John Archer, wearied out by the pedlar's importunities, could resist no longer, and suspecting nothing, tossed off the glass at a gulp. "Good, indeed," he had barely time to say, as he gave back the glass. "Gramercy! how is this? My head swims. I--I----" He was unable to finish his sentence, but fell like a log to the ground. The pedlar's eyes glistened as he witnessed the speedy effects of the drug. In another moment his fingers were fumbling in the waistcoat pocket of the prostrate John Archer, and he had succeeded in transferring the watch from the gamekeeper's pocket to his own. He then began rifling his other pockets, but there was little else worth taking on poor John's person--a few loose coins, perhaps, nothing more. At this moment De Chevron came up, and lifting the gun from the ground, said, "This gun is yours, Mike." Then, retreating a few paces behind the pedlar, he levelled the gun at his head, but not being quite correct in his aim, the bullet lodged in the man's shoulder. Mike gave a yell of agony on finding himself wounded, but he still might have imagined that the gun had gone off accidentally and had thus hit him in the shoulder, had not De Chevron immediately come up and with one tremendous blow on the head from the butt end of the gun, felled him to the ground. "Treachery!" feebly gasped out the wretched man. Then followed a second blow, a third and even a fourth, until the unhappy dupe spoke no more. To drag the body to a ditch thickly overgrown with nettles and brambles which completely concealed it from view was the work of the moment, having previously despoiled the corpse of its recently acquired treasure and restored the same to the pocket of its owner, who still lay in the arms of Morpheus. Then replacing the gun by the side of its sleeping master, and bedaubing the gamekeeper's clothes with blood, he first poured out the contents of the pedlar's bottle on the grass, then started homewards. No one appears to have met him, either before or after the murder. Circumstances seem to have been peculiarly favourable to him that evening, for chancing to be excessively windy at that hour, and the road being of loose white sand, not a single footprint was to be discovered the next morning. It was somewhere about midnight when John Archer woke up from his trance. His first wonderment was how he got there. He imagined that he must in some way or other have become intoxicated. Then he thought of the pedlar. It was strange, he did not remember having drunk more than one glass, but it was not until he reached his cot that he was aware of the plight he was in.