Wolfe hurried on breathlessly, going straight toward Virginia. He walked nearly all of that night, guiding his movements by the stars, and slept the next day hidden in a dense thicket of laurel and ivy. Not until he had placed forty rugged, hard-won miles between him and the head of Doe River, did he dare to travel in the daytime. His debt to the law must wait--until his debt to man was paid! In an extremely wild section just across the Tennessee-Virginia State line, he ran upon a logging-camp that was sorely in need of a woods foreman. He decided that there was small chance of his being apprehended in this out-of-the-way place, so he asked for the job for one month and got it. The pay was good, and in the four weeks he saved enough money to defray all expenses of the journey to the Northwest. Then he hastened to the nearest railway station, bought a fare, and caught a westbound train. XXIV The Wolfes had been in the State's prison at Nashville a little more than four years. They now stood convinced that they had erred, that they had wilfully violated a law that was absolutely just, and they were atoning like men. There was about them none of the grimness, none of the moroseness, none of the sullen bitterness that is usually found in the hillman when he has had iron bars and walls of stone placed between him and his liberty. If they pined for home and the great dim-blue mountains with their trees and rocks and sparkling streams, there was certainly no outward sign of it. Only one of them had felt the cold touch of the white plague, the scourge that so frequently cuts short the life of the imprisoned mountaineer. This was Brian Wolfe's son, Charley, who was not much more than a boy for all of his six feet in height. But Charley didn't whine about it; to have whined about it, to him, would have been the part of a yellow dog. In point of fact, Charley Wolfe kept his afflictions so well hidden that no one else even suspected it. It was pitiful how he did that. In the daytime he staved off the telltale cough by means of a force of will that was truly remarkable; at night he buried his head in the folds of his blankets and smothered the cough. He laughed lightly at his increasing thinness and at the hectic flush that glowed in his cheeks in the afternoons--when anybody chanced to mention it. Christmas Day came snowy and cold, with a biting north wind. The spirit of peace and good-will had found its way through the high and forbidding stone walls of the penitentiary. The convicts were not kept in their cells, nor were they made to work, on this day. Even Bully McCrary, who had been an incorrigible and the fighting man of the prison before the coming of the Wolfes, cried "Merry Christmas!" to every person he met--which included his former sworn enemy, a sad-eyed, intelligent fellow nicknamed and named Pale Tom Ledworth.