stood motionless behind the wind-swept pine, too full of her purpose to sit down and rest. Darkness came on out of the east, and a little brown owl somewhere below her cried a mournful welcome to it. A nighthawk cut the air over her head with its knife-sharp wings; its shriek was like the dying note of a steamer's siren. From far across the other mountain came the shrill sound of a panther's scream, imitating the call of a woman in mortal distress.

Then there was silence, a deep and awesome silence. The earth, the sky, and all between, formed one vast and hollow loneliness. But Tot did not feel it. She herself was loneliness.

At last she sat down on the pine needles. Her weariness, the weariness of long hours of tramping without food, of long vigils on mountain tops, forced her to rest. What a game of hide-and-seek it had been! Half a dozen times she had been almost upon him. His way of eluding her was both uncanny and maddening. He had really seemed to be enjoying it!

Again the owl cried out; again the nighthawk shrieked; again the panther screamed. And again did Tot Singleton pay no attention to the gruesome trinity.

Some time later, she saw on the side of the other mountain a tiny point of light. It brought a cold but triumphant smile to her lips. How sure of himself he was! She rose, and began to move swiftly and noiselessly down through the scrubby laurel and ivy, going as straight toward the point of light as the slopes of the valley would allow.

After nearly an hour, she divided a wall of rank green undergrowth and stepped into a little, round patch of huckleberry bushes, in the center of which was a small brushwood fire--and beyond the fire, eating berries, his rifle lying across his knees, sat Cat-Eye Mayfield, who also was pale and haggard. He looked up. His jaws stopped their movement as though they had been that moment paralyzed. He stared at her half-defiantly and half-reproachfully.

She went closer to him, the big revolver ready in her hand, her gaze riveted on his.

"You're onder arrest fo' tryin' to kill Little Buck Wolfe," she said in a low voice that carried the ring of ice. With the forefinger of her left hand she pointed to the officer's shield that she wore over her heart like a target and a dare.

"Ye don't say!" he sneered.

"But I do say!" she replied.

"Depity-Sheriff Tot Singleton!" grinned Mayfield.

"C'rect, sir!" boldly. "It's jest what I am. I'll haf to ax ye to pass that 'ar rifle acrost to me, Mister Cat-Eye."

"Humph!" scornfully.

"Pass me that 'ar rifle, butt fust--pass it, quick!"

Mayfield saw, or imagined he saw, her finger tighten on the trigger. He gave her the gun, butt first, reluctantly. She lifted it in her left hand and brought it down hard on a stone, disabling the mechanism of the breech. Mayfield muttered an oath and leaped to his feet, but the revolver's muzzle held him off.

"You better hadn't!" she warned, her finger now so hard on the trigger that the cylinder trembled. "I've got the whole United States ahind o' me now, and I shore hain't afeared to shoot. Ef you think I am, try me and see!"

The other prepared to play his last card. He had some faith in it. He tucked his thumbs under his homemade suspenders, and cocked his bullet-shaped head to one side.

"We've had a fine time a-playin' whoopy-hide, hain't we?" He tried to laugh, and failed. "But it's all come to a show-down now, I reckon. You've sp'iled it all; the fun's all over. Tot Singleton, you won't want me to go to jail when I've told ye what I've got to tell ye!"

"Tell it!" impatiently.

"All right. Well," leered Mayfield, "you rickollect 'at time me and yore pap went over to Shelton Laurel and stayed a week at the big shootin'-match, sev'ral year ago? And you rickollect yore pap acted pow'ful strange fo' a long time atter we'd got back? It was the talk o' the whole Singleton tribe. You rickollect, Tot?"

"Yes. Shorely," she nodded. "Git the rest of it out o' ye quick."

"All right. Well, yore pap he killed a man named Mort Gibson over thar," Cat-Eye Mayfield went on, "and I seed him do it. I was the only witness. I'm the only pusson on earth 'at knows who done it--'ceptin' yore pap. Take me to jail, and I'll shore tell who it was killed Mort Gibson. Then yore pap he'll land in the penitenchy even ef he don't hang!"

Tot Singleton saw light in a place that had been mysteriously dark to her for years.

"So that," she cried, shaken hard, "is why pap never would make you stop a-pesterin' me to marry you! He was afeard to make you mad, acause he was afeard you'd tell! But," with fine scorn, "he knowed he could trust me never to tie up to sech as you, o' course. Do ye reckon, Cat-Eye Mayfield, they'd take yore word about the killin', and you in jail?"

