"Son," insisted the other calmly, "I ain't aimin' to change you. I've never let men change me, have I? But there's a time for everything, an' just now you must hearken to me." He sketched briefly and forcibly his interviews in the office of the commonwealth attorney and at the jail. He enlarged on the fatality of having another shooting by a mountaineer tread so close on the heels of the first tragedy.
"You ain't aimin' to put these boys' necks into ropes, son," he suggested chidingly at the end. "You can get your man without makin' your own kin pay such a steep price. All I ask of you is to pass me your word that you won't do anything until you get back to the hills. Seems to me that's fair enough."
Newt sat silent for a time, scowling blackly, but at last he rose and nodded.
"I gives ye my hand on thet—because I don't see no way ter holp myself," he capitulated. It is the mountain's formula of oath, and though the men who use it rarely shake hands, its utterance is a recognized bond.
"Come along to town with me," suggested the Deacon. "You can sleep at my boardin' place, and in the morning you can start out."
But to that proposition Newt shook his head.
"I aims ter start right now, es soon es I kin buy a snack ter put in my pocket," he announced decisively. "Which road goes towards Jackson?" When at last he did lie down for sleep that night, it was under the lee of a last year's straw stack and surrounded by the rustling spears of this year's corn, where he could look up at the stars and call defiantly upon them all to bear witness that he had no intention of being deterred by the interference of any man.
It had been a very exhausting day, strenuous with much footsore tramping; strenuous, too, with the buffeting of emotions as sudden and violent as the tempests which sometimes swept across his hills; bending the forests, lashing the sandstone ramparts, shrieking through valleys and cannonading along the slopes. And like the hills when such a storm has wreaked its noisy wrath and swollen all the thread-like streams to freshets, he lay by his straw stack supine and shaken. It seemed to him that he had only just stretched himself out on the straw when he opened his eyes to see the east pallidly kindling with the preface of dawn, yet it had been long enough for his limbs to have cramped and chilled under the moisture of the night. He rose and ate a small supply of his provender, and took a swig from the flask, wiping the mouth of the bottle with his palm, after the custom of his country. After that he started on with the gray dawn growing rosy at his front. At length, he halted and drew a long breath of relief and satisfaction, for already he was beginning to recognize, in the changing character of the country, harbingers of home. The smooth swell of the bluegrass began to break into a choppier formation and assume raggedness, while far away the sky-line was broken by a climbing back-bone of foothills.
Unless he could mend his rate of travel he had still ahead several days of journeying, but early in the afternoon, when he sat down to rest, it was by a woodland stream where the underbrush grew in a tangle and the wild roses were blooming among scrub oaks. Cornucopias of the trumpet-flower flared vividly, and here and there he caught a glimpse of a chinked log-cabin. That night he slept at Clay City, where the channel of Red River was almost choked with logs; logs floated down from higher up. Once more he slept in a "feather-bed," for a distant relative had taken him in, willing to "eat an' sleep him" for no greater remuneration than the news of what had happened in Winchester; willing even to produce from some hidden place a jug from which moonshine liquor ran white and colorless.
The next day brought such a dawn as he had not seen since he had left Jackson with cuffed wrists, a dawn in which the sun did not blaze forth at once unobscured, but came up to dissipate the mists and flare redly through their vanishing, before he stood forth master of the day. And even then the skies were full of sullen hinting at rain. Nature seemed to brood in accord with his own dreariness of mind; and wisps of cloud trailed down the summits, as he nodded with a curt, "I'm obleeged ter ye," and pushed onward, boring into hills that grew ever taller and wilder.