him, would take him up behind and save him many a weary mile.  Boldly he went until one morning he stood on the icy, glittering crest of Pine Mountain and looked down a white wooded ravine to the frozen Cumberland locked motionless in the valley below.  He could see the mouth of Hawn Branch and the mouth of Honeycutt Creek—­could see the spur, the neck of which once separated Mavis’s home from his—­and with a joyful throb and a quickly following pang he plunged down the ravine.  Ahead of him was the house of a Honeycutt and he had no fear, but as he swiftly approached it along the river road, he saw two men, strangers, appear on the porch and instinctively he scudded noiselessly behind a great clump of evergreen rhododendron and lay flat to the frozen earth.  A moment later they rode by him at a walk and talking in low, earnest tones.

“He’s sure to come back here,” said one, “and it won’t be long before some Honeycutt will give him away.  This peace business ain’t skin-deep and a five-dollar bill will do the trick for us and I’ll find the right man in twenty-four hours.”

The other man grunted an assent and the two rode on.  Already they were after Jason; they had guessed where he would go, and the boy knew that what he had heard from these men was true.  When he rose now he kept out of the road and skirted his way along the white flanks of the hills.  Passing high up the spur above Hawn Branch, he could see his grandfather’s house.  A horse was hitched to the fence and a man was walking toward the porch and the lad wondered if that stranger, too, could be on his trail.  On upward he went until just below him he could see the old circuit rider’s cabin under a snow-laden pine, and all up and down the Hawn Creek were signs of activity from the outside world.  Already he had watched engineers mapping out the line of railway up the river.  He had seen the coming of the railroad darkies who lived in shacks like cave-men, who were little above brutes and driven like slaves by rough men in blue woollen shirts and high-laced boots.  And now he saw that old Morton Sanders’ engineers had mapped out a line up the creek of his fathers; that the darkies had graded it and their wretched shacks were sagging drunkenly here and there from the hill-sides.  Around the ravine the boy curved toward the neck of the dividing spur and half-unconsciously toward the little creek where he had uncovered his big vein of coal, and there where with hand, foot, and pick he had toiled so long was a black tunnel boring into the very spot, with supporting columns of wood and a great pile of coal at its gaping mouth.  The robbery was under way and the boy looked on with fierce eyes at the three begrimed and coal-blackened darkies hugging a little fire near by.  Cautiously he backed away and slipped on down to a point where he could see his mother’s old home and Steve Hawn’s, and there he almost groaned.  One was desolate, deserted, the door swinging from one hinge, the chimney fallen, every paling of the fence