Until now he had thought of Hemlock Mountain as a single peak, but he had discovered it to be, instead, an unbroken range beginning at Hell’s Door and ending at Praise the Lord, which zigzagged for a hundred miles and arched its bristling backbone two thousand feet into the sky. Along this entire 75 length it offered only a few passes over which a traveler could cross except on foot or horseback.
He had found entertainment overnight at a clay-chinked log-cabin, where he had shared the single room with six human beings and two dogs. This census takes no account of a razor-back pig which was segregated in a box under the dining table, where its feeding with scraps simplified the problem of stock raising.
His present objective was the house of Dyke Cappeze, the retired lawyer, whose name had drifted into talk at every town in which he had stopped along the railroad.
Cappeze was a “queer fellow,” a recluse who had quit the villages and drawn far back into the hills themselves. He was one who could neither win nor stop fighting; who wanted to change the unalterable, and, having failed, sulked like Achilles in his tent. But whoever spoke of Cappeze credited him with being a positive and unique personality, and Spurrier meant to know him.
So he pretended to hunt quail—in a country where a covey rose and scattered beyond gorges over which neither dog nor man could follow. One excuse served as well as another so long as he seemed sufficiently careless of the things which were really the core and center of his interest. And now Cappeze’s place ought to be near by.
Off to one side of the ragged way stretched a brown patch of stubble, and suddenly the dog stopped at its edge, lifted his muzzle with distended nostrils delicately aquiver, and then went streaking away into the rattling weed stalks, eagerly quartering the bare field.
Spurrier followed, growling skeptically to himself: “He’s made a stand on a rabbit. That dog’s a liar and the truth is not in him!”
But the setter had come to a halt and held motionless, his statuesque pose with one foreleg uplifted as rigid as a piece of bronze save for the black muzzle sensitively alert and tremulous.
Then as the man walked in there came that startling little thunder of whirring wings with which quail break cover.