Strobe looked a trifle crestfallen. Marcella, with a sudden anxious impatience of manner, rose and passed to the other side of the room and mechanically closed the batten shutter, then purposelessly opened it again. Rathburn did not follow her with his eyes. They were still fixed moodily on the fire. When she seated herself again, she looked at her father with a clearing brow. A slow satisfaction, even triumph, was creeping across Eli Strobe’s face. “They need me ter keep ’em straight,” he observed. “Some powerful fractious boys in Brumsaidge Cove,” he declared, with a slow, sidelong, convincing glance at Rathburn. “I should think so, indeed,” Rathburn affirmed, with an accession of significant emphasis. He hesitated a moment, then went on. “I fell in to-night with the ringleader of a gang of lynchers, and if I hadn’t been warned beforehand and known just how to talk to him I shouldn’t have got off with my life.” He once more cast a swift glance at Marcella, charged with much that he would fain have said; but her eyes were downcast, the long lashes almost touching the rare rose a-bloom in her cheeks. Eli Strobe turned his bovine stare of slowly kindling excitement upon the speaker; his pipe-stem was quivering in his hand; his lips had parted, as if an ejaculation were trembling upon them, but the alert maternal comments forestalled him:— “Dell-law! the crazy buzzards! What hed _ye_ been a-doin’ of, though, ter hev sech a pursuit ez that take arter ye?” Mrs. Strobe fixed an investigating eye upon the stranger which intimated a cautious reserve of judgment. “I’d like for you to guess; but you never could,” said Rathburn. “It air in rank vi’lation o’ the law, no matter what he done nor what he done it fur,” Eli Strobe declared impressively. Then he tremulously replaced his pipe in his mouth. “You see,” said Rathburn, leaning forward and tapping the burly mountaineer on the knee, looking up at him the while with eyes that grew fiery revealing the angry, smarting wounds to his pride, “I admit I was fool enough to agree to Jake Baintree’s idiocy in keeping the matter secret. I have been trying to strike silver that he found here a few years ago, and when we broke our tools I undertook to mend and sharpen them at the forge, being a sort of Jack-of-all-trades; and I did it at night and in secret to humor him. I wanted to keep him as communicative as I could, because the fool puts me off and deceives me from day to day about the place,—the Lord knows why.” He paused. “I’d like to throttle him,—I’d like to break his neck,” he said, as his preoccupied gaze dwelt on the fire for a moment. Then flinging himself back in his chair in his former attitude, and slipping his hands into his pockets he continued, “That’s what like to have happened to me, though, I tell you. It was a mighty close call. I got off by the skin of my teeth.”