"Not ef I knows what's good fur me!" protested Tom, with a great horse-laugh. "What ails ye, boy? Ye talk like ye war teched in the head!"
"I went ter say ez Alf Coggin air thar waitin' fur ye," Jim began again, nodding his slandered head with great solemnity, "an' tole me ter tell ye ter kem thar quick."
He took no heed of the inaccuracy of the message; he was glancing fearfully over his shoulder, and the next minute scuttled down the road in a bee-line for home.
Tom hurried off briskly through the woods. "Waal, sir! I'm mighty nigh crazed ter know what Alf Coggin kin want o' me; goin' coon-huntin', mebbe," he speculated, as he drew within sight of an old lightning-scathed tree which stood beside the sulphur spring and stretched up, stark and white, in the dim light.
The clouds were blowing away from a densely instarred sky; the moon was hardly more than a crescent and dipping low in the west, but he could see the sombre outline of the opposite mountain, and the white mists that shifted in a ghostly and elusive fashion along the summit. The night was still, save for a late katydid, spared by the frost, and piping shrilly.
He experienced a terrible shock of surprise when a sudden voice—a voice he had never heard before—cried out sharply, "Hello there! Help! help!"
As he pressed tremulously forward, he beheld a sight which made him ask himself if it were possible that Alf Coggin had sent for him to join in some nefarious work which had ended in leaving a man—a stranger—bound to the old lightning-scathed tree.
Even in the uncertain light Tom could see that he was pallid and panting, evidently exhausted in some desperate struggle: there was blood on his face, his clothes were torn, and by all odds he was the angriest man that was ever waylaid and robbed.
"Ter-morrer he'll be jes' a-swoopin'!" thought Tom, tremulously untying the complicated knots, and listening to his threats of vengeance on the unknown robbers, "an' every critter on the mounting will git a clutch from his claws."
And in fact, it was hardly daybreak before the constable of the district, who lived hard by in the valley, was informed of all the details of the affair, so far as known to Tom or the "Traveler,"—for thus the mountaineers designated him, as if he were the only one in the world.