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Updated: May 20, 2025
A neck ahead!" It is difficult to say what would have happened, then, if Madge, Holton, Barbara and Frank had not come from the stable, chattering about Queen Bess. Joe Lorey, mad with wrath, his heart filled with the lust of killing for revenge, infuriated to the point where he felt need of neither food nor sleep, yet made less rapid time down the rough mountain paths than had the girl.
While the young man and Barbara were talking about moonshiners, one of them had drifted near and he gave them a keen glance at the first mention of the word. Now he turned, but turned most casually, to follow with his own, their glances at Joe Lorey. Then he sauntered off, and, as he passed Holton, seemed to exchange meaning glances with him. Soon afterward Lorey turned away.
Daylight insects were beginning to abate their clamor, while their fellows of the night were tuning for the evening concert. Mournfully, and very faintly, came a locomotive's wail from the far valley. Joe Lorey paused grimly in his progress to stare at the rough shack which housed the man he hated.
Holton paled with rage, but did not take another forward step. As he fell back Joe Lorey spoke.
Here was Holton's chance. The vicious scheme came to him in a flash. Layson he hated fiercely; this youth he hated fiercely. What plan could be better than to set the one to hunt the other? If Lorey should kill Layson it would remove Layson from his path and make his way clear to the purchase of Madge Brierly's coal-lands at a small fraction of their value.
"Reckon I am," said Joe. "Generally pass for one." Then, although he knew quite well just why the man had come, from whom, for whom, he asked sternly to confuse him: "What you doin' in these mountings?" "I's lookin' fo' my massa, young Marse Frank Layson, suh," Neb answered timidly. "You needn't to go fur to find him," Lorey answered bitterly. "You needn't to go fur to find him."
Layson laughed long and heartily. "Must have been Joe Lorey," he surmised. "I heard that cry and thought, myself, it was a panther. He's the only one on earth, I guess, who can imitate the beasts so well. Where is he, now? "Lawd knows! I see him dar, close by me, den I seed you in de doah, an' when I looked aroun' ag'in, he had plumb faded clean away!"
Sometimes they have really bloody battles with them, when they try to make a raid." "How terrible!" said Barbara, and shuddered carefully. She looked again at Lorey, who, conscious that he was the subject of their conversation and resentful of it, stared back boldly and defiantly. "And do you think that he that very young man there can possibly have ever actually killed a man?"
Layson's blood and breeding told, in this emergency. He did not flinch a whit. "I'm ready," he said calmly. "I'm not afraid to die, though it's hard to meet death at the hands of a coward." "Coward!" said the mountaineer, amazed. "You call me that?" "The man who shoots another in cold blood, giving him no chance for his life, deserves no better name." This appealed to Lorey.
Time and again you find her being taken in by kindly people after such `accidents, and made an object of sympathy for the dreadful coincidences that were making her so unhappy. It was out of sympathy that the Widow Lorey, of Locmine, took Helene into her house. On the widow's death the niece arrived.
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