"Yes, Chief, I do wish it. I can promise you one of two things within the next three months: either you'll have all the evidence you want about the secret still and the men behind it or--well, you know where to ship my remains!" With that and a quick handshake he was gone. During the weeks that followed, people repeatedly asked the Commissioner: "What's become of Jimmy Reynolds? Haven't seen him round here for a month of Sundays." But the Commissioner would assume an air of blank ignorance, mutter something about, "He's out of town somewhere," and rapidly change the subject. About six weeks or so later a buzzard which was flapping its lazy way across the mountains which divide Tennessee from North Carolina saw, far below, a strange sight. A man, haggard and forlorn, his face covered with a half-inch of stubble, his cheeks sunken, his clothing torn by brambles and bleached by the sun and rain until it was almost impossible to tell its original texture, stumbled along with his eyes fixed always on the crest of a hill some distance off. It was as if he were making a last desperate effort to reach his goal before the sun went down. Had the buzzard been so minded, his keen eyes might have noted the fact that the man's clothes were marked by horizontal stripes, while his head was covered with hair the same length all over, as if he had been shaved recently and the unkempt thatch had sprouted during the last ten days. Painfully but persistently the man in convict's clothes pressed forward. When the sun was a little more than halfway across the heavens he glimpsed a cabin tucked away on the side of a mountain spur not far away. At the sight he pressed forward with renewed vigor, but distances are deceptive in that part of the country and it was not until nearly dark that he managed to reach his destination. In fact, the Stiles family was just sitting down to what passes for supper in that part of the world--fat bacon and corn bread, mostly--when there was the sound of a man's footstep some fifty feet away. Instantly the houn' dog rose from his accustomed place under the table and crouched, ready to repel invaders. Old Man Stiles--his wife called him Joe, but to the entire countryside he was just "Old Man Stiles"--reached for his rifle with a muttered imprecation about "Rev'nue officers who never let a body be." But the mountaineer had hardly risen from his seat when there was a sound as of a heavy body falling against the door--and then silence. Stiles looked inquiringly at his wife and then at Ruth, their adopted daughter. None of them spoke for an appreciable time, but the hound continued to whine and finally backed off into a corner. "Guess I'll have to see what et is," drawled the master of the cabin, holding his rifle ready for action.