At last Mustard leaned back in his chair. His stomach was gorged, his head blood-flushed until his temples throbbed like drums. He kicked over the box which had served as a table, thus dumping the cans and bottles and other empty receptacles into a corner of the store and rose to his feet. “Whar is de seegaws in dis sto’?” Pap inquired sleepily. “I’ll git ’em,” Mustard said. Selecting the largest cigars in stock, he wandered sleepily back to Pap Curtain. The clock in the court-house steeple tolled the hour. Mustard counted. “Twelve!” he exclaimed. “Here we been eatin’ five hours an’ to-morrer is de secont day! Git outen dis sto’, Pap Curtain!” Pap rose, and Mustard followed him to the rear door and shut him out. Then, tossing his cigar aside, Mustard piled an armload of sacks in the corner, snapped off the electric light, and sprawled down upon his pallet, sinking instantly into a slumber like the lethargy of the gorged boa constrictor, or the inertia of the hibernating bear. He was a sound sleeper. II THE LONE WOLF. Slatey the Skull was a gentleman of leisure and perverted education; he was also a nitroglycerin expert, making a specialty of the application of this sovereign explosive to burglar-proof safes. He was a child of the congested cities, loving the noise and clatter of their streets, the whir of machinery, the hum and hustle of their myriad life. But tuberculosis clutched at his panting, crumbling lungs with the pitiless fingers of death, and the ravages of the disease had changed a naturally ruddy countenance into the emaciated, soapstone-colored face which gave him the name among his fellows. Under sentence of death, imposed, not by the law of the land which he defied, but by the law of life which defied him, he had wandered from the city to the deep woods and sparsely populated villages of the South as a wild goat leaves its fellows and crawls into some desolate mountain cave to languish and die alone. Despairing of his own life, indifferent to the lives of others, he was a lone wolf, perilous, predaceous, as quick to strike and as deadly as a viper. His admiring fellows said of him that he could “smell money.” Slipping like a shadow from the log-train which stopped for water at Tickfall shortly after midnight, he wandered up the crooked, silent, deserted streets toward the business portion of the village. Pausing before the door of the Gaitskill store, his thin, flexible nostrils quivered like a rabbit’s nose. Flattening himself against the door like the wraith of a man, his keen eyes searched the streets, his acutely sensitive ears listened intently. Then he turned, and with an ease like the magic of a sleight-of-hand performer, he opened the door and entered the store. “I smell a nigger,” he muttered with a curse, as the stale odor of cigar smoke racked his frail body with noiseless coughing.