In an hour or so they began to draw out of the lowlands fructifying in the sunlight, and in among the craggy foothills. Here the knobs stood up, like the knuckle-bones of a great rough hand laid across the peaceful countryside. “Deadenings” flashed by, with the girdled, bleached tree-trunks rising, deformed and gaunt, above the young corn. The purplish pink of the redbud trees was thick in clumps on the hillsides. The train entered a cut with a steep fill running down on one side and a seamed cliff standing close up on the other. Small saplings grew out of the crannies in the rocks and swung their boughs downward so that the leaves almost brushed the dusty tops of the coaches sliding by beneath them. Suddenly, midway of this cut, there came a grinding and sliding of the wheels--the cars began creaking in all their joints as though they would rack apart; and, with a jerk which wakened Judge Priest and shook the others in their seats, the train halted. From up ahead somewhere, heard dimly through the escape of the freed steam, came a confusion of shouted cries. Could they be nearing the Junction so soon? Mrs. McLaurin felt in a new handbag--of gray broadcloth with a gold clasp, to match her uniform--for a powder-rag. Then she shrank cowering back in her place, for leaping briskly up the car steps there appeared, framed in the open doorway just beyond her, an armed man--a short, broad man in a flannel shirt and ragged overalls, with a dirty white handkerchief bound closely over the bridge of his nose and shielding the lower part of his face. A long-barreled pistol was in his right hand and a pair of darting, evilly disposed eyes looked into her startled ones from under the brim of a broken hat. “Hands up, everybody!” he called out, and swung his gun right and left from his hip, so that its muzzle seemed to point all ways at once. “Hands up, everybody--and keep 'em up!”