"Since you won't answer my questions," said Jerry Henderson, irritated into capriciousness, "I think I'll see for myself where this trail leads." Instantly, then, she planted herself before him, with a violently heaving bosom and a wrathful quivering of her delicate nostrils, Her challenge broke tensely from her lips with a note of unyielding defiance. "Ye can't pass hyar!" "So you _can_ talk, after all," he observed coolly. "It's a help to learn that much at all events." He had chanced on a path, he realized, which some moonshiner preferred keeping closed and the girl had been stationed there as a human declaration, "no thoroughfare." Still he stood where he was and presently he had the result of his waiting. A deep, masculine voice, unmistakable in the peremptoriness of its command, sounded from the massed tangle of the hillside. It expressed itself in the single word "Begone!" and Henderson was not fool enough to search the underbrush for an identifying glimpse of his challenger. "My name is Jerry Henderson and I was seeking to be shown my way," he said quietly, keeping his eyes, as he spoke, studiously on the face of the girl. "Begone! I'm a-warnin' ye fa'r. Begone!" The wayfarer shrugged his shoulders. Debate seemed impracticable, but his annoyance was not lessened as he recognized in the clear eyes of the young woman a half-suppressed mockery of scorn and triumph. Henderson stooped and hefted his pack again to his shoulders, adjusting it deliberately. If it must be retreat, he wished at least to retire with the honors of war. The girl's expression had piqued him into irascibility. "I'd heard tell that folks hereabouts were civil to strangers," he announced bluntly. "And I don't give a damn about whatever secret you're bent on hiding from me." Then he turned on his heel and started, not rapidly but with a leisurely stride to the road. He seemed to feel the eyes of the girl following him as he went, and his spirit of resentment prompted an act of mild bravado as he halted by the rotten line of fence and unhurriedly tightened the lace of a boot. "Hasten!" barked the warning voice from the laurel, but Henderson did not hasten. He acknowledged the disquieting surmise of a rifle trained on him from the dense cover, but he neither looked back nor altered his pace. Then he heard a gun bark from the shrubbery and a bullet zip as it found its billet in a tree trunk above his head, but that he had expected. It was merely a demonstration in warning--not an attempt on his life. As long as he kept on his way, he believed hostilities would go no further. Without venturing to use his eyes, he let his ears do their best, and a satirical smile came to his lips as he heard a low, half-smothered scream of fright break from the lips of the girl whom he could no longer see.