From all that Towers could learn, it appeared that Bear Cat Stacy was operating as a lone bandit. Yet the ground he seemed to cover single-handed was so wide of boundary and his success so phenomenal that already he was being hallowed, in country-side gossip, with legendary and heroic qualities. In that Towers read a serious menace to his own prestige; until he ground his teeth and swore sulphurously. He organized a larger force of human hounds and fired them more hotly with the incentive of liquor and greed for promised reward. The doors of Old Lone Stacy's house, tenanted now only by the wife of the prisoner and the mother of the refugee, were endlessly watched by unseen eyes. Around the cabin where Jerry Henderson lay lingering with a tenuous hold on life, lounged the men posted there by Joe Stacy, and back in the timbered slopes that frowned down upon its roof crouched yet other shapes of butter-nut brown; shapes stationed there at the behest of the Quarterhouse. Going in and out among these would-be avengers and learning all their plans, by dint of a pretendedly bitter hatred of Bear Cat Stacy, were such men as Dog Tate and Joe Sanders, spying upon the spies. Old Bud Jason at his little tub-mill and Uncle Israel at his general store secretly nodded their wise old heads and chuckled. They knew that, hushed and undeclared, a strong sentiment was being born for the boy who was outwitting scores of time-seasoned murder hirelings. But they shook their heads, too--realizing the deadly odds of the game and its tragic chances. One afternoon after a day sheeted in cold rain that sometimes merged into snow, Bear Cat crept cautiously toward the sagging door of the abandoned cabin which had, on another night, housed Ratler Webb. It had been a perilously difficult day for the man upon whose head Towers had set the price of a river-bottom farm. Like a hard-run fox he had doubled back and forth under relentless pursuit and gone often to earth. The only things they needed with which to harry him further were bloodhounds. Now in the later afternoon he came to the cabin and sought a few minutes' shelter there against the penetrating misery of rain and sloppy snow that thawed as it fell. He dared not light a fire, and must not relax the vigilance of his outlook. Just before sunset Bear Cat saw a man edging cautiously through the timber, moving with a shadowy furtiveness--and recognized Joe Sanders. The newcomer slipped through the rotting lintels, bringing a face stamped with foreboding. "Ye kain't stay hyar," announced the excited voice. "I don't hardly know whar ye _kin_ go to nuther, onlessen' ye kin make hit back ter Dog Tate's dwellin'-house by ther hill-trail." "Tell me all ye knows, Joe," directed Stacy with a steadying calmness, and the other went on hurriedly: