Larrabee hesitated. "Hev ye met up with the stars in yer readin'?" he finally blurted out. A sudden look of blank disappointment crossed Kenniston's face. "Stars!" he echoed in dismay. "Why, I thought you had come to give me some information about the cur that set fire to my house." (It was a different kind of brute, but the fact of Bruin's agency was relegated to the state of things not revealed, which we denominate mystery.) It was Larrabee's turn for impatience, and an affronted sense of interruption. "I dunno nuthin' 'bout who burnt yer hotel"--He paused suddenly, the conviction all at once fully fledged in his mind that it was the deed of the moonshiners, to rid the Cove of its prospect of troublesome invaders. The recollection of Espey's threat rang in his ears as if the very vibrations of the words were audible upon the air: "Burn him out! Burn his shanty every time he gits it started!" Larrabee suffered the sense of a nervous shock, so great was the revulsion from the subject that had engrossed him; for this reminiscence of all things he had least expected to meet here. He could hardly cope with it in the free outer air. It belonged so essentially to that other life of his, that underground world where he bore so different an identity, that it seemed to have thoughts and intentions and a conscience peculiar to itself. He had realized the dangers of the isolation in which he stood amongst those of his association, but he had thought himself safe here. Kenniston knew him neither by name nor face, and he was a stranger to all the workmen; since their advent into the Cove he had been held a prisoner in the Lost Time mine. Even a chance encounter with Rodolphus Ross he did not dread, for the officer had not been apprised of his identity on the night he had summoned him to search for the escaped Espey masquerading under the name of Larrabee.