He could with difficulty eat, despite the fatigues of the day, but he sat down among them with a hearty show of appetite and with his wonted bluff manner. His sharpened attention took cognizance of many details which under ordinary circumstances he would not have noticed. He could have sworn to every one of the rough faces—and right welcome would have been the opportunity—grouped about the table. The men ate in a business-like, capacious fashion, especially one lean, lank fellow, with unkempt black hair and a thin face, the chin decorated with what is known as a goatee. Notwithstanding their roughness they were not altogether unkind. Philetus could not complain of disregarded pleas as he begged from chair to chair, under the firm impression that there was something choice in the _menu_ not included in the contents of the pan placed for him on a bench, which should serve as table, while he was to be seated on an inverted noggin. And the dogs spent the time of the family meal alternately in a petrified expectancy and sudden elastic bounds to catch the bits flung liberally over the shoulders. When the repast, conducted chiefly in silence, was concluded, the group reassembled about the hearth-stone, the pipes were lighted, and conversation again became practicable. It required some strong control of his faculties to bear himself as an honored guest instead of a suspected informer, trapped, but Harshaw managed to support much of his wonted manner as he lighted a pipe that he had in his pocket and pulled it into a strong glow. Nevertheless, he was beset with a realization of how easy it would be for them to rid themselves of him without a possibility that his fate would excite suspicion. As he looked into the flaming coals of the fire, his quickened imagination could picture a man lying lifeless at the foot of a great wall of rocks,—lying motionless where he had fallen, but with an averted face,—and another vista in which his horse, with an empty saddle, with pistols in the holster, cropped the grass on a slope. He thought of it often afterward,—the man lying lifeless beneath the crags, with a face he did not see! This was the doom that persistently forced itself upon him as most obviously, most insistently, his; naught else could so readily release these desperadoes from the peril that threatened them. He began to remember various stories of Marvin’s old encounters with the “revenuers:” on one occasion shots had been exchanged; one or more of the posse had been killed; he could not remember accurately, but he thought this was accredited to Jeb Peake,—“hongry Jeb,” who could, according to the popular account of him, “chaw up five men of his weight at a mouthful an’ beg for more.” They had much at stake; perhaps, as they looked into the fire with that slow, ruminative gaze, they also saw a picture,—a halter wavering in the wind. The room alternately flared and faded as the flames rose and fell. It