“Dey’s all sot, yas, suh; dat’s de bes’ I kin do for ol’ Mammy Ann. I’s gwine tromp off down de mounting ag’in, now. Mus’ be gettin’ might’ nigh de ol’ man’s bedtime; yas, suh; it sholy am dat. I’s sayin’ good night to you-all; an’ t’ank yo’ kin’ly, marstehs.” After the old negro had shuffled away on a short-cut through the wood in the direction of the pike, the two young men took up the affair of the moment, which was to ascertain what the man with the bandaged head had been doing to the engine of the drilling plant. The smoke-box door was standing open, as he had left it, and Tregarvon struck a match and held it in the small sooty cavern. What he saw made him withdraw the match suddenly and blow it out. “Did it bite you?” asked Carfax, genially quizzical. Tregarvon’s rejoinder was not in words. Thrusting an arm into the smoke-box he drew out a paper-wrapped cylinder with a capped fuse buried in one end of it, passing the find to Carfax with the remark: “I fancy we can stay awake until daybreak on the strength of that, don’t you think, Poictiers?” “Dynamite!” gasped Carfax, holding the cartridge gingerly between thumb and finger and at arm’s length. “Yes, dynamite. It was poked into one of the flues with the business end toward the fire-box, and it made no account of Rucker, who would be the one to fire up the boiler before breakfast the day after to-morrow.” “Say, by Jove, Vance! this thing is getting serious!” exclaimed the golden youth, forgetting even the slight hint of a lisp. “We’ll have to ‘take measures,’ as my father used to say. Come on over to the shanty and we’ll get busy. I am in the same condition you said you were, a while back: I’m not sleepy now--don’t know as I ever shall be again.” The talk on the door-step of the tool-house was prolonged far past Tregarvon’s recounting of the suppositions pieced together in the period of his lonely sentry go. But it came back to the suppositions in the end, with Carfax checking off the probabilities on his finger-tips. “So it figures out about this way,” he said, not too cheerfully. “We have Judge Birrell as Lord High Executioner to a couple of receivers of stolen goods--always without his daughter’s approval or consent, as a matter of course--and Professor Hartridge as his able deputy in the field. Then there is this skulking rascal of a dynamite-planter, who acts under orders, or possibly exceeds them now and then; and he seems to be the only one of the lot that we can satisfactorily pinch--when we shall be lucky enough to catch him. Uncle William isn’t in it, is he?” Tregarvon shook his head gloomily. “I have been wrestling with that,” he confessed. “He seems more than trustworthy. But he is evidently an old house servant of the judge’s, and he was sent straight to me from Westwood. That is beyond question.”