As Jasper Larrabee rode away in the little troop toward the scene of the disaster, to search for the body of the supposititious Jasper Larrabee, his mental faculties began to recover from the torpor of surprise which had benumbed them. That cautious self-control which sometimes seems an added faculty in a certain type of law-breaker had held him mute as he watched the development of events. Now, as he began to take cognizance of the disclosures of the evening, he adhered of sober intention to the policy he had intuitively adopted. He feared the acknowledgment that he had received and harbored Jack Espey, a fugitive from justice, more than the acrimonious search of the deputy sheriff for the misdeeds of Jasper Larrabee. This, indeed, might result in his apprehension for the violation of the revenue laws, and the discovery of the moonshiner's lair, and this would mean many years of imprisonment; but the other might involve him, and possibly his mother as well, in a trial for murder, as accessories after the fact. It might be impossible to establish their ignorance of Espey's crime, and their lack of connivance in his escape. He had that pervasive terror of the law, as of technical and arbitrary construction of crime, common to the unlearned. His heart burned with rancor against his whilom friend. He would not recognize Espey's share in these ignorant terrors of the law. He argued that if his friend had been open with him, he would at least have been a free agent in receiving him, have had some voice in the degree of responsibility he assumed. As it was, his open-handed hospitality had been grossly imposed upon, and as a return he was given the choice of the jeopardy of a charge as accessory to a murder, or of an infringement of the revenue laws. He realized the whole drama as it had been enacted. He understood that Espey, conniving at the officer's mistake, and allowing him to suppose him to be Larrabee, had thus shielded his own identity as the fugitive from justice whom they sought. And this ruse Espey fancied was discovered, when the deputy, in his wild horse-play, had facetiously endeavored to handcuff him; he had therefore strenuously resisted, and thus had possibly come to his death. This possibility did not soften Larrabee toward him; perhaps he did not altogether accredit it at once, for death is difficult to realize even when a certainty. He dwelt upon his own danger, even more upon his mother's possible jeopardy; upon her untiring and laborious hospitality; upon his own labors which had rendered such entertainment practicable, for the money earned without her knowledge at the still went, much of it, to this pious use.