The tone was kind, even tender. Yet the man, whose closed lids covered waking eyes, felt no impulse to let her know that he heard, no desire to respond to her farewell.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE SHERIFF SCORES.
LANCE CLEAVERAGE lay in the cavern above the East Fork of Caney for nearly two weeks. The search for him was persistent, even savage, the reason given being that he had attempted the life of an officer of the law. Flenton Hands had been taken to the house of his kinsman the sheriff, and the bulletins sent out from his bedside were not encouraging; yet Lance's people clung to such hope as they might from the fact that the man was not yet dead.
"No, Flent ain't gone yet," Beason would rumble out when questioned on the subject, "but he's mighty low—mighty low. He's liable to drop off any time; and who'd take Lance Cleaverage then, I'd like to know? Not me. No, nor not any man I've met, so far. The thing for us to do is to git that thar wild hawk of a feller while they's nothing agin him more than assault with intent to kill, or some such. When he smells hemp in the business, he's goin' to make it too dangerous for anybody to go after him, and his folks'll git him out o' them mountains and plumb away to Texas, or Californy."
This it was which, urging haste, gave the hunt its flavor of 372 savagery. The empty cabin at the head of Lance's Laurel had been ransacked again and again; it was known to be watched day and night; the espionage on the house of Kimbro Cleaverage and that of the Gentrys was almost as close. But Callista and Sylvane continually evaded it at night, and kept the fugitive in his cave well provided. In spite of their care, Lance pined visibly. His arm was almost healed; he suffered from no definite bodily ailment, save a low, fretting fever; but his manner was one of heavy languor, broken by random breaths of surface irritability.
Then came a Saturday night when Beason's men, watching a trail, surprised and took Sylvane laden with food and necessaries plainly intended for the man in hiding. They rose up from behind some rocks by the roadside and had the boy in their clutches almost before he knew to be alarmed. It was a raw, gray February evening, drawing in sullenly to night, with a spit of rain in the air, freezing as it fell, stinging the cheek like a whip-lash, numbing toes and fingers. The boy looked desolately up the long road which he had intended to forsake for a safer trail at the next turning. He glanced at his laden mule, and answered at random the volleyed questions flung at him. Finally Beason, heavy, black-bearded, saturnine, silenced them all and opened out, with the dignity of his office,
"Now see here, Sylvanus Cleaverage, these gentlemen with me is 373 sworn officers of the law. We know whar you're a-goin' at, and who you're a-goin' to. They's no use to dodge."
"I ain't a-dodgin'," retorted Sylvane, and in the tilt of his head against the weak light of the western sky one got his full resemblance to Lance. "If you know so mighty well and good right where I was a-goin' at, go thar yo'self," he concluded, desperate, at the end of everything. "What you pesterin' me about it for? With your kind leave I'll turn around and walk myself back home."