The squad-leader looked about the place with perfunctory eye and then, seeing the ladder, set his foot upon its lowest rung.
Dog Tate felt a sudden commotion of hammering pulses, but his lids did not flicker nor his mouth alter its line. Quite unostentatiously, however, his wife moved toward the front door and stood there blankly expressionless. Also, Dog laid his hand idly on the ladder as the visitor climbed upward. If the search proved embarrassing he meant to kick the support from under the Towers minion, and his wife meant to bar the door for siege.
But the intruder went only high enough to thrust his head into the overhead darkness while a match flared and went out. He had seen nothing, and as he stumped down again the poised finger relaxed on the rifle trigger, and the Tates breathed free.
"I'm obleeged ter ye," said the searching lieutenant. "Ef ye wants ter start up yore still ergin, I reckon ye'll be safe. He won't be runnin' wild fer long nohow."
The Quarterhouse emissaries were raking the hills with an admirable thoroughness, running like a pack in full cry on the man trail, but they did not again come so near the fringes of success as when they missed the opportunity at Dog Tate's house.
In spite of a watchfulness that gave eyes to the hills and ears to the timber, their quarry left that house and went to his own.
He had no intention of making the mad effort to remain there. The wild tangle of cliff and forest was his safest refuge now—but there were two things to be done at home. He wished to have for companionship in exile his "Lincoln, Master of Men," and he wished to learn if out of the wholesale desertion of yesterday there had not come back to him even one or two followers.
So that afternoon he slipped, undetected by his trailers, into and out of his father's house; and there followed him, though each went singly and casually to escape detection, some eight or ten men, who henceforth were to be his secret followers and, he hoped, the nucleus of a larger force.
The next morning in both Stacy and Towers territory, hickories and walnuts and sycamores burst into copper fruitage. The hills were alive with armed search-parties, liquor-incited and vowing vengeance, yet through their cordons he moved like some invisible and soundless creature, striking and escaping while they raged.