FRIENDSVILLE, MD.Larry Harding left his 12-gauge shotgun propped by the door that September night. He feared that otherwise he might shoot the thieves if he stumbled on them in the dark. Instead, he grabbed his camera and went out across the road where they’d raided his ginseng patch the week before. He suspected the bandits would return, and sure enough, flashlights bouncing around the woods confirmed it.

“I backed up, and I called the law, and I said: They’re here.”

Harding asked the officer to meet him on a hill near his house in Friendsville, in western Maryland, a pastoral town of about 500 a few miles south of the Pennsylvania border. Then he phoned his grown sons, Tyler and Derek, to help