Leaving the front door unlocked, he walked noiselessly down the avenue between the counters to open the door in the rear. There he found Mustard Prophet sleeping on a pile of sacks, invisible to the eye, but easily vizualized by the trained mind of the Skull as he listened to Mustard’s stertorous breathing. “A nigger,” he racked with his noiseless cough, “stuffed like a fat woman’s stocking, sleeping like a stiff!” He walked back to the little office partitioned off in the middle of the store. His frail fingers fumbled with the combination knob of the safe for a moment, then caressed its top and sides. “Forty years old,” he sighed, “and made of pot-metal. If I was not so weak, I’d turn it over and kick a hole in the bottom of it with my sore toe. As it is, I’ll have to work with this soup and cough like an alligator for a week with its fumes in my lungs.” Ten minutes later the door of the safe swung crazily open, hanging upon a half-broken hinge. The bony arm and hand of the Skull explored the contents. His fingers grasped the top of the coarse bag which Colonel Gaitskill had placed there a few hours before, and he lifted it out. “No further seek its contents to disclose or draw its dollars from their frail abode,” the Skull parodied. “The simp put it all in one sack for me and tied the top with a rawhide string.” His fingers fumbled the contents of the sack through the thick cloth. “Gosh!” he sighed. “Gold and silver and a little dirty paper money--heavy as pig-iron--and I’m too weak to carry an empty pill-box across the street to a homeopathic doctor.” Nevertheless, he took the bag with him as he started to leave. At the rear door, he paused at the pallet where Mustard lay sprawled out and a sardonic smile distorted his skull-like face. “Behold the guardian of this gold!” he muttered. “Strange the South has been the fall guy for this sort of servant ever since the South began. Well, Cæsar had his Brutus, and every colonel has his coon!” Then he stepped out into the lot and closed the door behind him. There was the crack of a pistol, and a bullet plugged into the door-jamb. “You missed, friend!” the Skull called tauntingly. “I had my sharp edge turned toward you!” The night prowler in the Southern village seeking spoils is exposed to no danger by the night watchman sleeping sweetly on a soft stone step. The yeggman dreads the fox-hunters. They leave town at sundown accompanied by friends, followed by dogs, comforted by the contents of sundry jugs. They are kept keyed up to alert wakefulness by the excitement of the chase and return only when the jugs are empty. It was a party of fox-hunters, headed by Sheriff Flournoy, with whom Slatey the Skull had now to deal. Passing through the town on their return from the hunt they had heard the dull explosion in the store and had made an investigation. They were now in ambush, waiting for the appearance of the safe-blower.