He nodded his head once or twice in emphatic confirmation of the burden of his thoughts. He felt suddenly as if civilization, the world, all the mechanism of law and art and knowledge that he seemed to have been familiarized with in some previous state of existence on some alien planet, were not so far away, after all, save in sentiment. What could be easier than to place the headstrong despot of Broomsedge Cove under the surveillance of a law stronger even than that which he wielded with so arrogant and absolute a temper? He was not so far from the county authorities, who might take more cognizance of such matters than the constable of Broomsedge Cove; as lynch-law and the domination of a community according to the will of regulators might to them perchance be less familiar. The recollection, ignominious he felt it to be, of his fear; the terrible strain on his nerves; the mere chance that had saved his life,—this girl’s word of warning and his own clever diplomacy in its use,—all were bitter still to him, and his escape held none of the sweets of triumph. He would rejoice to be revenged: not upon Clem Sanders, who seemed, in his hap-hazard lack of logic, as irresponsible as a child—not upon the unnumbered, unindividualized, unimagined vigilantes at the barn, but upon Teck Jepson. With all the fervor of a deep, suddenly awakened hatred he longed to see him cringe and cower. He resented his lofty serenity, his calm admission of the usurpation of power, his deliberate, open avowal of his intentions and of his conditional clemency. He should like to see this doughty mountaineer face the law he had insulted. His lip curled at the thought; he stroked his mustache in the satisfaction that the mental picture afforded him. He too could follow out a scheme; he too could plot, and lie in wait, and capture. “With stronger toils, my fine fellow!” He encountered a sudden rebuff in the sequence of the idea,—the ridicule that would attach to the revelation in Glaston that in his perfectly tame and lawful prospecting for silver he should have been hauled up before the captain of vigilantes. He felt, too, that there was a certain element of derogation in his very enterprise. Unless he should find silver, he hardly cared that it should be known in his world that he had sought it. And yet he quivered with eagerness at the very thought of vengeance upon Teck Jepson. Fine sport, to be sure, to run down this big game of the Smoky Mountains. “For all he is so pious!” he exclaimed with a sneer. Eli Strobe turned a slow glance upon him. “Who be ye a-talkin’ ’bout?” he demanded quietly. “That fellow I saw over at the forge there,—the ringleader of the lynchers. Teck Jepson is his name.”