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THE shooting of Tug Beavers precipitated a number of routine reactions in Irontown. Sheriff Bascom came from Lanesburg and telephoned to Florence, Alabama, for bloodhounds. On the evening train arrived an enormous dun-coloured bitch and a still huger dog, both grim as the crack of doom. The crowd around the station gave the two brutes a wide berth, awed by their ferocious aspect and their uncanny powers of trailing.

As soon as the dogs arrived, sheriff and constable started for the place of the shooting. A great crowd followed, Abner among them. The looks of the hounds, the fact that they were going to trail a man whom he knew very well appalled the youth. He could imagine Peck Bradley flying futilely through the hills, wading streams, walking the trunks of fallen trees, putting pepper into his shoes, trying every ruse, and still these terrible animals would follow the scent he must inevitably leave behind him.

The constable had gone to Peck Bradley's boarding house and obtained one of the murderer's shirts. When the hounds reached the place where Tug had been found, the constable tossed the shirt to them, let them sniff at it, learn the peculiar odour which this man and no other man on earth bore. Then the sagacious animals started off, dragging their keeper and the constable at the end of their chains. They made wider and wider circles around the spot.

The handler of the dogs shouted to the crowd to stand back and not confuse the scent, but they would not do it. So the brutes circled about, casting over a hundred different trails, remembering by some unbelievable power a certain