“You go to hell!” said Norton promptly.  The man glowered heavily at hire through the gathering gloom of twilight.

“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.

Norton’s horse trotted down the road.  When it entered the yard at Thicket Point half an hour later, Carrington was on the porch.

“Is that you, Norton?” he called, but there was no response, and he saw the horse was riderless.  “Jeff!” he cried, summoning Norton’s servant from the house.

“What’s the matter, Mas’r?” asked the negro, as he appeared in the open door.

“Why, here’s Mr. Norton’s horse come home without him.  Do you know where he went this afternoon?”

“I heard him say he reckoned he’d ride over to Belle Plain, Mas’r,” answered Jeff, grinning.  “I ’low the hoss done broke away and come home by himself—­he couldn’t a-throwed Mas’r Charley!”

“We’ll make sure of that.  Get lanterns, and a couple of the boys!” said Carrington.

It was mid-afternoon of the day following before Betty heard of the attack on Charley Norton.  Tom brought the news, and she at once ordered her horse saddled and was soon out on the river road with a black groom trailing along through the dust in her wake.  Tom’s version of the attack was that Charley, had been robbed and all but murdered, and Betty never drew rein until she reached Thicket Point.  As she galloped into the yard Bruce Carrington came from the house.  At sight of the girl, with her wind-blown halo of bright hair, he paused uncertainly.  By a gesture Betty called him to her side.

“How is Mr. Norton?” she asked, extending her hand.

“The doctor says he’ll be up and about inside of a week, anyhow, Miss Malroy,” said Carrington.