For the sake of carrying out the theory on which he had conducted his share in the episode, the stranger, feigning to understand no more than the surface of affairs might betoken, lifted his eyebrows as in surprise, and shrugged his shoulders with a sophisticated gesture intimating a facile concession. “I meant no offense, I’m sure; I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I had no idea the Strobes were so exclusive!” He could not have forborne this fling, had his life depended on his withholding it. “But, my good fellow, don’t question me. Ask them if _they_ know _me_. They will tell you, and as you are so polite you will certainly believe them.” The blacksmith lowered at him, the red light of the dwindling forge fire on his broad face and bare throat and herculean arm. Only a portion of the reply was intelligible to him, but he caught the covert satire it conveyed, and the method of glib enunciation, with quick, flexible motions of the eyelids and lips, the alert turn of the head, the gleam of innuendo in the eye implying bridled retorts that chafed at the curb of fear, all repelled him. He felt a sudden ebbing away of confidence, of his credulity. He began illogically to doubt every statement the stranger had made. Even the pick in his hand—how well it was mended, better than new; the goodly handicraft!—was in some sort a blind, a disguise, a subterfuge. He frowned more darkly still as he sought to divine the rascality that must lurk behind this feint of mining. Mrs. Sanders, still sitting on the keg, yawned with a somnolent vocal refrain, and then rose stiffly to her feet; this gesture roused little Silas from a state of galvanic jerks and nods in which he had been indulging, his white eyeballs quite eclipsed, or now and then half showing unnaturally upturned. He began to rub his eyes violently as he shuffled up from his seat on the hub, taking scant notice of the fact that where there is a hub, spokes are of the vicinage; he stumbled over one or two of these, and fell in sprawling fashion almost to the door. “Thar, now! What did I tell ye!” Mrs. Sanders exclaimed acridly. And yet she had not told him anything. But Silas, who had voice enough for much loud whooping, when such demonstrations were timely, seemed to be frugal in volume on ordinary occasions, and it was in a very thin wheeze that he made haste to stipulate that he “warn’t hurt nowhar,” in a manner that implied that if he were injured he might expect to have his bruises multiplied at the hands of Mrs. Sanders, by way of annotating the lesson he had received to take more care.