Then they fled, and this time, letting the less guilty rowdies escape, Morton pursued the well-known thieves and their allies into and through Jenkinsville, and on through the country, until the hunted fellows abandoned their horses and fled to the woods on foot. For two days more Morton harried them, arresting one of them now and then until he had captured eight or ten. He chased one of these into Brewer's Hole itself. The shoes had been torn from his feet by briers in his rough flight, and he left tracks of blood upon the floor. The orderly citizens of the county were so much heartened by this boldness and severity on Morton's part that they combined against the roughs and took the work into their own hands, driving some of the thieves away and terrifying the rest into a sullen submission. The camp-meeting went on in great triumph. Burchard had disappeared--how, nobody knew. Weeks afterward a stranger passing through Jenkinsville reported that he had seen such a man on a keel-boat leaving Cincinnati for the lower Mississippi, and it soon came to be accepted that Burchard had found a home in New Orleans, that refuge of broken adventurers. Why he had fled no one could guess. _CHAPTER XXVIII._ PATTY AND HER PATIENT. We left Patty standing irresolute in the road. The latch-string of her father's house was drawn in; she must find another home. Every Methodist cabin would be open to her, of course; Colonel Wheeler would be only too glad to receive her. But Colonel Wheeler and all the Methodist people were openly hostile to her father, and delicacy forbade her allying herself so closely with her father's foes. She did not want to foreclose every door to a reconciliation. Mrs. Goodwin's was not to be thought of. There was but one place, and that was with Kike's mother, the widow Lumsden, who, as a relative, was naturally her first resort in exile. Here she found a cordial welcome, and here she found the schoolmaster, still attentive to the widow, though neither he nor she dared think of marriage with Kike's awful displeasure in the back-ground. "Well, well," said Brady, when the homeless Patty had received permission to stay in the cabin of her aunt-in-law: "Well, well, how sthrange things comes to pass, Miss Lumsden. You turned Moirton off yersilf fer bein' a Mithodis' and now ye're the one that gits sint adrift." Then, half musingly, he added: "I wish Moirton noo, now don't oi? Revinge is swate, and this sort of revinge would be swater on many accounts."