Rathburn felt the blood rush to his temples, and he heard his hurrying pulses beat surcharged with the impetus of rage. He did not stir. He still sat with his hands clasped behind his head, his chair tilted on the hind legs. He looked very trim, and sinewy, and lithe in his close-fitting blue flannel shirt and trousers, with the well-shaped high boots coming to the knee, in contrast with the long and lean Baintree, upon whose gaunt frame his ill-made brown jeans hung with many a crease and wrinkle. Beside the florid young physician, the jail-bird seemed to have no blood in his veins, so pallid was his clearly-cut face. As they steadfastly gazed at one another, the comparison might have interested a third party looking on in the firelight, now richly aglow once more; but they were alone in the vastness of the Great Smoky Mountains, the slope of this lofty dome inhabited by naught else save bear, or panther, or wolf. Only the mist peered in at the rift of the batten shutter, white-faced, and wild, and disheveled, fleeing forever before the ousting wind that made the timorous silent thing a vagrant. It seemed as if to escape the antagonistic element that it sought to enter the rift in the shutter, sending in a hesitating wreath, slow-stealing, pausing aghast in the glow of the fire, and disappearing in the instant. As the two comrades faced each other it was hard to say which had the advantage, the clever man with the aid of culture, or the clever man so clever despite the lack of culture. Baintree’s insidious sarcasms, with their ever-ready thrust, had acquired an edge from the attrition with his malicious mirth. And Rathburn found that his seriousness weighted his anger and, since he would not sanction its outburst, made his defense clumsy. “I don’t understand you, Jake,” he said at last in a mollifying tone,—“to save my life I can’t understand you. You go fooling me along with a bait of rich float from month to month pretending to show me where you found it. And when I tell you that it is impossible that you could have found it here, and there, and elsewhere, because the formation proves you a liar, you make out all at once that you were mistaken, and we plod about, and you affect to recognize other landmarks, and so we have the whole tomfoolery over again. If you were half as smart as you think you are, you would realize that you can’t light hap-hazard on any similar rich spot—you have got to go where you found that piece of float, and follow it up or dig there.”