Kinnard's squad reached the house of Dog Tate while the morning was yet young, searching each cabin along the way, in the hope that last night's raider might be still hiding in their own terrain.
They found Joe Sanders sitting on the doorstep, with the morose aspect of a man deprived of his avocation in life. The wintry hillsides were no moodier than his eyes, and the sullen skies no more darkly lowering.
But Dog Tate himself was loquacious to a fault. He raved with a fury so unbridled that it suggested lunacy. Bear Cat had come to his place wounded and had been succored. Twenty-four hours later he had come there again treasonably to repay that service by ripping out an unguarded still. Henceforth the Stacy call might remain eternally unanswered, and be relegated to perdition for all of him.
"Dog," suggested the leader of the squad, "we've done been askin' leave ter kinderly hev a look inter dwellin' houses—in case Bear Cat's still layin' concealed over hyar. I reckon ye hain't hardly got no objection, hev ye?"
"Does ye 'low thet I'd be hidin' out ther man thet raided me?" The host put his question with a fine irony, and the reply was apologetic.
"Not sca'cely. Hit's jest so thet we kin tell Kinnard, we didn't pass no house by, thet's all."
The speaker and the ex-moonshiner were standing at the threshold of the log shack. It was a place of a single, windowless room with a lean-to kitchen—and above was the loft reached by a trap and ladder.
"Come right in then," acceded Dog Tate with disarming readiness. "I hain't got no excess of love fer Kinnard—but I've got yit less fer still-busters."
Far back where the shingle roof dropped steeply from ridge pole to edge was a murky recess hidden behind a litter of old bedding, piled up potatoes and onions. Silently listening and mercifully blotted into shadow there, Bear Cat Stacy crouched with rifle-barrel thrust forward and his finger caressing the trigger.