"Tumph! I'd jest tell 'em to ax yore pap about it, and he'd give hisself away. He hain't got over it yit. It's nigh driv' him crazy."

It was all too true. Then the young woman's countenance took on an expression that fascinated Mayfield because he couldn't begin to guess what it meant.

"You turn yore back to me, quick!" she ordered.

The revolver threatened. The firelight gleamed on the deputy's badge she wore. Mayfield lost faith in his last card. He turned his back to Tot, and bent his head dejectedly. She stepped to him, gripped the waistband of his blue denim trousers in her left hand, and shoved him forward.

"Move on!" she said, bleakly but desperately, and he moved on. "Try anything I don't like the looks of, and see ef I don't shoot--then you cain't tell on pap. I--I've got the whole United States ahind o' me now."

* * * * *

They reached the crest of a high and rugged mountain just before daybreak. Tot decided to halt there and wait for the dawn to show her the surrounding country, in order that she might get her bearings again.

When the gray light came, she found that the great pile of earth and stone under her feet was the Big Blackfern, the eastern wall of Wolfe's Basin!

"Listen, Cat-Eye," she said wearily. "This is what we're a-goin' to do. We're a-goin' straight down the mountainside to the aidge o' the basin; then we're a-goin' to sneak out to the right under cover o' the trees ontel we're to the Gate. Anything about that you don't onderstand?"

"Yes," growled her prisoner, "I onderstand ye."

"Rickollect, ef you try to run, I'll shoot."

She released her hold on his clothing, now that he no longer had darkness for a friend. She followed him doggedly, fighting for strength to keep on her feet. Before they were halfway to the basin's edge, she was stumbling, and the trees were beginning to run grotesquely together like drunken monsters, and there was in her eyes a light closely akin to that of delirium. Mayfield knew that she soon would be completely exhausted, and upon this he was depending for his escape. Now and then he cast a sly glance over his shoulder, and with each succeeding glimpse of her his countenance grew a degree less heavy.

When they had come to a point a hundred yards from the level ground of the basin's bottom, Mayfield halted suddenly and began to stare ahead of him. His captor thrust the muzzle of the revolver weakly against his back. Still he didn't move. His immobility was like that of an evil bird that a snake holds charmed.

"Go on!" mumbled Tot. "Go on!"

"Looky thar!" exclaimed Mayfield. He pointed.

"What is it?"

She saw that they were standing at the lower side of the family burying-ground of the Wolfes.

"Thar!" Mayfield growled, pointing again.

At last she saw. "It was you," she gasped, "that done it!"

A thick, black mist was already settling down before her. She couldn't see anything at all now. Mayfield seized the revolver and tore it from her weakened grip. She made no attempt to recover it, for nothing mattered; the universe had become one great, dark void; it was finished. She staggered and fell prostrate, with her arms flung out helplessly. There she lay quite still, with the officer's shield pressed close to the earth and no more like a target, no more like a dare.

In the basin below were two men, one of whom was mounted, who had been watching with rising interest the progress of the pair down the rugged slope of the Blackfern. They had recognized Tot and Mayfield only when the latter-named halted suddenly and pointed; captor and captive had come into plain view at that moment.

Colonel Mason uttered an exclamation that was half-oath, and spurred his horse forward. The man on foot also was an elderly man, and he was tired and worn from days and nights of fruitless searching through the mountain wilderness. He thought that Mayfield had struck Tot down. He choked back a sob and cried out a whole oath instead, and ran, not toward his daughter, his one little girl, but after Cat-Eye Mayfield.

The colonel dismounted and with infinite tenderness gathered Tot's limp body up from the new mound of black earth on which it had fallen. He shook his head sorrowfully, regretfully, at sight of the new slab of sandstone that had been put at the head of the mound only that morning.

For on it had been chiseled crudely this pitiful inscription:

_Hear Lays Little Buck Wolfe_

IX

Granny Wolfe had signally failed to soften her son, Old Buck. She had talked to him until she was hoarse, now pleading, now threatening him, now browbeating him with her sharp and ready tongue. Several times he had walked off to keep from hearing her; twice he had seized his fiddle and gone to playing "Buffalo Gals" wildly to shut her up.

But her spirits were not so low this morning. She had put on her red flannel petticoat wrong side out by mistake, and that certainly meant better luck in the future. It was a sign that never failed.

