"What is it, honey," demanded the man, anxiously, as he felt her tremor against his arm, "air ye cold?" Dorothy opened her eyes and laughed, but with a tremulousness in her mirth. "I reckon I hain't plum rekivered from ther fright hit give me when ye went over thar ter Virginny," she answered, "sometimes I feels plum timorous." "But ther peril's done past now," he reassured her, "an' all ther enemies we had, thet's wuth winnin' over, hev done come ter be friends." "All thet's wuth winnin' over, yes," she admitted without conviction, "but hit's ther other kind thet a body hes most cause ter fear." Into the man's thought flashed the picture of Bas Rowlett, and a grim stiffness came to his lips, but she could hardly know of that remaining danger, he reflected, and he asked seriously, "What enemies does ye mean, honey?" She, too, had been thinking of Bas, and she, too, believed that fear to be her own exclusive secret, so she answered in a low voice: "I was studyin' erbout ther riders. I reckon they've done tuck thought thet you an' Hump hev been seekin' evi_dence_ erginst 'em." The man laughed. "Don't disquiet yoreself erbout them fellers, honey. We _hev_ been seekin' evi_dence_--an' gittin' hit, too, in some measure. Ef ther riders air strong enough ter best us we hain't fit ter succeed." The smile gave slowly way to a sterner and more militant expression, the look which his wife had come to know of late. It had brought a gravity to his eyes and a new dimension to his character, for it had not been there before he had dedicated himself to a cause and taken up the leadership which he had at first sought to refuse. Dorothy knew that he was thinking of the fight which lay ahead, before the scattered enmities of that community were resolved and the disrupted life welded and cemented into a solidarity of law. CHAPTER XXX Sim Squires was finding himself in a most intricate and perplexing maze of circumstance; the situation of the man who wears another man's collar and whose vassalage galls almost beyond endurance. It was dawning on Squires that he was involved in a web of such criss-cross meshes that before long he might find no way out. He had been induced to waylay Parish Thornton at the demand of one whom he dared not incense on pain of exposures that would send him to the penitentiary. His intended victim had not only failed to die but had grown to an influence in the neighbourhood that made him a most dangerous enemy; and to become, in fact, such an enemy to Sim he needed only to learn the truth as to who had fired that shot.