During the hurried cross-mountain run Tregarvon wrestled manfully with the problem thrust upon him by Richardia Birrell’s whispered appeal. How was he to prevent a meeting between the judge and the as yet unnamed man whom Tryon and Rucker had captured? The query was still unanswered when the yellow car skidded and slued around the turn into the old wood road. Despite the promise given by a fair day and a measurably clear evening, the night had suddenly thickened, with cloud wracks flying low over the mountain top to wrap the forest in mantlings of fleecy vapor silver-shot by the rays of a gibbous moon, but opposing a wall of blank opacity to the headlamps of the car. Tregarvon would have welcomed help from the chapter of accidents, but now that they were off the main road there was a fair chance that the accident might be too destructive. “Easy, Poictiers!--you’ll scrap us if you don’t look out!” he cautioned, leaning forward to warn Carfax, who was boring into the cloud bank at reckless speed. The words were scarcely uttered before there came a crunching of dry tree limbs under the wheels, a hiss of escaping air, and a jolting stoppage of the car as the brakes were applied. “Punctured!” exclaimed the cautioner, and they all got out to investigate cause and consequence. The obstruction proved to be what it had seemed--the dry limb of a tree--and the result was a flat tire. “It is dead wood, and it may have fallen of its own accord; or it may mean that your dynamiter has friends who would like to delay us,” Wilmerding offered. “On the bare chance, hadn’t we better sprint along and not wait to change tires? Your man, Rucker, may easily be having the time of his life trying to hold on to his prisoner.” They sprinted accordingly, the judge taking the dog-trot as actively as his younger pace-setters, and stubbornly refusing to let Tregarvon relieve him of the burden of the heavy deer-gun. So running, they came in a few minutes to the site of the old burying-ground, and to the door of the tool shanty. Rucker admitted them at Tregarvon’s knock and call, and his report was brief and unenlightening. “No; nothin’ doin’ since we took him in--and the cuss won’t talk. But maybe you can make him loosen up.” Tregarvon still saw no way of keeping the judge out of it, and he held himself absolved from his promise by the sheer impossibility of doing what Richardia had begged him to do. The captive, wrist-bound with a turn or two of cord, was sitting hunched upon the edge of Rucker’s cot-bed. It was Carfax who picked up the lantern and flashed its light into the man’s face. “By Jove!” he exclaimed; “Morgan McNabb!” and Rucker nodded. Judge Birrell sat upon the spare coil of rope and wiped his face with his handkerchief. His hands were trembling and he was breathing hard, but the smart run from the disabled automobile might have accounted for these disturbances. When he spoke to the prisoner his tone was sternly accusing.