This it was which, urging haste, gave the hunt [372] its flavor of savagery. The empty cabin at the head of Lance's Laurel had been ransacked again and again; it was known to be watched day and night; the espionage on the house of Kimbro Cleaverage and that of the Gentrys was almost as close. But Callista and Sylvane continually evaded it at night, and kept the fugitive in his cave well provided. In spite of their care, Lance pined visibly. His arm was almost healed; he suffered from no definite bodily ailment, save a low, fretting fever; but his manner was one of heavy languor, broken by random breaths of surface irritability. Then came a Saturday night when Beason's men, watching a trail, surprised and took Sylvane laden with food and necessaries plainly intended for the man in hiding. They rose up from behind some rocks by the roadside and had the boy in their clutches almost before he knew to be alarmed. It was a raw, gray February evening, drawing in sullenly to night, with a spit of rain in the air, freezing as it fell, stinging the cheek like a whip-lash, numbing toes and fingers. The boy looked desolately up the long road which he had intended to forsake for a safer trail at the next turning. He glanced at his laden mule, and answered at random the volleyed questions flung at him. Finally Beason, heavy, black-bearded, saturnine, silenced them all and opened out, with the dignity of his office, [373] "Now see here, Sylvanus Cleaverage, these gentlemen with me is sworn officers of the law. We know whar you're a-goin' at, and who you're a-goin' to. They's no use to dodge." "I ain't a-dodgin'," retorted Sylvane, and in the tilt of his head against the weak light of the western sky one got his full resemblance to Lance. "If you know so mighty well and good right where I was a-goin' at, go thar yo'self," he concluded, desperate, at the end of everything. "What you pesterin' me about it for? With your kind leave I'll turn around and walk myself back home." "No you won't," Beason countered. "Ain't I told you that we're all officers of the law, and I'm sheriff of this here county, and I aim to do my duty as sworn to perform it? What you got to do is to jest move along in the--in the direction you was a-goin', and lead us to Lance Cleaver-age. You do that, or you'll wish you had." It was a lack of tact to threaten even this younger one of the Cleaverage boys. "I'll never do yo' biddin'," Sylvane told him with positiveness, "not this side of the grave. As for makin' me wish I had, you can kill me, but that won't get Buddy for you. He's whar you can't take him. You'll never find him; an' if you did, no ten men could take him whar he's at. An' if I was killed and put out of the way, there's them that would still feed him and carry him the news." [374] "The good God A'mighty! Who wants to kill you, you fool boy?" demanded Beason testily. "There's been too much killin' did; that's the trouble."