She had gone out, with her little black dog at her heels, to weed a bed of sky-colored ragged-robins. Her gaze sought out the not far distant family burying-ground instead. That which she saw caused her to drop her sourwood staff and step on her little dog's foot.

"Wag, ye black devil!" she creaked in response to the canine howl.

She recovered her staff, took her clay pipe from her almost toothless jaws, shaded her eyes with one hand, and looked toward the side of the Blackfern again. That which she had seen before had become an indistinct blur.

"I wonder what!" she muttered.

The eyes of Old Buck Wolfe were keener. He threw a last clod at a marauding hen, snatched up his always ready rifle, and hurried toward the mountain.

As he passed his mother's cabin, she hailed him shrilly, "Wait thar, and I'll go 'long wi' ye!"

He didn't even turn his head.

"You'd ort to be skun alive!" and she limped after him, Wag following at her heels.

* * * * *

Colonel Mason looked for water with which to revive Tot and, it being unfamiliar territory to him, failed to find any. Wondering whether he could mount unassisted with the young woman in his arms, he went back to his horse. Then he saw, standing less than two rods away, as motionless as the trees about him, the bearded, hard-eyed, giant mountaineer, Old Buck Wolfe.

"You're a terrible man, Buck," the colonel observed bitingly.

Wolfe changed not one feature.

"Will you be so kind, sir," and the old Southerner's voice was now not so cold, "as to hold this girl until I can get on my horse, and then pass her up to me?"

Still no word, no move, from the hillman. His mother arrived, panting heavily. She went straight to Colonel Mason. A great deal was plain to her already.

"Le' me take keer o' Tot," she said, fumbling at the bandana corners that were knotted under her chin, "ontel you can chase out the mountain thar about half a quarter and wet this here handkercher in a little spring ye'll find. Hey?"

The colonel returned not long afterward with the bandana soaking wet. Tot opened her eyes the moment the water touched her face. Granny Wolfe smiled, swept the matted and tangled hair back from the high, smooth brow and crooned:

"Now don't you worry yore little self no more, Tot, honey. Why, the' hain't a blessed thing to worry about! Little Buck ain't dead at all! His pap thar, the cross-grained old fool, he made that 'ar grave thar, and set up a tombstone to it, as a sign to the whole world 'at his best son was dead to him. Don't ye see, Tot, honey? Why, it's as plain as yore nose!"

"Cat-Eye didn't kill him?" Tot breathed uncertainly.

"Shorely not!" the old woman assured her.

"I thought Cat-Eye--had got him," Tot mumbled weakly, and slowly closed her eyes.

Colonel Mason rose and faced Old Buck Wolfe squarely.

"You could be a mighty good man," said he, "if you would. I know you've got plenty of chances to be bad; still, that's a very fine reason why you shouldn't be. I tell you, sir, there's nothing much coming to the fellow who is good simply because he hasn't any chance to be bad--and don't you ever forget that. Come, now! Help your son instead of hindering him. Be what you ought to be to him. You owe him your----"

"I don't owe nobody nothin'!" cut in the man who kept his word, told the truth, and paid his debts; who bent his knees only to a woodchuck's den, a ginseng root, or the furnace of a moonshine still; and who believed in nothing that he couldn't see with his temporal eyes.

Old Kirby Mason drew himself up straight, as straight as he had stood at Chickamauga when a general had complimented him to his face. But he was pale now, instead of flushed.

"By George, sir!" he bellowed.

With that he sprang to the head of the new black mound, tore away the slab of sandstone, lifted it in both hands and brought it down hard against the stump of a tree, breaking it into half a dozen pieces. The mountaineer went toward him, his rifle ready. The colonel looked into the barrel of the weapon without flinching.

"You ort to be hung as high as Haman or higher, Buck Wolfe!" the old woman cried. "You go home! Some says a old fool is the biggest fool on earth, and some says a young fool is the biggest; but me, I say you settle the question forever. Now you go on home!"

"Nobody hain't axed you fo' none o' yore edvice," growled her son.

"By gyar," Granny Wolfe retorted witheringly, "you need edvice, as shore as the Old Scratch hain't a jaybird."

Colonel Mason turned to his waiting horse, and swung himself into the saddle with the agility of a cavalryman. Tot seemed only half-conscious, only half-alive, and it was with some difficulty that the colonel and Granny Wolfe lifted her to the saddlefront. The grizzled mountain man stood and watched it with a face like a mask of stone.

Then the horseman left the old hillwoman berating her son mercilessly, and rode toward the basin's bottom.

