Ike was not reassured by the reception of his disclosure. And he had not told the worst of his troubles. More than once of late he had seen Skimpy and Binwell together. He had felt no resentment that his friend had been forbidden association with him, to avoid contact with this elderly villain. It seemed wise in Skimpy’s father, and he only wished that his own had been sufficiently uninfluenced and firm to have determined upon a similar course. Noting the constable in the clump of sour-wood, and with his own recollection of Binwell climbing down Keedon Bluffs, he had been smitten with terror for Skimpy’s sake. He knew that Binwell had some reason of his own for affecting the lad’s society. In cudgeling his mind for the man’s motive he had brought to light the true one which might not have been so readily presented were not Keedon Bluffs so continually in his thoughts of late. He was sure that Binwell wished Skimpy, being light and slim, to explore the hollows of the Bluffs—with what end in view he had not definitely known until to-night. Nevertheless the conviction that his simple-hearted friend had become involved in serious danger had been strong enough that afternoon to induce him to go to Skimpy’s home. Old man Sawyer sat on the porch morosely smoking his pipe, and Ike paused at the fence and whistled for Skimpy—a shrill, preconcerted signal; it was in the deepest confidence that he was about to impart his suspicions and his warnings and he did not feel justified in including the elder Sawyer in the colloquy. It might be a slander on Jerry Binwell, after all. “An’ I don’t wanter be a backbiter like him,” said Ike to himself. The whistle brought Skimpy promptly out from the barn. To Ike’s surprise, however, he did not approach the fence, which was at some distance from the house. He simply stood near the porch with his old hat on the back of his red head, his long arms crooked, his hands thrust into his pockets, and upon his face a sardonic grin that seemed broader than anything in his whole physical economy. “Kem down hyar. I hev a word ter say ter ye,” called Ike. He felt as if he were dreaming when instead of replying Skimpy swayed himself grotesquely and mockingly about, and began to sing with outrageous fluctuations from the key “Oh-aw-e-Mister Coon! Oh-aw-i-Mister Ky-une.” It seemed a frenzied imitation of himself, and Ike was about to speak when Skimpy, putting his fingers in his ears that he might not hear Ike, although to the casual observer it might well seem that he had good reasons for not wanting to hear himself, bellowed and piped mockingly, “Oh-aw-i-Mister Kyune! That’s the way he ’lows I sing,” he observed in an aside to his father, who might have been carved from a corn-cob, for all the animation he showed, except to silently smoke his corn-cob pipe. “I never!” cried Ike indignantly; “somebody hev been settin’ ye ag’in me—a backbitin’ scamp! An’ I’ll be bound I know who ’twar.”