FACING PAGE Carfax stopped abruptly and said no more 162 “Poictiers, I’m a ruined man!” 328 “My heavens!” gasped the discoverer; and a voice, apparently at his elbow, said: “Quite so” 400 After the Manner of Men I The Townlander Coincident with a miniature thunderclap shattering the summer afternoon silence of the mountain forest a bullet whipped through the foliage, leaving a half-severed twig to flutter and dangle within easy arm’s reach. Tregarvon had never before been under fire, and he was a product of twentieth-century civilization and the cities. Yet his colonial ancestor, figuring as a seasoned Indian fighter in Braddock’s disaster, could scarcely have picked his sheltering tree with better judgment or dropped behind it with more mechanical celerity. “Great Peter!” he exclaimed, under his breath, struggling to draw the pocket-entangled weapon which he had persuaded himself to add to his impedimenta before leaving Philadelphia, under the impression that it would be a necessary part of a land-looker’s equipment in the Tennessee mountains; “Great Pete----” The pocket yielded with a sound of tearing cloth, and the first shock of panic subsided. Crouching behind his tree, the Philadelphian twirled the cylinder of the revolver to make sure that all the chambers were filled. While he was doing this there was another report, and this time the bullet scored the sheltering oak. Tregarvon edged himself into position, with due regard for the enemy’s line of fire, and cocked his weapon, not, however, with any reassuring confidence in it, or in his own steadiness of nerve. Peering judiciously around the buttressing knees of the barricade oak, he could see nothing save a matted tangle of briers, blackberry bushes, and laurel. But being the possessor of a fairly active imagination, he fancied he could see more--the sunlight reflecting from the polished barrel of a rifle, for example, and, by another turn of the imaginative screw, the indistinct figure of his assailant far back among the trees. While he was thus reconnoitring, a third shot ripped through the screening laurel and clicked spitefully into his oak. Since the click came first, with the report a fraction of a second later, he reserved his fire. It was evident that the hidden marksman was well beyond pistol range, and he decided to save his ammunition against a time when it might stand a chance of being more effective. The target-practice part of his education had been neglected, and he especially distrusted his marksmanship with the nickel-plated house weapon, the more since he had never as yet fired it.