She likes to think herself a
man, which means that she hasn't waked up yet, but some day she will."
He paused and his own voice became heavy with coming sleep. "She's had
adventures that she won't forget--if I go away--her imagination will be
at work. Later when Spring comes and the sap rises--and the birds--the
birds----" There the voice trailed off into the incoherence of slumber.
Jase Mallows was sleeping, too, at that hour, and it was only by a
lucky chance that it wasn't his final sleep. The terrain over which
the group of highwaymen had been operating had centered about the mine
shaft just back of the Wolf-Pen Gap. The distances between all the
points involved had been short of radius save as prolonged by the
broken formation of mountain and chasm, of precipice and gorge. There
were caves and thickets and the Gap itself was what local parlance
termed a "master shut-in."
When the chief body of alleged Ku-Klux operators had trailed out of the
mine shaft, they had removed their masks and scattered into the
raggedness. They could, if need exacted, have remained there for days,
safe from discovery, each in his separate hiding place.
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