Mason straightened as though he had been struck. Just then a lamp was lighted in the corridor, and its rays showed the face of Oliver Wolfe to be jerking under stress of emotion.
"Well," Oliver demanded, "are you a-goin' to wear the boots of a man?"
The other turned toward the iron-latticed door, and called to the sheriff to come and let him out.
"Is yore name, dahlin' brother," sneered the jailbird, "Wolfe, or is it Mason?"
"Wolfe," answered the stalwart young man at the door. "Wolfe. Now and forever."
II
The bottom of Wolfe's Basin is two miles in length, one mile in breadth, and as level as a prairie. The rockbound and majestic Big Blackfern Mountain makes the eastern wall; the western wall is formed by great Lost Trail Mountain, which lifts high toward the heavens a bald peak called Pickett's Dome. A crystal-clear creek gushes from under a rugged gray cliff at the junction of the Big Blackfern and the Lost Trail, splits the basin's bottom in the centre, and flows out through a dizzily-portaled pass, the same being known as Devil's Gate.
Old Alex Singleton and his people lived in twenty-two low and rambling log cabins near the south end of the basin. Old Buck Wolfe and his people occupied eighteen cabins of the same kind near the basin's north end, near the pass. Old Buck's mother lived alone save for a little black dog named Wag. She was sixty-nine, white-headed, as wrinkled as parchment, very sharp of feature and of tongue; she was called wise in her understanding of the curative properties of herbs, and she was a firm believer in supernatural tokens.