"Now, little lady," he said when they had come to level ground, "I'll take you to your mother in short order. I'm afraid to try to take you to Johnsville; it would probably be too much for you. It'll be all right for you to go home. Your father is sorry he was so hasty with you."

Tot stared wide-eyed into his patrician old face. Her spirit fluttered up quickly.

"I want to go back to Mis' Mason," she told him.

"Oh!" smiled the colonel. "Back to Mrs. Mason, eh? Very well. Perhaps it would really be better. You may need the services of a doctor, and you couldn't get one out here--though I'd never dare to tell Granny Wolfe that! And I fancy, little lady," he added pleasantly, "that Mrs. Mason will be right glad to have you back."

They soon met young Wolfe, who had just ridden through Devil's Gate. He heard the story as they rode toward Johnsville, and made no comment, though there was a glint in his eyes that his foster-father hadn't been accustomed to seeing there.

Mrs. Mason saw them coming, and called the doctor by phone. Then she ran to make ready the bed in the blue-and-white room upstairs.

It was a case of utter physical exhaustion and high nervous strain, the doctor said; there was some fever now, and would doubtless be more before morning. Tot watched him as though she were not the least interested. After an hour, Doctor Rice left medicine and directions for giving them, and turned homeward.

Another hour went by. The patient spoke to the anxious-faced little woman who sat at her bedside.

"That tombstone. I can see it as plain as daylight. Ef I look somewhar else, it moves whar I look. 'Hear lays Little Buck Wolfe.' Are you shore he ain't dead, Mis' Mason, plum' shore?"

"Very sure," promptly. "He's perfectly safe."

"Ef you don't keer, Mis' Mason," and Tot strove to lift herself to an elbow, "I'll jest step downsta'rs and see."

"Delirium," the colonel's wife whispered to herself. Aloud, "No, you mustn't get up! Wait, dear; I'll call him."

Wolfe entered the blue-and-white bedroom a minute later. He went to the bedside and knelt there, took one of the hot and fluttering hands and caressed it awkwardly.

"I'm all right," he told her over and over. "Don't you see? Everything is all right."

She appeared to be satisfied, and accepted a teaspoonful of queer-tasting liquid without a murmur.

But the fever kept going higher in spite of the queer-tasting liquid, and the doctor was summoned again. He gave a powder, left others, and departed. Out in the hallway, Wolfe paced the floor anxiously. On the veranda the colonel sat smoking and swearing under his breath at the forces that had brought themselves together in a mighty attempt to crush him that was as flesh and blood of his own.

Wolfe stopped his nervous pacing at the sound of soft footfalls behind him, turned, and faced his foster-mother.

"I don't think you need worry yourself like this, Arnold; the case isn't so desperate," said Mrs. Mason, half-whispering. She went on smilingly, "If you hadn't told me about Alice, I'd think you were about to fall in love with Tot--or that you'd already fallen in love with her! She's handsome, honey boy, isn't she?"

"Very," he agreed, "but I'm not in love with her, mother."

Mrs. Mason gave him a wise look. "Of course, you aren't, not yet. It's gratitude and appreciation, now. But a man of your make-up could hardly help caring for a girl like Tot--after she has had a little polish, you know. That was a boyish affair you had with Alice, a sort of flashlight affair; you hadn't been much used to women, and she dazzled you. You'll see the day, dear boy, when you'll be quite thankful that Alice wouldn't have you. Now go straight off to bed, Arnold!"

"You'll call me if she gets worse?"

The colonel's wife promised. Wolfe went to his room. He shook his head and smiled a trifle bitterly at that which Mrs. Mason had said concerning "a flashlight affair." He thought she didn't understand.

But she did.

* * * * *

At noon of the next day, Sheriff Alvin Starnes, tall and lank, brave and illiterate, rose from his office chair and went to a telephone instrument on the wall. He asked for Colonel Mason's residence.

"This is Sheriff Starnes," he growled into the transmitter. "Is the young lady still improvin'?"

"Doing finely, thank you, Sheriff." It was Little Buck Wolfe talking. "The colonel told you about her, eh?"

"This mornin', sir. I think I'd better go after Mayfield, Mr. Mason. I ain't forgot that I promised to let you run that end o' the county, on account o' your kinfolks; but Mayfield ain't your kinfolks."

"Go ahead!" laughed Wolfe. "Hope you catch him."

"Startin' right now," replied Starnes. "Goo'-by!"