This ruffian paused now half way inside the door and looked about him. A grin spread across his wide, high-cheeked face. He reached down silently to the stout spruce stick, charred at one end, that stood between him and the stove. Grasping it he advanced on tiptoe, silent as a cat, toward the woman. He was convinced that her sight was poor, almost convinced that she did not see at all, because she made no move when he stopped, the stick drawn back. With a swift sweep he struck the barrel of the revolver a blow so forceful that it was cast quite across the room. He sprang upon it at once. Mary Warren cried out, drew back as far as she could. The impact of the blow had crushed a finger of the hand that held the weapon. She wrung her hands, held up the bloody finger. "Who are you--what do you want?" she moaned. "That's what you get when you run against a real one," sneered the voice of the man, who now stood fully within the little room. "Just keep quiet now." "What do you mean? What are you going to do?" She felt about again for some weapon, anything, but could find nothing. "That's a purty question to ask, ain't it now?" sneered her assailant. She could catch the reek of raw spirits around him as he stood near by. She shuddered. "Sim!" she called out aloud at last. "Sim! Sim!" The name caused a vast mirth in her captor. "Sim! Sim!" he mocked her. "Lot o' help Sim'd be if he was here, wouldn't he? As though I cared for that dirty loafer. He's going to git all that's comin' to _him_. Aw, Sim! He'll leave us Soviet sabcats alone. We're thinkers. We're free men. We run our own government, and we run our own selves, too." The liquor had made the man loquacious. He must boast. She tried to guess what he might mean. But something in the muddled brain of the man retained recollection of an earlier purpose. "Stay inside, you!" he said. "I got work to do. If you go outside I'll kill you. Do you hear me?" She heard his feet passing, heard them upon the scattered boards near the door, then muffled in the grass. She could not guess what he was about. He went to the edge of the standing grass beyond the dooryard, and began sowing, broadcast, spikes, nails, bits of iron, intended to ruin the sickle blades of the mowers when they came to work. Even he thrust a spike or bolt here or there upright in the ground to catch a blade. Mary Warren where she sat knew none of this, but she heard a sound presently which she could not mistake--the crackling of fire! The scent of it came to her nostrils. The man had fired the meager remnants of Sim Gage's hay stacks. She heard next a shot or two, but could not tell what they meant. She could not know that he was firing into the dumb, gaunt cattle which hung about the ricks.