Jerry Henderson smiled grimly to himself. "That was shaving it pretty thin," he mused. "After all it was only a shadow that saved me." As he lay there unmoving, he heard one of his would-be assassins rattle off through the dry weed stalks after the lunging mule. The second splashed through the shallow water and passed almost in arm's length, but to neither did it occur that the intended victim had left the saddle at just that point. Ten minutes later, with dead silence about him, Jerry retreated into the woods and spent the night under a ledge of shielding rock. He had lived too long in the easy security of cities to pit his woodcraft against an unknown number of pursuers whose eyes and ears were more than a match for his own in the dark. Had he known every foot of the way, night travel would have been safer, but, imperfectly familiar with the blind trails he meant to move only when he could gauge his course and pursue it cautiously step by step. From sunrise to dark on the following day he went at the rate of a half-mile an hour through thickets that lacerated his face and tore the skin from his hands and wrists. Often he lay crouched close to the ground, listening. He had no food and dared not show his face at any house, and since he must avoid well-defined paths, he multiplied the distance so that when he arrived on the familiar ground of his own neighborhood, his hunger had become an acute pain and his weariness amounted to exhaustion. Incidentally, he had slipped once and wrenched his ankle. Within a radius of two miles were two houses only, Lone Stacy's and Brother Fulkerson's. The Stacy place would presumably be watched, but Brother Fulkerson would not deny him food and shelter. Painfully, yard by yard, he crept down the mountainside to the rear of the preacher's abode. Then on a tour of reconnaissance he cautiously circled it. There were no visible signs of picketing and through one unshuttered window came a grateful glow of lamplight. He dared neither knock on the door nor scratch on the pane, but he remembered the signal that had been Bear Cat Stacy's. He had heard the boy give it, and now he cautiously repeated, three times, the softly quavering call of the barn-owl. It was a moonless night, but the stars were frostily clear and as the refugee crouched, dissolved in shadow, against the mortised logs of the cabin's corner, the door opened and Blossom stood, slim and straight, against the yellow background of the lamp-lit door. She might have seemed, to one passing, interested only in the star-filled skies and the starkly etched peaks, but in a low voice of extreme guardedness she demanded, "Bear Cat, where air ye?" Henderson remembered that Turner, too, was "hiding out" and that this girl had the ingrained self-repression of a people inured to the perils of ambuscade. Without leaving the cancellation of the shadowed wall he spoke with a caution that equaled her own.