the dearest desire of Taft's heart to shield and screen him. The realization that, despite himself, Larrabee shared his security cheapened it. Less and less he realized its value. A turbulent pulse began to stir within his veins. His heavy cheek was red and pendulous beneath his yellow beard. Occasionally he dropped his lower jaw with an expression of angry dismay, so ill had the event fallen out with his liking. The sight of old Copley wandering about the half-darkened house, lighted only by the fire and the pallid grayness from the door ajar opening upon the rainy outside world, as uneasy as a homeless cat, able to settle to nothing, his face a palimpsest of care and trouble and failure, overwritten again and again above the half-obliterated script of years agone, irritated him vaguely. Taft eyed him loweringly, as the two children in the opposite room besieged him for the detail of the adventures and dramatic "taking off" of a certain "black b'ar," a vanquished enemy of his earlier days, which he recounted as aimlessly as if the story were elicited by a wooden crank; but responding to a spirited encore, he plucked up heart of grace to add new and fresh particulars. His worn and not unkindly face did not ill become the armchair and the propinquity of the juvenile heads. His serenity, as the two resorted from contradiction to blows, smartly administered across him to his own great jeopardy, bespoke a grandfatherly tolerance, nearly related to affection, for the combatants. Without more masterful leading than his own mind could originate or his own propensities could furnish, he might spend the rest of his life at the plough-handles, and ask no better society, and hope for naught beyond his coarse garb and his coarser fare. He was old, and this might be a better prospect than the still could promise, with always the possibility of a federal prisoner's cell at the vanishing point of the long perspective.

VOL. LXXIII. — NO. 437.

25

Taft could preempt no such demesne of mild content. His rankling regret for all that he had done, and done so well, in that it served his enemy perforce as one with himself, deepened as he began to realize that in escaping so great and imminent a danger none sustained appreciable injury but himself. He alone seemed at the end. He could not for years, perhaps, safely rehabilitate the still. A new place must be sought, a new trade established, new dangers guarded against; and complicated by his relations with Larrabee, at large and at enmity, a removal unobserved and a reestablishment without pursuit seemed impossible. He dwelt with futile persistence on the peculiar adaptability of his hiding-place, now demolished forever. Nowhere else could he have commanded such advantages of seclusion. Surely nowhere else could his dangerous vocation have been so safely plied. He enumerated the varied precautions that he had observed, the dangers that he had successfully balked. All the chances of the world outside had run in his favor; even the mysterious burning of the hotel was strangely calculated to aid his design in discouraging the advent into the Cove of strangers, summer sojourners, that might lead to the discovery of his lair. Doubtless, too, by this time, in addition, Kenniston's plans were definitely and forever baffled by the untoward result of processioning the land. And as the thought of it recurred to him he started suddenly, the color deepened in his face, and he beheld the events of which he had elected to play the deus ex machina in a new and baleful light.

Certainly there was no flaw in his reasoning that stormy night when he had betaken himself, in company with the wind and the rain, high up into the solitudes of the "bald" of the mountain. A wild night, with none else abroad save perchance a stray marauder of the furry gentry. Only the mists dogged his steps, and only the lightnings

searched out his path. The gigantic boulder that seemed immovable, grim, gaunt, forbidding, the agency of giant powder set astir easily enough; and although the charge, accurately calculated for the purpose, was not sufficient to fracture the great mass, its equilibrium on the steep slope was destroyed. A wild turbulent dance it had as it hurled down the slope from the spot where the ebbing seas of centuries agone had left it stranded. A thunderous crashing voice it lifted as it went, and the thunder of the clouds seemed to reply. In the pallid dawn of the rainy day, Taft had crept back through the wet clouds of the summits and the spent winds lingering in the dank woods, to behold it lying there in this alien spot, as immovable of aspect as of yore, with great trees uprooted by the tempest athwart the rocky ledges about its path, and every trace of the action of powder effaced by the persistent rain. It marked a new corner for the beginning of Kenniston's survey; on a line with the old, it is true, but full five furlongs distant. There was a northwesterly line to be run out thence; the greater divergence would occur in the Cove, which fact Taft had learned as Kenniston made a swift plat of his ir regularly shaped land with his cane on the floor of Captain Lucy's cabin porch. A simple scheme enough, this, that the one available site for the hotel should be thrown within the boundaries of Captain Lucy, who would not bargain, sell, or convey, and that thus the ill-omened caravansary should be crowded out of the space it was expected to occupy; for as yet Bruin's intervention as incendiary was among the uncovenanted things, and since the unlucky threat to burn the building had originated among the moonshiners Taft feared discovery should he apply the torch himself. A simple scheme, well planned and carried out with full effect, and how should its completion so ill please its projector?

