The blacksmith, the storekeeper and one passing drummer were coming in from the woods when he reached the hotel. “A gang o' those Falins,” said the storekeeper, “they come over lookin' for young Dave Tolliver. They didn't find him, so they thought they'd have some fun”; and he pointed to the hotel sign which was punctuated with pistol-bullet periods. Hale's eyes flashed once but he said nothing. He turned his horse over to a stable boy and went across to the little frame cottage that served as office and home for him. While he sat on the veranda that almost hung over the mill-pond of the other stream three of the Falins came riding back. One of them had left something at the hotel, and while he was gone in for it, another put a bullet through the sign, and seeing Hale rode over to him. Hale's blue eye looked anything than friendly. “Don't ye like it?” asked the horseman. “I do not,” said Hale calmly. The horseman seemed amused. “Well, whut you goin' to do about it?” “Nothing--at least not now.” “All right--whenever you git ready. You ain't ready now?” “No,” said Hale, “not now.” The fellow laughed. “Hit's a damned good thing for you that you ain't.” Hale looked long after the three as they galloped down the road. “When I start to build this town,” he thought gravely and without humour, “I'll put a stop to all that.” VIII On a spur of Black Mountain, beyond the Kentucky line, a lean horse was tied to a sassafras bush, and in a clump of rhododendron ten yards away, a lean black-haired boy sat with a Winchester between his stomach and thighs--waiting for the dusk to drop. His chin was in both hands, the brim of his slouch hat was curved crescent-wise over his forehead, and his eyes were on the sweeping bend of the river below him. That was the “Bad Bend” down there, peopled with ancestral enemies and the head-quarters of their leader for the last ten years. Though they had been at peace for some time now, it had been Saturday in the county town ten miles down the river as well, and nobody ever knew what a Saturday might bring forth between his people and them. So he would not risk riding through that bend by the light of day. All the long way up spur after spur and along ridge after ridge, all along the still, tree-crested top of the Big Black, he had been thinking of the man--the “furriner” whom he had seen at his uncle's cabin in Lonesome Cove. He was thinking of him still, as he sat there waiting for darkness to come, and the two vertical little lines in his forehead, that had hardly relaxed once during his climb, got deeper and deeper, as his brain puzzled into the problem that was worrying it: who the stranger was, what his business was over in the Cove and his business with the Red Fox with whom the boy had seen him talking.