Baintree, taken by surprise, his eyes starting out of his head, his face almost purple, both unnerved hands grasping Rathburn’s lifted arms, seemed in these intervals, in catching his breath, to regain a modicum of his faculties. He ceased his instinctive efforts to tear away the strong clutch at his throat. He swiftly passed his arms around the waist of his assailant, and with a sudden wrench sought to fling him to the floor. But the lithe Rathburn kept his feet, and the two went staggering together across the room; crashing over the chairs; dragging the saddle that lay on the floor under their clumsy, stumbling steps, the stirrup-irons clattering on the puncheons; now swaying this way and now that; overturning the table, with its scanty store of crockery breaking unheeded on the hearth-stone. The red firelight, sole witness of the strife, flickered bravely on the brown walls; the green wood, with the sap still in the fibres, sang a mellow elfin song, fine and faint, all unheard. Their shadows had lost the pacific habit of many evenings of fraternal communings when the silhouettes smoked many a pipe in Barmecidal fashion, and drank together in dumb show, and imitated their hilarious, genial, and hopeful gestures. Now, adopting their example anew, they reeled furiously after them as they went. Baintree’s vise-like grip failed when the pressure on his throat was renewed; the strength of the convulsive struggle, in which all his unconscious physical forces were asserted, proved futile. There was a different expression in his bulging eyes—he was beginning to believe that the reply to the question was the price of his life. Perhaps Rathburn noticed and interpreted the sign of subduement. The pressure of the deft fingers relaxed again. “Where did you find the float—tell me!” he reiterated. “I never fund it,” Baintree gasped. The fingers tightened on his throat, then loosened, for he was about to speak again. “Sam’l Keale fund it.” “Where—where?” demanded Rathburn, his teeth set hard and his breath fluttering. “I dunno,” gasped the victim,—“he wouldn’t never tell me!” “You killed him for that?” Rathburn asked swiftly—suddenly his fingers began to tremble. Had he too been tempted to this hideous crime through the lure of that bit of float? “What ever became of him?” He asked this question less with the desire of response than with an instinctive effort to elude even to his own conscience the tracing of so repulsive a parallel. But Baintree could not divine his train of thought nor that aught had served to weaken that clutch upon his throat save the wish to facilitate reply. He was in momentary expectation of its renewal. He had yielded and yielded utterly. “I never knowed,” he sputtered,—“ez the Lord air my witness I never knowed. He jes’ disappeared one day, an’ I traced his steps ter the mouth o’ a cave,—thar hed been a rain,—an’ I never seen him agin.” “Was the cave where Jepson found his hat and coat?” Rathburn demanded.