"You don't tell me! Well, it did jest give me a start for a minute. I'd like to hev gone in and seen it nigh to, if I hadn't happened to think of this 'ere autoo. You see I ain't got it all paid for yet. I'm jest clean beat. You don't mind my takin' a leetle pull at a stone fence, do you?" "I guess not," I assented somewhat dubiously, however. "That was a rail fence we took a pull at back in the lane, wasn't it? Of course, if we shouldn't happen to clear the stone fence as well as we did the rail fence, it might be more disastrous." "Oh, land!" he said with a cackling laugh, "I ain't meanin' that kind of a fence. I mean the kind you--Say! You ain't one of them teetotalers, be you?" "Only in theory," I replied, "but this stone fence drink is a new one on me. What's it like?" He stopped the "autoo" and pulled a bottle from an inner pocket. "You kin taste it better than I kin tell it," he declared. "Take a pull--a condumned good one." I rarely imbibed, confining my indulgences to the demands of necessity, but I thought that the flight of Ptolemy, the ghostly encounter, and my Mazeppa--wild ride all combined to constitute an occasion adequate to call for a bracer in the shape of a stone fence, or anything he might produce. I took what I considered a "condumned good one" from the bottle and it nearly strangled me, but I followed the aged stranger's advice to take another to "cure the chokes" caused by the first one. On general principles I took a third and then reluctantly returned him the bottle. "Here's over the moon," he jovially exclaimed as he proceeded to make my attempt at a "condumned good one" appear most niggardly. "May I ask," I inquired when my feeling of nerve-tense strain had vanished, and I felt as if I were treading thin air, "just what is in a stone fence?" "Well, what do you think?" he asked slyly. "I think the very devil is in it," I replied. "Well, mebby," he admitted. "It's two-thirds hard cider and one-third whisky. It's a healthy, hearting drink and yet it has a leetle come back to it--a sort o' kick, you know. But this is where I live," pointing to a farmhouse well back from the road, "but I am goin' to run you on to your tavern though." The hotel was dark, save for a light in my room. I invited him in, but he was anxious to "git hum and tell the folks", so I gave him some cigars and went in to "tell my folks." I found them in the room waiting for me. That is, Beth was in the room, sitting by the table and pretending to read. Silvia and Rob were out in the little balcony. They came inside as soon as they heard my voice. "Oh, was he there?" asked Silvia anxiously. "Yes," I replied. "He answered the telephone himself."