"Seems to me you're mighty fond of askin' questions," sneered the tramp, "an' you don't take the most comfortable places to do it in. Well, fire ahead, and I'll answer if I like."
Tom paused a moment. He looked about in the surrounding blackness, as if to note whether help was at hand, or perhaps to discover if the person he had come out to meet was near. But, there was no movement. There was no sound save the swish of the rain about the two figures so strangely contrasted, confronting one another. Off in the distance, down the hill, could be seen the dim lights in the old farmhouse of Mr. Appleby.
"Well?" asked the tramp, in a hard voice. "Go ahead, an' get done with it. I'm tired of standing here." He had released his thumb from the spring of the electric torch, and the light went out, making the spot seem all the blacker by contrast.
Tom drew in his breath sharply. Taking a stride forward, and reaching out his two muscular arms in the darkness, he asked in a low voice:
"How much did you pay for that cyanide of potassium, Jacob Crouse?"
Tom could hear the surprised gasp from the tramp, he could hear his teeth chatter, not with cold, but from fright, and a moment later, with a half audible cry, the man turned and fled away in the storm and darkness.
"No, you don't!" cried Tom, and with, a spring he sought to grab the ragged fellow. But the lad was just the fraction of a second too late, and though he did manage to grasp a portion of the tramp's coat, the ragged and rotten cloth parted in his hand.
"I'll get you yet!" exclaimed Tom fiercely, as he took up the pursuit in the darkness. He had been expecting this, and yet it had come so suddenly that he was not quite prepared for it. He had hoped to get near enough to the tramp, undetected, to grab him before asking that question which so startled the fellow. Now the man, on whom so much depended in the clearing of Tom's name, was sprinting down the farm lane.
"My ankle!" gasped Tom, as a sudden turn on it sent a twinge of pain through him. "If it wasn't for that I'd stand a better chance. And yet I'm not going to give up. I've got to get him, or all my work will go for nothing."
On he ran, the rain-soaked ground giving forth scarcely a sound save when he or the man ahead of him stepped into some mud puddle, of which there were many.