"He sure was. Strothers found him in the Hophra House bar, and the line of talk he turned loose would have set a wet blanket afire. Just the same, he had to go along with Jimmie and get himself locked up." "That is the first step; now if you're ready, we'll take the next." Harding rode forward to marshal his troop, and when the advance began Starbuck shut off his car lamps and held his place at the rear of the straggling column, juggling throttle and spark until the car kept even pace with the horses and the low humming of the motor was indistinguishable above the muffled drumming of hoof-beats. For the first mile or so the midnight silence was unbroken save by the subdued progress noises and the murmurings of the near-by river in its bed. Once Smith took the wheel while Starbuck rolled and lighted a cigarette, and once again, in obedience to a word from the mine owner, he turned the flash-light upon the gasolene pressure-gauge. In the fulness of time it was Starbuck who harked back to the talk which had been so abruptly broken off at the waiting halt in the Little Creek road. "Let's not head into this ruction with an unpicked bone betwixt us, John," he began gently. "Maybe I said too much, back yonder at the foot of the hill." "No; you didn't say too much," was the low-toned reply. And then: "Billy, I've had a strange experience this summer; the strangest a man ever lived through, I believe. A few months ago I was jerked out of my place in life and set down in another place where practically everything I had learned as a boy and man had to be forgotten. It was as if my life had been swept clean of everything that I knew how to use--like a house gutted of its well-worn and familiar furniture, and handed back to its tenant to be refitted with whatever could be found and made to serve. I don't know that I'm making it understandable to you, but----" "Yes, you are," broke in the man at the wheel. "I've had to turn two or three little double somersaults myself in the years that are gone." "They used to call me 'Monty-Boy,' back there in Lawrenceville, and I fitted the name," Smith went on. "I was neither better nor worse than thousands of other home-bred young fellows just like me, nor different from them in any essential way. I had my little tin-basin round of work and play, and I lived in it. I've spent half an hour, many a time, in a shop picking out the exactly right shade in a tie to wear with the socks that I had, perhaps, spent another half-hour in selecting." "I'm getting you," said Starbuck, not without friendly sympathy. "Go on."