The fact that Captain Lucy should

profit by it Taft had heretofore hardly heeded, since this was the necessary incident of his own greater profit. Now, however, that treachery, as he esteemed it, had riddled the whole finespun web and brought it to naught, a turmoil of rage possessed him. It seemed some curious chicanery of fate that he alone should sustain loss, and that to others should accrue all the advantage of his subtle weavings of chance and fact, as if the threads still held fast. Captain Lucy was in possession, doubtless, of many hundred acres of Kenniston's land. Now he grudged them to Lucy as he had never bethought himself to grudge them to Kenniston. Jealousy is an intimate passion, and insistently of the soil. The neighbor, the associate, the friend's friend, it makes no far casts. Kenniston was beyond its restricted bounds. Captain Lucy's causticity, his arrogance, his insulting courage which belittled the possibilities of another man's wrath, his intrenchment in the subservience of his household, and his preeminence in the esteem of his small world did not serve to commend him to his unwilling benefactor, who stood in immediate contemplation of his own loss. And suddenly, as the radiant face of Julia appeared in the dim midst of Taft's recollection, he rose to his feet, his resolution taken in the instant. the instant. He had not forgotten the look in Larrabee's eyes when Espey had demanded of him whom he had been “a-courtin' at Tems's." Now, with Espey gone and Larrabee foot-loose and free, it might chance that these hundreds of acres of which he had bereft Kenniston would one day fall into Larrabee's possession as his wife's inheritance, when Captain Lucy should go to his account, which Taft doubted not would be a long one.

"I'll be dad-burned," he cried, "ef I'll stand by an' see Kenniston choused fur ole Lucy or Lar'bee, air one!"

Few human motives are simple. The travesty of restitution served to cloak

even to himself jealousy and grudging and revenge, and that mad impulse to hurl down and wreak woe upon those who had chanced to prosper in the dispensations which he had ordered himself, and which had wrought perversely to his interest. He had, however, nothing of the appearance or the manner of a subtle villain when he was on horseback, in the slanting lines of rain, that multiplied till they hid the mountains near at hand, and erased the Cove, and nullified all the conditions of the familiar world. On the contrary, his bluff, bold, open aspect was of a reassuring geniality, notwithstanding its overbearing intimations, and served to identify him to Kenniston, as he lounged in his unsubstantial domicile, and looked out ruefully at the dull day and the gray rain and the grayer mist and the ochreous pools of water, seeing naught else till this massive equestrian figure took form and seemed to ride straight out of it all. Taft flung himself from his saddle with a decision which implied a mission; and despite Kenniston's intention to discourage the visits of the mountaineers, he could not, with so assured a guest, have withheld the customary greeting of hospitality without more definite rudeness than he had expected to adventure.

