The Deacon was not riding the county roads back to Troublesome. He was taking a shorter and steeper trail, which led over the mountains. Travel by this way was slow and arduous, but it was an isolated way and offered a better route for a man who wished to ride unseen. At a point where the narrow trail doubled sharply around the shoulder of a hill-top and where the soft earth deadened the hoofbeats of his horse, he came unexpectedly on a walking figure. The mounted man had come around the angle so unwarnedly that he seemed to rise from nowhere. The walking figure had made an instinctive dive for the cover of the roadside brush and tangle, and then, with a realization that it was too late to escape detection, had halted and stood with his bare feet planted in the soft mud of the road and his face slowly blackening. The man on foot was Newt Spooner. He was once more dressed in mountain jeans and butternut, and at his side his swinging right hand clutched a repeating rifle. The Deacon drew his horse to a standstill with an amicable nod. "Howdy, Newt?" he greeted. The boy made no response, and shifted his weight from foot to foot, while his eyes kindled with growing fury. About a little roadside puddle fluttered a small flock of white and lemon butterflies, disturbed by human invasion, and on a branch overhead a squirrel ran out and stopped cautiously. "There's a squirrel, Newt," suggested the Deacon casually. "I reckon you're squirrel-huntin', ain't you?" But the boy did not answer, and the Deacon knew why. He was thirteen miles from home, and was stalking bigger game than squirrels. CHAPTER XI For a little space the two men looked at each other, the Deacon to outward seeming with the casual interest of a chance meeting, and the boy with a lowering truculence which augured trouble. The little mud-butterflies alighted again at the edge of the puddle, and the squirrel whisked himself away. Back on the hillsides the white elder blossoms and pink-hearted laurel cups nodded in the sleepy languor of a summer afternoon. In the overhead blue a buzzard drifted on tilting wings. "You're right far off your beat, ain't you, son?" suggested Black Pete at length. The sullen visage did not alter or brighten. "I hain't none too fur off," was the surly response. "I reckon I knows what I'm a-doin'."