But for McGill to get a glimpse of the path it was necessary for him to thrust his head far out from his place of concealment. Just at a time when Bud thought that he must surely risk a change in his position, a half-dozen razorbacks trotted up from behind. When they saw Bud lying on the ground in plain view, they uttered a series of affrighted grunts, and dashed ahead, two of them swerved and jumped over the very log that hid McGill, and must have come perilously near to jumping squarely upon him. The next instant McGill's head was thrust stealthfully out of the laurel, his eyes fixed intently on the scrub cedars that jutted out into the trail leading down from the Lutts cabin. As McGill waited to waylay Lem, his life in these minutes hinged upon a seemingly irrelevant and insignificant act.
The moment that McGill broke his gun and discovered that it had been tampered with, he would naturally replace the shells. And the instant that he replaced the shells, Buddy Lutts meant to send a rifle ball into his brain.
On the eve of leaving his sequestered haunts in the hills, none but the omniscient Providence could tell for how long, Lem Lutts was loath to turn his eyes toward the blue-grass country. So it was that he lingered, feasting his gaze upon the panoramic view that lay beneath Eagle Crown, every spur and nook and cove and gulch of which he had been familiar with all his life. With a heaviness weighing his heart, but a determination unabated, he swept his eyes over the purple distance with one last farewell, and turning started his descent. His head had disappeared downward when suddenly, as if in response to a voice, he halted and, not knowing his own purpose precisely, he climbed back and stood up on the ledge, sending his gaze afar to the glistening patch of water that marked the Boon Creek ford; immortalized in his soul, with the last beckonings of her whom he adored with a flaming, compelling, deathless love that eclipsed and obliterated all else in life. His gaze dwelt here for a full minute. Then he turned half-way, then looked quickly back. Something there had attracted him. With his hand half raised, he pushed to the brink of the precipice. He now discerned the burnished coat of a blood-bay horse standing in the ford. Lem's mouth dropped ajar. As he strained his eyes downward, his breath paused with the miraculous thought that slowly filtered into his brain. From this vast, hazy height he could not determine whether the equestrian was male or female. But an exciting intuition seized his senses as he descried some object flashing methodically in the sunlight.
Unmistakably the distant rider was waving to him!
Then the signal changed to something white, flaunting against the azure space, and Lem's heart smote his ribs with a great bound of suffocating joy, as the influx of a scintillating realization obsessed him, and he started down that perilous descent faster than he had ever gone in his life.
CHAPTER XXXIII
BELLE-ANN COMES BACK
When he reached the ground he dashed along the trail like a madman. On past the cabin he ran in great bounds; down the cypress cut, his speed increasing every second. As he rushed headlong down into the loop, a startling thing happened.
As Lem shot around a clump of scrub cedars that marked a sharp twist in the trail, the form of a man confronted him with a shotgun leveled at his head. At the same time the ambuscader pulled the trigger with murderous intent. The gun snapped with no report, and the sheer impetus of Lem's body moving at terrific velocity bore him down in a trice. As Lem flashed past, unable to check his headlong speed on the moment, he struck the mystified face a stunning, crashing blow. The man tumbled backward—his head striking a rock with a crushing impact.