When she came back again to the bedroom she carried the journal that had been so mysteriously lost and recovered, and then she drew a chair to the window and opened the document where she had left off in her reading. But often she laid the book absent-mindedly in her lap to listen with an ear turned toward the bed, and often, too, she looked out into the spreading softness of golden-green laced through by dove-gray and sepia-brown branches on which played baffling reflexes of soft and mossy colours. * * * * * Parish Thornton did not approach the house of his enemy from the front. He came upon it from behind and held to the shelter of the laurel as long as that was possible, but he found a padlock on the door and all the windows closed. For an hour or more he waited, but there was no return of the owner and Parish carried his search elsewhere. Bas, he reflected, was busy to-day conferring with those leaders of the riders from whom he ostensibly stood aloof, and the man who was hunting him down followed trail after trail along roads that could be ridden and "traces" that must be tramped. Casual inquiries along the highway served only to send him hither and yon on a series of wild goose chases. This man and that had seen Bas Rowlett, and "Bas he seemed right profoundly shocked an' sore distressed," they said. They gave Thornton the best directions they could, and as the clan-leader rode on they nodded sage heads and reflected that it was both natural and becoming that he should be seeking for Bas at such a time. The man who had been murdered last night was Rowlett's kinsman and Thornton was Rowlett's friend. Both men were prominent, and it was a time for sober counsel. The shadow of the riders lay over the country broader and deeper than that which the mountains cast across the valleys. So from early forenoon until almost sunset Parish Thornton went doggedly and vainly on with his man-hunt. Yet he set his teeth and swore that he must not fail; that he could not afford to fail. He would go home and have supper with Dorothy, then start out afresh. He was threading a blind and narrow pathway homeward between laurel thickets, when he came to the spot where he and Bas Rowlett had stood on that other June night a year ago, the spot where the shot rang out that had wounded him. There he paused in meditation, summing up in his mind the many things that had happened since then, and the sinister strands of Rowlett's influence that ran defacingly through the whole pattern.