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 be to slay his own mare, and make his way afoot to Albany. People would be on the lookout for a tinker, riding a mare and carrying a pack. Once in Albany he would be safe.

A quarter mile down the road he led his mare deep into the wood, pushing into the very heart of a copse of young pine where, he was reasonably certain, she would lie undetected for many days. With commendable despatch he tethered her to a sturdy sapling and cut her throat.

Feeling considerably lightened at heart, Black Jem returned to the road and resumed his journey. Unburdened by mare or pack, his escape was as good as accomplished.

And now the infrequent lights of Hooker's Crossing showed ahead, widely spaced, glimmering low down beyond the fields. The road sloped gently downward; the village lay in a shallow valley. And presently Black Jem was passing the low built, clap-through the darkness. He was alert as any hunted thing; he wanted no person to say, tomorrow, that a stranger had been seen this night awalking through the village.





And then he paused, listening. From far behind him came the faint, growing thunder of horses' hoofs! His lips parted in a snarling curse. Without doubt his pursuers were the revelers who had feasted Andrew Bennett earlier in the evening. Bennett's riderless horse must have gone straight to the inn!

Black Jem decided quickly. He was passing a churchyard, its tombstones ghostly in the night, its elm-sentineled quietude enclosed by a fence of white boarded houses that blinked at him pickets through which an iron-latched