Tad trudged up the steps and entered a large room with a sanded floor. Two fiddlers were scraping away diligently at the farther end of the place, and a crowd of thirty or forty men stood drinking and watching a raggedly dressed old fellow do a buck-and-wing dance. At one end of the long and busy bar lounged a big, red-haired man in shirt-sleeves. Tad crossed to him. “Could you put me up for tonight?” he asked. The man eyed him shrewdly. “I’ve got a cot in one of the rooms, but it’ll cost ye dear,” he answered at length. “Two dollars for the night. An’ I doubt ye’ve that much money.” “Yes,” said Tad. “It’s high, but I can pay it.” “Let’s see your cash,” the other replied coldly. Tad hesitated a second, then pulled a purse from under his belt. The big handful of Government notes and silver which he held up seemed to satisfy the tavern-keeper. “Two dollars--in advance,” he said, with a nod. “That’ll cover supper an’ breakfast.” Tad paid him and was stuffing the purse back into its place when he saw a tall, dark man, who had come up during the conversation and was standing a few feet away, leaning an elbow on the bar. He was a rather handsome fellow of twenty-four or twenty-five, with a sweeping, dark mustache and restless, sharp, black eyes. His clothes, beautifully tailored and expensive, seemed to have been worn a little too long or too carelessly. But it was his hands that Tad noticed first of all. They were white and slim, with extraordinarily long fingers. And on the middle finger of the right hand was a queer-shaped silver ring with a dull green stone. The man shifted his gaze quickly, as Tad looked up, and the next moment he was ordering a drink from one of the bartenders. “Here, you, Rufus,” cried the landlord to a negro boy who emerged just then from the kitchen, “take this feller up to Number Four--lively.” “Yassah, Marse’ Burke,” was the reply, and Tad, hearing the name, remembered the stage-driver’s warning. “Burke Howard,” he thought. “Yes, that was the name. But I’ve got to sleep somewhere, and at any rate I’ll keep my eyes open.”