Across the street where brick banks and modern plate-glass store fronts stood jammed between frontier-like shacks, he halted once more. Court was adjourning for the noon recess, and a homicide jury came out of the dingy doors, marching in columns of twos, while behind, shirt-sleeved and collarless, stalked the sheriff, herding the panel to its mid-day meal and bearing a long hickory staff. They were rude and bearded men, for the most part spare and sinewy, but the elder among them tramped with a shambling gait that told of unrelieved drudgery. Newt made his way to the north end of the town, and took the road across the hills. By nightfall he would be in his own territory. Now he was once more treading familiar trails, and though he was tired and the way became steeper, he walked with a resilient stride. The roads along the valley gulches were only creek-beds, and where they looped over the tops of ridges they were uneven stairways of broken rock. Sometimes for a little space they ran level along high banks where the sand was like that of a beach. But Newt had taken off his shoes and as he splashed along the water courses, where straining "jolt-wagons" had cut smooth ruts almost hub-deep into the shaly beds, the grateful water stimulated him. About him were great forests almost virgin to the ax. Spruce pines and walnuts and poplars towered over him, and the road dipped often through a gloom like that of a dim chapel. Down there little cascades whispered, and out of fern banks rose huge brown and gray and green bowlders of sandstone, like altars of the Druids. The rhododendron, which his people called "laurel," and the laurel, which they called "ivy," cloaked the open slopes. It was a country where a good walker can travel faster afoot than mounted. He drank from wayside springs and from the flask which his kinsman had refilled. His mind turned to its magnet, and he planned anew the death of Henry Falkins, but now that he was at home he planned with confidence of success and in this conviction he found a certain contentment. It was something to be where he belonged and something to walk free of the chaingang. Around him the hills closed in comforting tiers of ramparts. From the high points of the road, he could look off over valleys to other peaks and see here and there the roof of a cabin with its small patch of corn and its rude out-houses. He passed tilting fields where red and blue calico dresses flashed as entire families worked with hoes, and roadside habitations of logs where raggedy children fled inside to gaze timidly around the corners of door-jambs. Razor-backed hogs and flocks of geese wandered near every habitation, and mules flapped their long ears as they looked out from primitive stables, fashioned by closing in with fence shelters under overhanging shelves of rock. CHAPTER VIII