“No, by grapples!  I hain’t.  I saw you in daylight.  If there’s been any fumblin’ done, I hain’t done it.  So you see it ain’t any o’ my funeral.”

“Think not?” said Blount.

“I know it ain’t.  Orders is orders, and you don’t git over into them woods on Upper Lost Creek with no papers to serve on nobody:  see?”

It was just here that the light of complete understanding dawned upon Blount; and with it came the disconcerting chill of a conviction overthrown.  As a theorist he had always scoffed at the idea that a corporation, which is a creature of the law, could afford to be an open law-breaker.  But here was a very striking refutation of the charitable assumption.  His smoking-room companion of the Pullman car was doubtless one of the timber-pillagers who had been cutting on the public domain.  To such a man an agent of the National Forest Service was an enemy to be hoodwinked, if possible, or, in the last resort, to be disposed of as expeditiously as might be, and Blount saw that he had only himself to blame for his present predicament, since he had allowed the man to believe that he was a Government emissary.  Having this clew to the mystery, his course was a little easier to steer.

“I have no papers of the kind you think I have, as you can readily determine by searching me,” he said.  “My name is Blount, and I am the son of ex-Senator David Blount, of this State.  Now what are you going to do with me?”

“What’s that you say?” grated the outlaw.

“You heard what I said.  Go ahead and heave me into the canyon if you are willing to stand for it afterward.”

The hard-faced man turned without replying and went back to the other two at the fire.  Blount caught only a word now and again of the low-toned, wrangling argument that followed.  But from the overheard word or two he gathered that there were still some leanings toward the sound old maxim which declares that “dead men tell no tales.”  When the decision was finally reached, he was left to guess its purport.  Without any explanation the thongs were taken from his wrists and ankles, and he was helped upon his horse.  After his captors were mounted, the new status was defined by the spokesman in curt phrase.

“You go along quiet with us, and you don’t make no bad breaks, see?  I more’n half believe you been lyin’ to me, but I’m goin’ to give you a chance to prove up.  If you don’t prove up, you pass out—­that’s all.  Now git in line and hike out; and if you’re countin’ on makin’ a break, jest ricollect that a chunk o’ lead out of a Winchester kin travel a heap faster thern your cayuse.”

If Blount had not already lost all sense of familiarity with his surroundings, the devious mountain trail taken by his captors would soon have convinced him that the boyhood memories were no longer to be trusted.  Up and down, the trail zigzagged and climbed, always penetrating deeper and deeper into the heart of the mountains.  At times Blount lost even the sense of direction; lost it so completely that the high-riding moon seemed to be in the wrong quarter of the heavens.