Somebody has done laid a trail of shavin's an' leaves in the brush there, an' soaked 'em with coal-oil. Some feller aims to burn down that school-house to-night." "Did ye tell Miss Holland?" demanded Milt, in a voice of deep anxiety.

No, I ain't named it to her." Bad Anse sat with a seeming of indifference in his face, at which the lad's blood boiled.

"Does ye aim ter set hyar an' let her place git burnt up?" he snapped out wrathfully. "Because if ye does,

I don't."

Anse Havey laughed. "Well, no," he replied, "I didn't aim to do that." Suddenly he rose. "What I did aim to do, Milt, was this: I aimed to go down there to-night with enough fellers to handle either the fire or whoever starts it. I aimed to see who was doin' a trick like that. Will you go with me?"

"Me?" echoed Milt in astonishment. This idea of the two factions acting in concert was a decided innovation. It might be loaded. It might be a trap. Suddenly the boy demanded, "Why don't ye ask pap?

"

"I don't ask your pap nothing." In Havey's reply was a quick and truculent snap that rarely came to his voice. "I'm askin' you, an' you can take my proposition or leave it. That house-burner is goin' to die. If he's one of my people I want to know it. If he's one of your people you ought to feel the same way. Will you go with me?”

The boy considered the proposal for a time in silence. Dawn would be in danger! At last he said gravely: "Hit sounds like a fa'r proposition. I'll go along with ye an' meantime I'll keep my own counsel."

A

CHAPTER XX

NSE HAVEY had been looking ahead. When
Old Milt McBriar had said, "Them Haveys 'lows

thet I'd cross hell on a rotten plank ter do 'em injury," he had shot close to the mark. Bad Anse knew that the quiet-visaged old murder-lord could no more free himself from guile and deceit than the rattler can separate himself from the poison which impregnates its fangs and nature.

When he had taken Milt's hand, sealing the truce, he had not been beguiled, but realized that the compact was only strategy and was totally insincere. Yet in young Milt he saw possibilities. He was accustomed to rely on his own judgment and he recognized a clean and sterling strain in the younger McBriar. He hated the breed with a hatred that was flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone, but with an eye of prophecy he foresaw the day when a disrupted mountain community must fall asunder unless native sons could unite against the conquest of lowland greed. He could never trust Old Milt, but he hoped that he and young Milt, who would some day succeed to his father's authority, might stand together in that inevitable crisis.

This idea had for a long time been vaguely taking shape in his mind, and when he met young Milt in the woods and proposed uniting to save Juanita's school he was laying a corner-stone for that future alliance.

At sunset young Milt came and he came without having spoken of his purpose at his own house. The night was sharp and moonless with no light save that which came from the coldly glittering stars and Anse and young Milt crouched for hours, knee to knee in the dead thickets, keeping watch.

At last they both saw a creeping figure which was only a vague shadow moving among shadows and they peered with straining eyes and raised rifles. But the shadow fell very still and since it was only by its movement that they could detect it they waited in vain. What hint of being watched was given out no one could say. The woods were still and the two kneeling figures in the laurel made no sound. The other men, waiting at their separated posts, were equally invisible and noiseless, but some intangible premonition had come to the shadow which lost itself in the impenetrable blackness and began its retreat with its object unaccomplished.

Young Milt went back to his house in the cold mists of dawn. No shot had been fired, no face recognized, but the Havey and the McBriar both knew that the school had been saved by their joint vigilance.

Some days later the news of that night-watch leaked through to Jerry Everson who bore the tidings to Juanita, and she wrote a note to Anse Havey, asking him to come over and let her express her thanks in per

son.

The mail rider brought her a brief reply, penned in a hand of copy-book care.

"I don't take any credit," [said the writer]. "I only did what any other man would do and young Milt McBriar did as

much as I did. Thank him if you want to. It would only be awkward for me to come over there. Respectfully, ANSE HAVEY."

The girl laid the letter down with a sense of disappointment and chagrin. She had been accustomed to having men come to her when she summoned them, and come willingly. For a time she was deeply apprehensive, too, lest the effort which had failed at first might be more successfully repeated, but that week brought the long-delayed rains. They stripped the hills of glory and left them gray and stark and dripping. The horizon reeked with raw fogs and utter desolation settled on the mountains.

Trickling streams were torrents again and the danger of fires was over. Old Milt McBriar heard of his son's part in the watching of the school, and brooded blackly as he gnawed at the stem of his pipe, but he said nothing. The boy had been sent away to college and had been given every advantage. Now he had unwittingly, but none the less surely, turned his rifle on one of his father's hirelings bent on his father's work, for the oil-soaked kindling had been laid at Old Milt's command. The thing did not tend to make the leader of the McBriars partial to the innovations from Downbelow.

One day when Juanita went down to the post-office which nestled unobtrusively behind the single counter of the shack store at the gap, she found a letter directed in a hand which set her heart beating and revived many old memories.

The sun had come out after those first rains and a little of the Indian summer languor still slept along the skyline, but the woods were for the most part bare and

the air was piercing. In a formless mass of wet mold, that no longer rattled crisply underfoot, lay all the leaves that had a few days ago been stitches in the tapestried and embroidered mantle of the hills; all except a few tenaciously clinging survivors and the russet of the scrub oaks. The pines that had been sober greens through the season of flaming color were still sober greens when all else had turned to cinnamon and slate. But in spite of the cold Juanita wished to carry that letter up to the crest and read it there under the poplar tree. As she climbed she heard the whistle of quail off in a cornfield and two or three rabbits jumped up and loped into the cover, flaunting their cotton tails. So she tore the end from her envelope and began to read the letter, from the man she had sent away. He said that he had made a sincere effort to reconcile himself to her decision; the decision which exiled him. The effort had failed. He had been to the Mediterranean and the East.

"Do you remember the terrace at Shepherd's, when you and I sat there together?" he asked, and the girl who knew him so well could fancy the lonely longing in his face as he had written it.

"Can you close your dear eyes and see again the motors purring by and the donkeys and camels and street fakirs with cobras in flat baskets and apes on chains? Can you hear the laughter of the tea-drinkers under the awnings and the Fellaheen chatter and Viennese orchestras contending with the tom-toms of returning pilgrims? Dearest, can you see the blue triangles of shadow that the pyramids throw down in the moonlight on the yellow sands of the desert? The des