A man was descending the run with hurried strides, wading with bare feet, or springing from rock to rock where were the deeper pools. A Winchester nestled in the crook of his left arm; two huge bear-traps, the jaws wickedly fanged, were swung from a rope over his right shoulder; a short-helved ax was thrust within his belt. He wore only a cotton shirt open at the neck, dirty throughout, patched jeans trousers, and a soft hat, green from long use. Beneath the shading brim showed a loutish face, the coarse features swollen from dissipation, the small black eyes bleared, yet alert and penetrating in their darting, furtive glances. It was Dan Hodges, a man of unsavory repute. The girl, though unafraid, blessed the instinct that had guided her to avoid a meeting.

There were two prime factors in Plutina's detestation of Hodges. The first was due to his insolence, as she deemed it, in aspiring for her favor. With little training in conventional ideas of delicacy, the girl had, nevertheless, a native refinement not always characteristic of her more-cultured sister women. There was to her something unspeakably repugnant in the fact that this bestial person should dare to think of her intimately. It was as if she were polluted by his dreaming of her kisses, of her yielding to his caresses. That he had so aspired she knew, for he had told her of his desire with the coarse candor of his kind. Her spurning of the uncouth advances had excited his wrath; it had not destroyed his hopes. He had even ventured to renew his suit, after the news of an engagement between Plutina and Zeke had gone abroad. He had winced under the scourge of the girl' scorn, but he had shown neither penitence nor remorse. Plutina had forborne any account of this trouble to her lover, lest, by bad blood between the two men, a worse thing befall.

The second cause of the girl's feeling was less direct, though of longer standing, and had to do with the death of her father. That Siddon, while yet in his prime, had been slain in a raid on a still by the revenue officers, and that despite the fact that he was not concerned in the affair, save by the unfortunate chance of being present. Plutina, though only a child at the time, could still remember the horror of that event. There was a singular personal guiltiness, too, in her feeling, for, on the occasion of the raid, her grandfather had been looking out from a balcony, and had seen the revenue men urging their horses up the trail, the sunlight glinting on their carbines. He had seized the great horn, to blow a warning to those at the secret still on the mountain above. Plutina could remember yet the grotesque bewilderment on his face, as no sound issued--then the wrath and despair. The children, in all innocence, had stuffed the horn with rags. The prank had thus, in a way, cost two lives--one, that of "Young" Dick Siddon. The owner of the raided still had been Dan Hodges, and him Plutina despised and hated with a virulence not at all Christian, but very human. She had all the old-time mountaineer's antipathy for the extortion, as it was esteemed, of the Federal Government, and her father's death had naturally inflamed her against those responsible for it. Yet, her loathing of Hodges caused her to regret that the man himself had escaped capture thus far, though twice his still had been destroyed, once within the year.




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