The second cause of the girl's feeling was less direct, though of longer standing, and had to do with the death of her father. That Siddon, while yet in his prime, had been slain in a raid on a still by the revenue officers, and that despite the fact that he was not concerned in the affair, save by the unfortunate chance of being present. Plutina, though only a child at the time, could still remember the horror of that event. There was a singular personal guiltiness, too, in her feeling, for, on the occasion of the raid, her grandfather had been looking out from a balcony, and had seen the revenue men urging their horses up the trail, the sunlight glinting on their carbines. He had seized the great horn, to blow a warning to those at the secret still on the mountain above. Plutina could remember yet the grotesque bewilderment on his face, as no sound issued--then the wrath and despair. The children, in all innocence, had stuffed the horn with rags. The prank had thus, in a way, cost two lives--one, that of "Young" Dick Siddon. The owner of the raided still had been Dan Hodges, and him Plutina despised and hated with a virulence not at all Christian, but very human. She had all the old-time mountaineer's antipathy for the extortion, as it was esteemed, of the Federal Government, and her father's death had naturally inflamed her against those responsible for it. Yet, her loathing of Hodges caused her to regret that the man himself had escaped capture thus far, though twice his still had been destroyed, once within the year. [Illustration: _Claudia Kimball Young under the direction of Louis J. Selznick._ A MOUNTAIN "STILL."] A high, jutting wall of rock hid the stream where it bent sharply a little way from Plutina's shelter. Presently, she became aware that Hodges had paused thus beyond the range of her vision, and was busy there. She heard the blows of the ax. General distrust of the man stirred up in her a brisk curiosity concerning the nature of his action in this place. On a previous day, she had observed that the limpid waters of the brook had been sullied by the milky refuse from a still somewhere in the reaches above. Now, the presence of Dan Hodges was sufficient to prove the hidden still his. But the fact did not explain his business here. That it was something evil, she could not doubt, for the man and his gang were almost outlaws among their own people. They were known, though unpunished, thieves, as well as "moonshiners," and there were whispers of more dreadful things--of slain men vanished into the unsounded depths of the Devil's Cauldron. The gorge of the community--careless as it had been of some laws in the past, and too ready to administer justice according to its own code--had risen against the vicious living of the gang that accepted Hodges as chief. It seemed to Plutina that duty conspired with curiosity to set her spying on the man.