Across a gray-green hummock of sandstone, so villainously matted with blackberry briars that a pointer-dog would have balked at its edge, he hitched himself forward on his belly. From there he could look down on the road he had abandoned--and the thick bushes that fringed it, and there he lay, silent and flat as a lizard, scanning the lower ground. A less acute and instinctive eye would have made little of it all, save the variegated colours of the foliage, but after a while he picked out a scrap of grey-brown buried deep and motionless under the leafage, much like the hue of the earth itself. His smile became more sardonically set and his muscles tensed as his rifle barrel was thrust forward. But he still sprawled there hugging the earth, and finally hushed voices stole up to him. "... He's got ter pass by hyar ef he holds ter ther highway.... I reckon he don't hardly suspicion nothin'." Then a second voice spoke Asa's name and linked it with foul expletives, yet save for the gray patches in the brush almost as hard to see as a rabbit crouched in dry grass there was no visible sign ... no warning. Asa's face blackened. His thumb lay on the hammer of his rifle and his thoughts ran to bitter turmoil. "I _'lowed_ them Blairs hed hit in head ter lay-way me this evenin'," he mused. "I jest _felt_ hit in my bones, somehow." The hatred in his veins pulsed and simmered. Here he lay behind them and above them, while they lurked in ambush waiting for him to pass in front and below. One shot from his rifle and Jett Blair would never rise. His face would sag forward--that was all--and as his companion scrambled up in dismay, he too would fall back. Asa could picture the expression of astonished panic that would gleam in his eyes for the one brief moment before he too crumpled. Asa's finger tingled with an itch which only trigger-pressure could cool and appease. Yet slowly and resolutely he shook his head. "No," he told himself, "no, hit won't hardly do. Thar's one murder charge a'hangin' over me now--an' es fer _them_, thar's time a'plenty. I hain't no-ways liable ter fergit!" CHAPTER II Backward he edged to the far side of the rock, and on he went by a detour which, in due course, brought him out to the road once more at that panel of fence where Boone Wellver still sat perched in the deep preoccupation of his thoughts. These reflections focussed about the stranger who had lately ridden by, and as Gregory paused, with no revealing sign in his face of the events of the past half-hour, the boy blurted out the fulness of his interest. "Asa, did ye find out who _is_ he? Did ye see thet _sward_ he hed hangin' ter his saddle, an' did ye note all them qu'ar contraptions he was totin' along with him?" "I didn't hev overly much speech with him," was the grave response. "But he 'lowed he'd done come from acrost ther waters--from somewhars in t'other world. I reckon he's done travelled wide."