As he went forward with his swinging, elastic stride, swaying the lantern back and forth, according to his wont, to illumine the path, his manner, his words, his expression, so tallied with the situation he had invented and the role he had played that even the most discerning might have descried no discrepancy in point of fact. The young moonshiner, barely sobered and wholly frightened, was easily to be deluded by a verisimilitude far less complete. He followed, his clumsy feet stumbling and stepping awry, as if his gait were still subject to spirituous influences from which his brain was freed. His cramped limbs yet felt the numbness of their long constraint and the pain of his bonds, for Larrabee's ropes had not been adjusted with due regard to the free circulation of the blood. His progress was far slower than his host's, who paused from time to time and waited to be overtaken. On these occasions it soon became apparent that there was something in his mind on which he had begun to ponder deeply; for whereas at first he had visibly hastened to join Taft on seeing him whirl around, the lantern describing in the distance a wheel of pallid white light against the dense darkness of the tunnel, he now continued to plod heavily, slower and slower, even when the light settled to a shining focus, again motionless. Taft lifted it once as Sykes approached, throwing its force full upon the swollen, mottled, absorbed face, the fixed introspective eyes, the heavy slouching shoulders and bent head. At that moment of careful reconnoitre a genuine expression was on Taft's face, keen, furtive, triumphant; it passed unobserved. He whirled around again, leading the way with the lantern, and it was with a perfectly cloaked satisfaction that he began to observe the young fellow's convulsive haste to depart as they neared the exit from the tunnel, his flimsy pretense of heed to his elder's advice, and finally his heedlessness altogether, no longer able to maintain attention or its semblance. He was gone at last, and Taft, returning to his prostrate comrade in the still, dismissed him from his mind, and thenceforward from his life, with a single comment. "That drunken shoat hev got an uncle in north Texas," he said, as he placed the lantern on the cold brick-work of the dead and fireless furnace. "I knowed that, so I fixed it so ez he'd light out fur them furrin parts d'rec'ly. He ain't dawdlin', I'm thinkin'." Then, as he addressed himself to removing the gag and cutting the bonds of the elder distiller, his brow darkened. "That cuss Lar'bee's work, hey?" he demanded gruffly; and as the liberated Copley gasped out an assent Taft growled a deep oath, his face scarlet, his hands trembling with rage, his anger unleashed, and his whole nature for the nonce unmasked. "That kems from sparin' powder an' lead," he declared vindictively. "Whyn't ye or Sykes shoot him?" "He war too suddint," gasped Copley. "Ye never see a painter so suddint an' sharp."