The new-comer was the more welcome since Kenniston's companion in keeping the monkey stove warm was Rodolphus Ross, who had come to the Cove for the purpose of examining the scene of the fire and ferreting out the incendiary. He had, under the guise of questioning Kenniston on the subject, inflicted his society upon his restive host for the better part of an hour, now and then desisting from the discussion to work away at the damper of the monkey stove, which he patronizingly denominated a "smart little trick," albeit by reason of the heavy air and ill adjust ment and the lack of adequate draught it was doing itself no credit. Ross experimented with an ardor and uninformed

energy which threatened the total wreck of its constitution. The clatter of the metal was hardly more grating upon Kenniston's educated nerves than were his guest's speech and bearing. There was something in the exaggeration of the deputy's urban boorishness, the plaid of his ill-fitting garments, the hilarity of his vulgar townish impudence, that daunted a charitable acceptation of his foibles. It might seem righteousness to cuff him. So distasteful to Kenniston's cultured taste was the degree of sophistication acquired by the deputy sheriff, and with many a misconception adapted to his personality, that the absence of it seemed dignity in the mountaineer, and Taft's unvarnished address the unpolished substratum of good manners.

"How's ducks in the hills?" Ross greeted him, dropping the small poker, and looking up with bright dark eyes, his prominent front teeth appearing beneath the short upper lip. There was a moment of rabbit-like expectancy of expression; then his lips widened to a laugh as the burly stranger turned his serious, impressive face toward him.

"Air you-uns speakin' ter me, sir?” demanded Taft, in a grave, direct manner, his steady eye full upon him.

The airy deputy shifted ground for once. "Good day fur ducks," he modified his speech.

"Cornsider'ble fallin' weather," admitted Taft incidentally, and, seating himself in the chair indicated by Kenniston, he proceeded to take part in the conversation, his big booming voice rendering interruption impossible save as he listed.

"I hev viewed you-uns afore at ole Cap'n Lucy Tems's house," he said to Kenniston, crossing his legs, and eying the steam casually as it rose from the damp boots under the persuasive heat of the stove. "Yes, sir, Taft is my name." "I remember you very well,” replied Kenniston affably. "Won't you light your pipe?" He pushed a match holder

and tobacco pouch across the table to him.

Taft, without comment, filled his pipe from an inexhaustible supply of tobacco that seemed always loose in his pocket; it was far stronger than that of his host, as the rank odor which rose on the air presently demonstrated. Rodolphus Ross had looked at him with a grin of hopeful anticipation, which shrunk at once when he recognized and adapted to his own needs the uses of the lucifer match.

"Yes, sir," Taft resumed, "I war toler❜ble sorry ter hear 'bout'n yer hotel bein' burnt. I did n't view it at the time." He puffed the coals into a glow, and pulled away comfortably.

"Meanes' people on yearth, these hyar mountaineers!" cried Ross. "They jes' so durned ignorant they don't know sin from salvation, nor law from lying."

"Then they ain't 'sponsible," remarked Taft coolly. He pressed down the burning tobacco in the bowl with a callous forefinger indurated by long practice to crowding his pipe, and resumed: "I 'lowed it mought gin ye a start ef I war ter tell ye I hearn sev'ral men talkin' 'bout burnin' it, long time ago, 'fore it war begun."

Kenniston was leaning back in his chair, much at his ease, noting with a sort of languid interest the intimations of force and ferocity in his visitor's face: the keen sagacity, as rather the instinctive endow ment of one of the lower orders of creation than belonging to an enlightened intelligence; the beaklike nose; the contradictory geniality of the full blue eye and broad floridity. He brought his tilted chair suddenly to the floor, leaned forward on the table, and barely caught himself in time to repress an exclusive gesture toward Rodolphus Ross, which, although it escaped that worthy, caused Taft a sharp regret for his precipitancy, and gave him a clue for the future.

The deputy sheriff was all a-clamor.
"Why, now, my big bull o' Bashan, ye

hev got ter make that statement under oath with full partic'lars, names, dates, and place! He rose up on the oppo

site side of the monkey stove, with the lifter in his hand, with which he gesticulated imperatively.

Kenniston could hardly restrain his impatience.

"Of course, Mr. Ross, of course, all in due season," he said irritably.

