"Ye're welcome," said the evangelist simply, and there was no riffle of visible misgiving in his eyes. "Come right in an' set ye a cheer."
Two days later Mr. Sidney rode away again, but in an altered frame of mind. He had met Bear Cat Stacy and was disposed to talk less slightingly of outlaws. He had even seen a thing that had made the flesh creep on his scalp and given to his pulses such a wild thrill as they had not known since boyhood. He had watched a long line of black horsemen, masked and riding single-file with flambeaux along a narrow road between encompassing shadows. He had heard the next day of a "blind tiger" raided, and of an undesirable citizen who had been sentenced to exile—though related by blood ties to the leader of the vigilance committee.
It was sitting in the lounging-room of his Louisville Club a week later that he unfolded his morning paper and read the following item—and the paper dropped from his hand which had become suddenly nerveless.
"Joel Fulkerson," he read, after the first shock of the head-lines, "a mountain evangelist, whose work had brought him into prominence even beyond the hills of Marlin County, was shot to death yesterday while riding on a mission of mercy through a thickly wooded territory. Since, even in the bitterest feud days, Fulkerson was regarded as the friend of all men and all factions, it is presumed that the unknown assassin mistook him for some one other than himself."
George Sidney took an early train to Frankfort, and that same day sat in conference with the governor.
"It's a strange story," said the chief executive at length, "and the remedy you suggest is even stranger—but this far I will go. If you swear Renshaw off the bench, I will name a temporary judge and set a special term of court, to convene at once. The rest comes later, and we will take it up as we reach it."
Once more, just after that, Bear Cat Stacy stood again with Blossom by a new-made grave, but this time he came openly. Those kinsmen who saw him there were of one mind, and had he spoken the word, they would have followed him through blood to vengeance. But Stacy, with the hardest effort of his life, held them in check. It would mar the peaceful sleep of that gentle soul whom they were laying to rest, he thought, to punish bloody violence with other bloody violence—and in his mind a more effective plan was incubating.
All that he would tell the grim men who met in conclave that night, ready to don their masks and fare forth, was that this was, above all others, an occasion for biding their time. "But I pledges ye faithful," he declared in a voice that shook with solemn feeling, "ye won't hev need ter grow wearied with waitin'...."
No Towers watchmen came in these days to Turner's house. They contented themselves with keeping a vindictive vigil along the creeks and tributaries where they were numerically stronger. Each day Turner came to watch over Blossom with the quiet fidelity of a great dog. There was little enough that he could do, but he came and looked at her with hungry eyes out of a hungry heart, speaking no word of his own love, but listening as she talked of her father. He sought in a hundred small ways to divert her thoughts from the grim thing that had twice scarred her life and taken the light out of her eyes. As he trudged back to his house, where he had again taken up his residence, after these visits, he walked with a set jaw and registered oaths of reprisal to take a form new to the hills.