He could not account for the quick glance of alarm and enmity which the mountaineer cast upon him. It roused in him a certain constraint which he had not experienced earlier in their chance association. It caused him to remember that this was a lonely way and a wild country. He was an alien to the temper and sentiment of the people. He felt suddenly that sense of distance in mind and spirit which is the true isolation of the foreigner, and which even an identity of tongue and kindred cannot annul. Looking keenly into the mountaineer's half-averted, angry, excited face, he could not for his life discern how its expression might comport with the tenor of the casual conversation which had elicited it. He did not even dimly surmise that his allusion to the finances of the government could be construed as a justification of the whiskey tax, generally esteemed in the mountains a measure of tyrannous oppression; that from his supposititious advocacy of it he had laid himself liable to the suspicion of being himself of the revenue force,--his mission here to spy out moonshiners; that his companion's mind was even now dwelling anew, and with a rueful difference, on that masterly drawing of himself in the stranger's sketch-book. "But what do that prove, though?" Hite thought, a certain hope springing up with the joy of the very recollection of the simulacrum of the brilliant rural coxcomb adorning the page. "Jes' that me is _Me_. All he kin say 'bout me air that hyar I be goin' home from huntin' ter kerry my game. _That_ ain't agin the law, surely." The "revenuers," he argued, too, never rode alone, as did this man, and spies and informers were generally of the vicinage. The stranger was specially well mounted, and as his puzzled cogitation over the significant silence that had supervened between them became so marked as to strike Hite's attention, the mountaineer sought to nullify it by an allusion to the horse. "That feller puts down his feet like a kitten," he said admiringly. "I never seen nuthin' ez wears shoes so supple. Shows speed, I s'pose? Built fur it."