"Have you the skin of a wampum bird in that bale?" asked Mount, pleasantly. Elerson struck the pack with the flat of his hand; the mangy wolverine pelt crackled. "Green hides! Green hides!" laughed Mount, sarcastically. "Come, my friend, we're your customers. Down with your bales and I'll buy." Murphy had laid a heavy hand on the man's shoulder, halting him short in his tracks; Elerson, rifle cradled in the hollow of his left arm, poked his forefinger into the bales, then sniffed at the aperture. "There are green hides there!" he exclaimed, stepping back. "Jack, slip that pack off!" The man started forward, crying out that he had no time to waste, but Murphy jerked him back by the collar and Elerson seized his right arm. "Wait!" I said, sharply. "You cannot stop a man like this on the highway!" "You don't know us, sir," replied Mount, impudently. "Come, Colonel Ormond," added Elerson, almost savagely. "You're our captain no longer. Give way, sir. Answer for your own men, and we'll answer to Danny Morgan!" Mount, struggling to unfasten the pack, looked over his huge shoulders at me. "Not that we're not fond of you, sir; but we know this old fox now--" "You lie!" shrieked the man, hurling his full weight at Murphy and tearing his right arm free from Elerson's grip. There came a flash, an explosion; through a cloud of smoke I saw the fellow's right arm stretched straight up in the air, his hand clutching a smoking pistol, and Elerson holding the arm rigid in a grip of steel. [Illustration: "INSTANTLY MOUNT TRIPPED THE MAN".] Instantly Mount tripped the man flat on his face in the dust, and Murphy jerked his arms behind his back, tying them fast at the wrists with a cord which Elerson cut from the pack and flung to him. "Rip up thim bales, Jack!" said Murphy. "Yell find them full o' powther an' ball an' cutlery, sorr, or I'm a liar!" he added to me. "This limb o' Lucifer is wan o' Francy McCraw's renegados!--Danny Redstock, sorr, th' tirror av the Sacandaga!" Redstock! I had seen him at Broadalbin that evening in May, threatening the angry settlers with his rifle, when Dorothy and the Brandt-Meester and I had ridden over with news of smoke in the hills. Murphy tied the prostrate man's legs, pulled him across the dusty road to the bushes, and laid him on his back under a great maple-tree. Mount, knife in hand, ripped up the bales of crackling peltry, and Elerson delved in among the skins, flinging them right and left in his impatient search. "There's no powder here," he exclaimed, rising to his knees on the road and staring at Mount; "nothing but badly cured beaver and mangy musk-rat." "Well, he baled 'em to conceal something!" insisted Mount. "No man packs in this moth-eaten stuff for love of labor. What's that parcel in the bottom?" "Not powder," replied Elerson, tossing it out, where it rebounded, crackling.