farther fence, and to walk down the road toward the school-house was so easy and so delightful that it was done without thought.  For Ralph was an eager man—­when he saw no wrong in anything that proposed itself, he was wont to follow his impulse without deliberation.  And this keeping company with the stars, and the memory of a delightful walk, were so much better than the commonplace Flat Creek life that he threw himself into his night excursion with enthusiasm.

At last he stood in the little hollow where he had joined Hannah.  It was the very spot at which Shocky, too, had met him a few mornings before.  He leaned against the fence and tried again to solve the puzzle of Hannah’s troubles.  For that she had troubles he did not doubt.  Neither did he doubt that he could help her if he could discover what they were.  But he had no clue.  In the midst of This meditations he heard the thud of horses’ hoofs coming down the road.  Until that moment he had not felt his own loneliness.  He shrank back into the fence-corner.  The horsemen were galloping.  There were three of them, and there was one figure that seemed familiar to Ralph.  But he could not tell who it was.  Neither could he remember having seen the horse, which was a sorrel with a white left forefoot and a white nose.  The men noticed him and reined up a little.  Why he should have been startled by the presence of these men he could not tell, but an indefinable dread seized him.  They galloped on, and he stood still shivering with a nervous fear.  The cold seemed to have got into his bones.  He remembered that the region lying on Flat Creek and Clifty Creek had the reputation of being infested with thieves, who practiced horse-stealing and house-breaking.  For ever since the day when Murrell’s confederate bands were paralyzed by the death of their leader, there have still existed gangs of desperadoes in parts of Southern Indiana and Illinois, and in Iowa, Missouri, Kentucky, and the Southwest.  It is out of these materials that border ruffianism has grown, and the nine members of the Reno band who were hanged two or three years ago by lynch law[17], were remains of the bad blood that came into the West in the days of Daniel Boone.  Shall I not say that these bands of desperadoes still found among the “poor whitey, dirt-eater” class are the outcroppings of the bad blood sent from England in convict-ships?  Ought an old country to sow the fertile soil of a colony with such noxious seed?

Before Ralph was able to move, he heard the hoofs of another horse striking upon the hard ground in an easy pace.  The rider was Dr. Small.  He checked his horse in a cool way, and stood still a few seconds while he scrutinized Ralph.  Then he rode on, keeping the same easy gait as before, Ralph had a superstitious horror of Henry Small.  And, shuddering with cold, he crept like a thief over the fence, past the tree, through the pasture, back to Pete Jones’s, never once thinking of the eyes that looked out of the window at Means’s.  Climbing the ladder, he got into bed, and shook as with the ague.  He tried to reason himself out of the foolish terror that possessed him, but he could not.