The Jumper dragged himself to the creek and removed the gun-barrel and plucked out the rods, then cleaned the barrel and screwed it in place. That the man he had been so solicitous for the day before should now stand in deadly danger made no impression on him. His own soul was in imminent peril of turning blue. The anger of the Deer ghosts remained unappeased. He could only think of hastening home and bankrupting himself in order to buy the shaman’s intercession. With head bowed and moving listlessly he went up the trail. Only once did a flicker of yesterday’s zeal show in his sombre eyes; that was when he halted and glanced back to warn— “You are in a red path now.” Sevier nodded and answered— “So the bullet fired in the night told me.” The Jumper resumed his gloomy way and the borderer saddled his horse and rode south. John Watts had charge of the warriors enforcing this trip to the Coosa. The mystery of their failure to appear on the trail while he was spying from the hilltop was now quite obvious. Watts dared not slay until Chucky Jack endeavoured to return through the land of the Cherokee, but he was perfectly willing to hold his warriors back and give Polcher his chance to make a “kill.” Polcher, however, must be mounted, which would necessitate his sticking close to the trail if he would not have his victim leave him far behind. Sevier found some consolation in this thought and, leaning over the neck of his horse, he looked for signs and found them within a mile from the creek. The traces indicated that the tavern-keeper had left his horse near the trail while he beat back through the woods to shoot at the shadowy form by the dying fire. On returning to his horse, so the signs read, he had led him some distance, then mounted to spur on as fast as the night would permit. A glance told Sevier these truths, and red rage smouldered in his heart as he pictured the man withdrawing before him and planning murder, while the Cherokees formed an implacable barrier to drive him to his slayer. His anger did not blind his woods sense, however; and when the forest promised decent travel for his mount he swung from the path and made wide detours. Once he came upon tracks of a horse in the forest mould and decided his foe was indulging in a similar manœuvre.