"We want your word that you'll keep away from Belle Plain," he
said with sullen insistence.

"Well, you won't get it!" responded Norton with quiet decision.

"We won't?"

"Certainly you won't!" Norton's eyes began to flash. He
wondered if these were Tom Ware's emissaries. He was both
quick-tempered and high-spirited. Falling back a step, he sprang
forward and dealt the bullnecked man a savage blow. The latter
grunted heavily but kept his feet. In the same instant one of
the men who had never taken his eyes off Norton from the moment
he quitted the saddle, raised his fist and struck the young
planter in the back of the neck.

"You cur!" cried Norton, blind and dizzy, as he wheeled on him.

"Damn him--let him have it!" roared the bullnecked man.

Afterward Norton was able to remember that the three rushed on
him, that he was knocked down and kicked with merciless
brutality, then consciousness left him. He lay very still in the
trampled dust of the road. The bull-necked man regarded the limp
figure in grim silence for a moment.

"That'll do, he's had enough; we ain't to kill him this time," he
said. An instant later he, with his two companions, had vanished
silently into the woods.