BEAR CAT STACY

Thames Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 17679, 2 September 1929, Page 3

BEAR CAT STACY

By CHARLES NE VIHLE BUCK. ,

! CHAPTER XI. ——— , *."••■'•' He might- as--well cross that -water, dry-shod, he reflected, and dismount just beyond. But, suddenly, he dragged hard at the bit and crouched low in his saddle. He had seen a reflection which belonged neither to fence nor roadside sapling. Inverted in the dim and oblong mirror of the pool he made out the shoidders and head of a man with a nine thrust forward. That upsidedown figure was so ready of poise' that only one conclusion was feasible. The human being who stood so mirrored did not realise that he was close enough to the water's line to be himself revealed, but he was watching for another figure to be betrayed by the same agency. Henderson slid quietly away from his saddle and jabbed the mule'si flank with the muzzle of his pistol. At his back was a thicket into which he melted as his mount

splashed into the water, and he held

with his eyes to the inverted shadow. He saw the rifle rise and bark with a spout of flame; heard his beast plunge blunderingly on and then caught an oath of astonished dismay from beyond tlie pool, as two inverted shadows stood where there had been one. "Damn me ef I hain't done shot across an empty saddle!"

I "'Mebby they got him further back," suggested the second voice as Jerry Henderson crouched in his hiding place. "Mebby Joe tuck up his stand at'ther other orossinV » 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 'cf his would-be assassins rattle off through the dry weed stalks after the lunging mule. The second spJashed 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 iledge of shelving rock. He had lived too long in the easy security of cities pit hi s 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 house through thickets that - lacerated his face and tore the skin j from his hands and wrists. Often he ! lay 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

I OUR SERIAL STORY

(Author of "The Call of the Cumberlandsj" etc.)

own neighbourhood, his hunger had become an acute pain and his weariless 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, hut Brother Fulkerson would not deny him food and shelter. ' Painfully, yard by yard,, he crept down the mountainside to the rear of the px-eacher's abode. Then on a tour of reconnaissance he cautiously circled it. There were no visihll signs of picketing' and through one unshutterjed window came a grateful glow of i lamplight). | He dared neither knock on the door i nor scratch on the pane, but he remembered the signal that had been, Bear Oat Stacy's. He had heard the boy give it, and how he cautiously re- j peated, 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 Bios- j smo stood, slim and straight, against the yellow background of the lamp-lit I door. . !

She might have seemed, to one .pas-

sing, interested only in the star-filled skies and the starkly etched peaks, but in a low voice of extreme guard--edness 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 equalled her own. "Don't seem to hear me . . . just keep looking straight ahead . . . It's not Bear Cat . . . it's Henderson . . .

I and they are after me ... So far I've escaped ... but I reckon they're fol- | lowing." He had seen the impulsive start with which she had heard his announcement and the instant recovery with which she relaxed her attitude into one of less tell-tale significance. "Thank God," breathed the piu-sued man, "for that self-control!" He detected a heart-wrenching anxiety in her voice, which .belied; the picture she made of unruffled simplicity as she commanded in a'tense whisper, "Go on, I'm listenin'." "Go back into the house," hedirected evenly. "Close the window shutters, then open the back door . . ."

She did not obey with the haste of excitement. She was too wise for that, but paiused unhurriedly, humming an ancient ballad, as though the stresses of life had no meaning for her. before she drew back and closed the door. Reappearing, at the window, she repeated the same convincing assumption of untroubled indolence as she drew in the heavy shutters; but a moment later she stood shaken and blanched of cheek at the rear door. "Come in hastily," she pleaded. "Air ye hurt?"

Slipping through the aperture, Henderson smiled at her. His heart had leaped wildly a s he read the terror of eyes; a terror for his danger. "I'm not hurt," he assured her, except for a. twisted ankle, but it's a miracle of luck. Where's your father?"

No actress trained and finished in her art could have carried off with greater perfection a semblance of tranquility than had Blossom while his

\ safety hung in the balance-. Now, with { that need ended, she leaned back against the support, of the wall with her hands gropingly spread j weak of knee and limp almost to collapse. Her amber eyes were preteunaturally wide and her words came with gasping difficulty. She had forgotten her striving ofter exemplary grammar. "He hain't hyar—he won't be back 1 afore to-morrow noon. Thar hain't no- ; bodv hyar bv me." ■■:'•.'>:

"Oh!" The monosyllable slipped from the man's lips with bitter disappointment. He knew the rigid tenets of mountain usage—an unwritten law.

A stranger may share a. ane-room-ed shack with men, women and children, but the traveller who is received into a cabin in the absence of its men compromise? the honour of its women.

"Oil," he repeated dejectedly. " I ! was seekin' shelter for the night. I'm faniishin' and weary. Kin ye give me a snack ter eat, Blossom, afore I fares forth again?" It was < with entire consciousness that he had slipped *back into the rough vernacular of his childhood. At that momen the was a man who had rubbed elbows with death and he had reverted to type as instinctively as though he had never known any other life. . , .

"Afore ye fares forth!" In Blossom's eye s blazed the same Valkyrie fire that had been in them as she bairred his way to Bear Cat Stacy's still. "Ye hain't a-igoin' ter fare forth y ter be murdered! I aims ter hide ye out right hyair!"

(To be continued.)