Lucifer; and thenceforward there was a price upon his head.
When the boy picked up his knife after a short search in the thicket where he had thrown it, he was glad to note that there was blood on the blade.
Byng, roaming his woods as usual and, as always, more or less on the lookout for the boy, of course knew nothing of the great change that had come about. He could not know that a dollar had been offered to any negro on the plantation who would bring in the body of a big wildcat with only one ear. Nor could he know that the boy had ridden over to the house of Sandy Jim Mayfield, his nearest white neighbor, to learn whether he had a dog in his deer pack that would follow the trail of a cat and to give him leave to hunt wildcats in the plantation woods. Byng was conscious of no resentment over the boy's sudden attack upon him, and the flesh wound where the knife had struck him on one hind quarter was too slight to cause serious annoyance. When, two mornings afterwards, he heard the boy in the woods, he left his sleeping place in a tangled, almost impenetrable thicket of thorny vines and moved swiftly towards the sounds. For a half mile or so he followed the boy, catching a glimpse of him now and then, sensible of those same strange promptings born of the old comradeship, never sus-
