But Burton did not know Lem as Orlick knew him, and to Orlick the prospect of a long term of confinement for Lem Lutts was very pleasing. Notwithstanding, Orlick knew that Lem would get out of jail subsequently, and that he—Orlick—might by then be a marked man.
Orlick was fully aware that when the suspicions already against him on Hellsfork had shaped themselves into convincing proofs of treason, his life would be worth nothing in Kentucky.
The Lutts faction would follow him even into the blue-grass precincts. They would dog him to the very threshold of the sheriff's office. His undoing would be swift and certain—and pitiless.
But all this was now a remote contingency in the face of his unbridled passion for Belle-Ann, and it was with a sense of bravado that he realized it was a mere matter of time before the calamity of exposure would overtake him.
But against the advent of this unerring nemesis, he banked on at least a few weeks, and probably a few months, during which, he told himself, he might win out and have Belle-Ann ensconced safely in some big city, far removed from the arm of the law and the limits of Kentucky.
After that he did not care.
He had cast the die, and had staked his life upon the outcome. If by any ill luck the outcome demanded his life, he stood ready to pay the toll. That Lem Lutts should never get Belle-Ann he had fully determined.
He regretted that Peter Burton had not killed Lem long ago, as he had always hoped.
He would have risked the chance and steered Burton up to the Lutts still, but he could not do so for the ample reason that he did not know where it was. He had known, so long as he had remained a mountaineer in good standing; but old Captain Lutts had moved the still in the early stages of Orlick's mysterious sojourns, and the faction had not since volunteered to tell him its whereabouts, and he was loath to jeopardize his own skin in looking for it.
However, while Orlick was serving Burton, he had served himself doubly. The smooth, unruffled manner in which his plans were unfolding up to date filled him with high glee, and his spirits soared to the skies.