Page:Frederick Faust--Free Range Lanning.djvu/241

Rh were again in funds. It was a point of honor. And so the innocent householder, drawn into the underground circle by force and retained there by bribes, was kept in the new world. Once fairly in, he could not withdraw. Before long he became, against or with his will, a depository of secrets—banned faces became known to him. And if he suddenly decided to withdraw from that criminal world his case was most precarious.

The "long riders" admitted no neutrals. If a man had once been with them he could only leave them to become an enemy. He became open prey. His name was published abroad. Then his cattle were apt to disappear. His stacks of hay might catch fire unexpectedly at night. His house itself might be plundered, and, in not infrequent cases, the man himself was brutally murdered. It was part of a code no less binding because it was unwritten.

All of this Andrew was more or less aware of, and scores of names had been mentioned to him by chance acquaintances of "the road." Such names he stored away, for he had always felt that time impending of which Henry Allister had warned him, the time when he must openly forget his scruples and take to a career of crime. That time, he now knew, was come upon him.

It would be misrepresenting Andrew to say that he shrank from the future. Rather he accepted it with a fierce joy. It offered him a swift life of action, an all-absorbing career, a chance for forgetfulness of the one thing that had until now, held him back with a meager leash. He accepted everything that lay before him whole-heartedly, and, with the laying aside of his scruples, there was an instant lightening of the heart, a fierce keenness of mind, a contempt for society, a disregard for life beginning with his own. One could have noted it