Both would have liked to credit this, but Baintree shook his head. “_I_ don’t believe Keale fell into any cave,” Rathburn presently resumed,—“a deft-footed mountaineer! He either went in there searching for silver, or he was put in there for some purpose, or he has run away from his matrimonial infelicity and the despot of Broomsedge Cove.” He paused to kick the chunks of the logs together, between the stones that served as fire-dogs, for they were burnt out now save for their bulky and charred ends. The flames leaped up anew. The smoke had ceased to puff into the room, but its aroma, with the pungent fragrance of the wood, lingered in the air. The worm, in which Jake Baintree had descried a parallel of cruelly perplexed anguish, was gone, and the world was as if it had never been. The sinuous contortions of his fear and harassment continued with hardly more hope of ultimate rescue. Nevertheless, like the worm, he could but strive. “Eugene,” he said, “let’s leave the cave alone. Su’thin’ dreadful will kem o’ it ef we go meddlin’ thar. Ye know ye don’t want ter put me in no danger wuss’n I be in now. Ye wouldn’t, now would ye?” in an unctuous, coaxing voice, and with an appealing look. “Why, not for worlds, Jake, not for worlds!” exclaimed Rathburn heartily. A sigh of relief was on the lips of the suspected man, a gleam of renewing life in his jaded eye. There had not yet been time to evolve doubt, suspicion, qualification, before Rathburn spoke again. “Nothing that I am going to do can injure anybody. I was placed in far greater jeopardy by your concealments and mystery about the forge than ever you will be by anything I counsel or do.” “Ye mean ye won’t go ter the cave?” said Baintree, his lips dry and moving with seeming difficulty. “Now don’t be an ignoramus and a fool, Jake. Of course I shall look for more of the float about the cave. I believe that’s where the man found it. I should be a fit subject for the lunatic asylum if I didn’t search there, and that’s just what you are. No harm in the world can come of it. Why,” taking a bit of paper from his pocket and deftly rolling a cigarette,—“why, Jake,”—he spoke in answer to Baintree’s silent look,—“what would you have done if, some of those days when we were at Jepson’s house, I had stumbled on the mouth of that cave?” He cocked the cigarette between his teeth, its tiny red tip brightly flaring, for the room was growing dull and dusky, and looked with an expression of good-natured argument at Baintree across the hearth. The mountaineer’s ruminative eyes were fixed upon him. “I tuk good pains ye shouldn’t,” he admitted, in a tone, however, which implied that he had yielded the previous points of controversy. “I never guided ye in that d’rection.”