some noise on the spur above.

"Nothin' but a hickory nut," said the chuckle again. But Hale had
been studying that strange face. One side of it was calm, kindly,
philosophic, benevolent; but, when the other was turned, a curious
twitch of the muscles at the left side of the mouth showed the
teeth and made a snarl there that was wolfish.

"Yes, and I know you," he said slowly. Self-satisfaction,
straightway, was ardent in the face.

"I knowed you would git to know me in time, if you didn't now."

This was the Red Fox of the mountains, of whom he had heard so
much--"yarb" doctor and Swedenborgian preacher; revenue officer
and, some said, cold-blooded murderer. He would walk twenty miles
to preach, or would start at any hour of the day or night to
minister to the sick, and would charge for neither service. At
other hours he would be searching for moonshine stills, or
watching his enemies in the valley from some mountain top, with
that huge spy-glass--Hale could see now that the brass tube was a
telescope--that he might slip down and unawares take a pot-shot at
them. The Red Fox communicated with spirits, had visions and
superhuman powers of locomotion--stepping mysteriously from the
bushes, people said, to walk at the traveller's side and as
mysteriously disappearing into them again, to be heard of in a few
hours an incredible distance away.

"I've been watchin' ye from up thar," he said with a wave of his
hand. "I seed ye go up the creek, and then the bushes hid ye. I