than ever, with the rich life of summer about it. Higher still were a
dark belt of stunted firs and the sandstone ledge, and above
these-home. He was risking his liberty, his life. Any clump of
bushes might bristle suddenly with Winchesters. If the soldiers
sought for him at the cave they would at the same time guard the
mountain paths; they would guard, too, the Stetson cabin. But no
matter-the sun was still high, and he turned up the steep. The ledge
passed, he stopped with a curse at his lips and the pain of a
knife-thrust at his heart. A heap of blackened stones and ashes
was before him. The wild mountain-grass was growing up about it.
The bee-gums were overturned and rifled. The garden was a
tangled mass of weeds. The graves in the little family
burying-ground were unprotected, the fence was gone, and no
boards marked the last two ragged mounds. Old Gabe had never
told him. He, too, like Martha, was homeless, and the old miller
had been kind to him, as the girl's kinspeople had been to her.

For a long while he sat on the remnant of the burned and broken
fence, and once more the old tide of bitterness rose within him and
ebbed away. There were none left to hate, to wreak vengeance on.
It was hard to leave the ruins as they were; and yet he would rather
leave weeds and ashes than, like Martha, have some day to know
that his home was in the hands of a stranger. When he thought of
the girl he grew calmer; his own sorrows gave way to the thought
of hers; and half from habit he raised his face to look across the
river. Two eagles swept from a dark ravine under the shelf of rock
where he had fought young Jasper, and made for a sun-lighted
peak on the other shore. From them his gaze fell to Wolf's Head
and to the cabin beneath, and a name passed his lips in a whisper.