Now, however, actual and obsessive dread showed plainly on his face and
in his movements. Such a fear would have induced most men to abandon any
enterprise which was not fraught with compelling necessity; with him
insistent curiosity seemed to counterbalance it. The man's face, rough,
hard, cruel, was, withal, unusually expressive; its deep lines were more
than ordinarily mobile, and every one of them, as he proceeded,
soft-footed as a cat, amazingly lithe and supple for his years, as
competent to find his way unseen through a woods country as an Indian,
showed that irresistible and fiercely inquisitive impulse was
offsetting in his mind a deadly apprehension.

In one way only, though, in spite of the accelleration of his eager
curiosity, did he drop his guard, at all, and this was quite apparently
the direct result of high excitement. That he had dropped it he was
clearly quite unconscious, but when his lips moved, now, they more than
once let fall articulate words.

"Ef th' old still's thar ..." they said at one time; then, after a long
pause devoted to worming troublous way through tangled areas of
windfall, they muttered, in completion of the sentence: "... it'll be
th' son that's runnin' it." Another busy silence, and: "Thar was a girl
... th' daughter of...."

Either a spasmodic contraction of the throat at mere thought of the
name--a grimace, almost of pain, which suddenly convulsed the old man's
evil face might well have made a stranger think that his muscles had
rebelled--or an unusually difficult struggle across a fallen tree-trunk
prevented further speech, as, probably, it prevented for the time,
consecutive further thought of old-time memories. His mind was tensely