"Captain," he asked significantly, "is that fellow, Jutt Orlick, a friend of yours? Remember, I haven't said a word, captain; not a word!" For a full minute the old man stood looking after the rider. Then a new light was added to his fixed suspicion of Jutt Orlick. * * * * * High noon of the following day found Orlick riding slowly, with loose rein, up the twisted trail toward the Lutts cabin. His horse was lathered and blown. He had covered the rugged distance from the junction since dawn, where he had held all-night counsel with Peter Burton, the revenuer. With astuteness and cunning Orlick had instigated a conspiracy that would have done credit to a city-bred malefactor, and for which Burton praised him extravagantly and, incidentally, liquorously. Burton had offered to secure Orlick an appointment as deputy marshal in the eighth district at Danville as recompense for his espionage and treason against his people. But even Orlick's audacious spirit cast the thought of this honor out of his mind decisively, and not without a shudder. Providing the raid succeeded, upon the plea that Orlick feared the Luttses, Burton had pledged himself to keep Lem and old Captain Lutts in jail to the last technical hour. He further promised to frustrate any attempt at communication with the Lutts faction and intercept any messages that they might attempt to launch from the prison. Burton confided to Orlick that his chief aim now was to capture and take the Luttses to Frankfort, out of the jurisdiction of the county, and isolate them from the subtle influences that had always favored them in the surrounding counties. The revenuer admitted that he entertained grave doubts as to taking old Captain Lutts alive; but he hoped to capture Lem Lutts, at any rate, and break the boy's stoic spirit and coerce him into disclosing the whereabouts of the old still that had flooded Hellsfork with moonshine for two decades. But Burton did not know Lem as Orlick knew him, and to Orlick the prospect of a long term of confinement for Lem Lutts was very pleasing. Notwithstanding, Orlick knew that Lem would get out of jail subsequently, and that he--Orlick--might by then be a marked man. Orlick was fully aware that when the suspicions already against him on Hellsfork had shaped themselves into convincing proofs of treason, his life would be worth nothing in Kentucky. The Lutts faction would follow him even into the blue-grass precincts. They would dog him to the very threshold of the sheriff's office. His undoing would be swift and certain--and pitiless. But all this was now a remote contingency in the face of his unbridled passion for Belle-Ann, and it was with a sense of bravado that he realized it was a mere matter of time before the calamity of exposure would overtake him.