A dozen rash plans leapt up in his brain--to steal her and bear her away, to hide her from their fury and then return to Tug Fork, to make an end to the feud. But each time the vision of Cal and Ewing Randolph rose up to brand them as worse than dreams; the fate which had pursued him was still on his trail, nothing could be done while her brothers were there. He put down his glasses and gazed out across the Basin, seeking some end to the phantasma of his life. Even here, as in Kentucky, it had been a nightmare of death and violence, while his heart was sick for peace. All he wanted was peace, the same surcease we give the dead--a forgetting, oblivion, a new life. Yet even after one death his incognito had been discovered and the chase was on again. Nothing would stay the dark passions of the men he had warred against, they were ruthless as death itself. He closed his eyes wearily to shut out the sight of this valley which had once seemed so fair, and sleep swooped to seize him in an instant. But while his senses swooned something came to his ears that roused him as nothing else could--a rifle-shot, far away. He listened, half convinced, and a volley ripped the air like the tearing of a strip of rough cloth. It came from the hill, where the Scarboroughs had hid before, the hill that looked down on the Bassetts'. But why did they shoot when Sharps and Henry were both dead, and Winchester and Bill---- His heart stopped and leapt again, and he knew the answer. Bill Bassett had stayed too long. CHAPTER XXII THE FLIGHT There never was a feud, nor yet a war, which did not revert to barbarism; for reprisal invites reprisal, and hot blood breeds new excesses until it ends in a mad swirl of killing. And always the human reason, ever the servant to our passions, finds a way to justify the slaughter. For the object of warfare, of course, is to kill; and why stop short of the absolute? Why leave boys to grow to manhood, or women to breed more boys, or old men to nurse the spark of future wars; why not kill them all, as speedily as possible, and with the least possible danger to ourselves? There we have the justification not only of war, but of feuds and murder from ambush; but the murders come first and reason follows tardily to lull the protests of conscience.