Betty turned quickly at the mention of Carrington’s name.  She had known that he was still at Thicket Point, and having heard him spoken of as Norton’s new overseer, had meant to ask Charley if he were really filling that position.  An undefined sense of relief came to her with Norton’s reply to Tom’s question.

“Going to turn farmer, is he?” asked Ware.

“So he says.”  Feeling that the only subjects in which he had ever known Ware to take the slightest interest, namely, crops and slaves, were exhausted, Norton was extremely disappointed when the planter manifested a disposition to play the host and returned to the house with them, where his mere presence, forbidding and sullen, was such a hardship that Norton shortly took his leave.

“Well, hang Tom!” he said, as he rode away from Belle Plain.  “If he thinks he can freeze me out there’s a long siege ahead of him!”

Issuing from the lane he turned his face in the direction of home, but he did not urge his horse off a walk.  To leave Belle Plain and Betty demanded always his utmost resolution.  His way took him into the solemn twilight of untouched solitudes.  A cool breath rippled through the depths of the woods and shaped its own soft harmonies where it lifted the great branches that arched the road.  He crossed strips of bottom land where the water stood in still pools about the gnarled and moss-covered trunks of trees.  At intervals down some sluggish inlet he caught sight of the yellow flood that was pouring past, or saw the Arkansas coast beyond, with its mighty sweep of unbroken forest that rose out of the river mists and blended with the gray distance that lay along the horizon.

He was within two miles of Thicket Point when, passing about a sudden turn in the road, he found himself confronted by three men, and before he could gather up his reins which he held loosely, one of them had seized his horse by the bit.  Norton was unarmed, he had not even a riding-whip.  This being the case he prepared to make the best of an unpleasant situation which he felt he could not alter.  He ran his eye over the three men.

“I am sorry, gentlemen, but I reckon you have hold of the wrong person—­”

“Get down!” said one of the men briefly.

“I haven’t any money, that’s why I say you have hold of the wrong person.”

“We don’t want your money.”  The unexpectedness of this reply somewhat disturbed Norton.

“What do you want, then?” he asked.

“We got a word to say to you.”

“I can hear it in the saddle.”

“Get down!” repeated the man, a surly, bull-necked fellow.  “Come—­hurry up!” he added.

Norton hesitated for an instant, then swung himself out of the saddle and stood in the road confronting the spokesman of the party.

“Now, what do you wish to say to me?” he asked.

“Just this—­you keep away from Belle Plain.”