“I ain’t goin’ ter North Car’liny, an’ leave ’em hyar tergether,” he declared vehemently. “I’ll meet up with him somewhar this side o’ the Craig house. I’ll dare him ter fight, an’ ef he don’t kill me I’ll kill him, an’ kiss the hand that does the deed!” The mists shivered to listen; the rocks repeated the threat, and again in hesitant dread, and still once more a word in an awed and tremulous staccato. On and on he went,—never abating speed, flying over the broken ground; deaf to the sound of horn and hounds borne fitfully from the slopes below on some hardly perceptible current of the air, and again dying to the dumbness of the shrouded woods; blind to the burly apparition of a bear trotting out of the clouds and in again, although the horse reared and pawed the air; callous to the keen chill of the torrent, swollen out of its banks with the spring rains till it surged about his limbs as he forded through. Over and again the mountain water-courses intercepted his path, but only once his attention was attracted to his surroundings, and this was because there seemed here a check upon his progress, and he must needs take heed of his way. The stream known as Gran’dad’s creek showed in the thickening mist a turbulent volume, a swollen breadth, covering rocks and brush and gullies, and washing the boles of trees far from its normal channel; he hardly knew where he might safely take the ford. Now the water elusively glimmered, swift, foaming, full of enormous bowlders, and with trees standing in its midst; and as he went down to the verge in a cleft of the rock the vapors closed again, and it seemed to recede into invisibility. The horse had become restive. He resisted and snorted, and finally deliberately faced about, as he was recklessly urged to enter the stream. He was forced again to the margin, when suddenly Mink thought he was dreaming. The fluctuating vapors parted once more, and in the rifts he saw on the opposite bank the man he sought. He stood in numb surprise; a strange overwhelming sense of hatred possessed him with the image thus palpably presented; he quivered with a recollection of all his wrongs. This was no dream. It was Gwinnan returning from the moonshiners’ house. He rose from his stirrups and waved his hand with a smile. Mink heard his ringing halloo. Then Gwinnan pressed his roan colt down to the margin of the water and took the ford. “Saved us wettin’ our feet agin, Grasshopper,” Mink observed. He was very distinct as he sat on the bareback stray; his feet dangling without stirrups, his big wool hat, his flaunting auburn hair, his keen, clear-cut face, all definitely painted on the opaque white background of the mist; a bole was barely outlined here and there behind him, or a towering crag, as if there were other elements of the picture merely sketched in. More than once Gwinnan lifted his grave eyes toward him. But when the mist came between them, surging in a great cloudy volume, Mink drew the pistol from his pocket.