He turned the buck over, made a slit with his hunting knife and pulled the viscera out. At once it became evident that John Wilson was the second hunter of whom Pythias had run afoul, for he had been wounded before. Ted probed interestedly. Entering the flank, the bullet had missed the spine by two inches and any vital organs by a half inch. It had lodged in the thick loin, and nature had built a healing scab of tissue around it. Ted probed it out with his knife and almost dropped the missile. In his hand lay one of Carl Thornton's distinctive, unmistakable, hand-loaded bullets. John Wilson asked, "He's been wounded before, eh?" "Yes!" "Ted, I swear that you're more excited than I am!" _Ted scarcely heard. He was here, beside Glory Rock, the day after Smoky Delbert was shot. Damon and Pythias, always together, and a deer so badly wounded that it couldn't possibly go on. Damon hadn't gone on. Only Pythias had. Hurt but not mortally, he had left enough blood on the leaves to convince Ted that there'd been only one deer._ "When do you suppose he picked that one up?" John Wilson asked. "I don't know." _Carl Thornton, who got what he wanted, had decided to get Damon and Pythias himself._ "He's darn' near as big as a horse," Wilson said. "Sure is." _A horse, a friendly, easily caught horse, that had gone down Coon Valley that night with Damon on its back, then been released to go back up it._ "You certainly know how to field-dress a buck." "I've done it before." _Smoky Delbert, happening to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Thornton couldn't afford to be found out. Smoky would blackmail him._ _Thornton paying Delbert's hospital bills._ "Did I hit him square?" "A good neck shot." _Factory-loaded ammunition that almost never failed to mushroom. Hand-loaded cartridges that might fail._ John Wilson fumbled in his pocket. "Doggone, I seem to have lost my pipe." _Al, forever losing his tobacco pouch, had gone to see Carl Thornton the day Thornton fired Ted._ Ted wiped his knife blade on the snow, stood up and sheathed his knife. He looped a length of rope around the great buck's antlers. "He'll be easy to get out of here," he said. 12 AL'S BETRAYAL Deer season was ended and the village of Lorton brooded moodily between the snowclad hills that flanked it. From now until arriving fishermen brought new excitement, Lorton would know only that which arose from within itself. Ted, who had put John Wilson and his great buck on yesterday's outgoing train, steered his pickup down the street with its plow-thrown heaps of snow on either side and drew up in front of Loring Blade's house. He said, "Stay here, Tammie." The collie settled back into the seat. Ted walked to the front door, knocked and was admitted by the game warden's attractive wife. "Hello, Ted." "Hello, Helen. Is Loring home?" "Yes, he is. Come on in."