CHAPTER XII
Sam Hoover he thought he could trust. Sam, at least, had come to him when they were taking him to prison, and had denounced the lethargy with which his kinsmen were standing idle while he went into bondage.
The store was a frame shack, presenting at its front a barrel-littered porch and a hitching-rack. Beyond one of the creek branches stood a dilapidated "meeting house" in a flat, gravel-strewn area. Sam Hoover himself sat at his door; a slouching giant in store clothes, coatless and open of vest, collarless and soiled of linen. His movements were ponderous, and his eyes were sunk in pouched sockets.
As Newt slouched up to the porch in the forenoon, the waves of heat were playing over the earth, and the mountains were torpid with mid-day stillness. This was a point about half-way between the two clan centers, and the man who trafficked here presented to each faction in turn the guise of friendship and to each played the tale-bearer under his smug semblance of neutrality.
But the place was a point from which branched the road that Henry Falkins must travel to Jackson, and the store-keeper would know when he had last passed that way.
Now, it happened that, though the Deacon had invented on the spur of the moment his news of Henry Falkins' departure, he had come much nearer the truth than he himself guessed. Almost a week intervened before Saturday and it had occurred to the young man, although he would have laughed had someone else made the suggestion, that the Fourth of July held some element of danger for himself. That being the case, he was possessed of a desire to see the girl in Winchester in the meantime. It might be a last chance. He had no intent of confiding in her anything that might alarm her, but he thought that with her words of love fresh in his memory he could undertake Saturday's work armed and accoutered with a higher confidence. So, almost on the heels of the Deacon, when he had left the Falkins house, Henry had ridden, bound for Jackson and Winchester. Had Newt Spooner gone home on foot and by the county road instead of with the Deacon and by sequestered trails, the two men must have met near Hoover's store—and Henry Falkins would not have gone on to Winchester.
Sam Hoover greeted the boy with a, "Howdy, Newt?" and the boy sat on the floor of the porch with a silent nod, and leaned his shoulders against a post. At last, he questioned casually:
"Hev ye seed anything of Henry Falkins here-abouts of late?"
"He rid by hyar this week," the store-keeper responded. "Hit war either the day afore yistiddy or the day afore thet, I disremember which, but he stopped to water his horse, and passed the time o' day with me. He 'lowed he war a-travelin' ter Winchester."