"But abuse the authorities, in season an' out, an' 'low the devil will ketch the officer, in due course o' jestice, 'fore the officer 'll ketch the malefactor. I ain't a-goin' ter lose you, Mr. Durham, ye bet high on that!" he added, turning to Taft.

"Mr. Taft expects to swear to the facts, of course," said Kenniston. He paused abruptly, meditating a remonstrance with the tumultuous brute; but Ross's very vulgarity, his clamorous brutality, the impossibility of reaching through his hardened exterior any sensitiveness, or pride, or sense of decorum, or whatever sanction may control the heart of a man who is a gentleman in jeans, gave him an advantage over a man of breeding which no culture could compass. Kenniston could not cope with him; his training had prepared him for no such encounter.

Only Taft's great sonorous voice could overbear the deputy's words, which sounded in his first utterance with the disjointed effect of Christmas firecrackers enlivening the booming of Christmas guns.

"I'll make oath ter statements ez ter

date an' person, but not place, I hev no call ter drag other folks inter sech. I dunno ez they fired the hotel; I only heard 'em threat it."

"But why?" demanded Kenniston eagerly.

appearance, if one were in the mood to be amused by it.

Kenniston's mood was far from such influences.

that the question served. He asked for the future.

"Waal, I reckon they hed some moonshinin' or sech on hand," returned Taft

He threw up his eyebrows almost to the smirches obliquely laid across his forehead, laughed with a gleam of white teeth and an intent widening of the dark eyes, the whole facial expression gone in an instant.

"Waal, we ain't 'torpid' no longer. 'Wake up, snakes!' Now, ole buck, answer my questions, an' tell me why they warn't willin' ter let Mr. Kenniston build his hotel in the Cove."

Kenniston folded his arms as he tilted himself back in his chair, and resigned the conversation to its unique leadership. The ceaseless motion of the falling lines of rain gave a spurious effect of motion to the great monastic forms of the mountains cowled with mists and robed in dreary hue, seeming continually in sad processional along the horizon. The ochreous pools near at hand had lost all capacity for reflection, although the dark green branches of the firs here and there bent above them, and the gray rain dripping from the fibrous fringes upon the unquiet tremulous surface took its color, and was seen no more. His returning glance met Taft's eye as he was about to speak, and somehow in that momentary contact a quiet understanding was established between them.

“The reason, I reckon, they did n't want Mr. Kenniston ter build his hotel hyar war kase 't would bring too many strangers round."

"And what's the objection to strangers?" asked Kenniston anxiously. It was not merely a retrospective interest

66

Thar, now! what did I tell ye?" vociferated Rodolphus Ross, appealing to Kenniston. "An' I'll bet this hyar Larrabee war one of 'em."

Taft nodded, and Kenniston meditatively eyed the dull flashes from the stove, recollecting the strange conversation of Larrabee here, and his sudden significant betrayal of secret knowledge of the origin of the fire when it was mentioned.

"Strangers air powerful onhealthy fur the moonshinin' business," said Taft, as a sort of corollary to his former statement.

"Speak from experience?" sneered Rodolphus Ross.

"I do so," declared Taft unequivocally. Then turning to Kenniston, "I sarved a prison term fur illicit distillin' whenst I war a young man. I 'lowed, like all these other young muskrats, ez I could do what I pleased with my own corn an' apples. But whenst I traveled all through six or seben States goin' to the North, an' seen this big kentry an' sech, I knowed I war n't ekal ter runnin' agin its laws; an' whether thar's reason in 'em or no, I ondertook ter keep 'em arterward."

This unexpected confession disconcerted Ross in some sort. He silently eyed Taft, whose criminal experience seemed rather an error of an unripe judgment than the turpitude of law-breaking, and his candor in admitting it bluntly did not detract from the serious impression he had evidently made upon Kenniston. With Ross nothing was serious long. There was a sudden breaking up of the gloss of intentness in his round dark eyes, and as they shifted they fell upon the poker of the stove, and he once more thrust it through the bars and rattled it smartly.