"Thank you again, Mr. Greeley."
"Since the raid on Teale's——" Tod drawled uncomfortably—"there's them as is scared. I ain't standing up or setting down for them Speak Easies back o' The Hollow, but business is business, and no man knows who's going to get struck so long as——" Greeley glanced cautiously about—"so long as—you're hiding what you are hiding!"
For a moment Marcia Lowe tried to readjust her thoughts and get them into some sort of connection; finally she laughed, laughed so long and so noiselessly that Greeley grew nervous.
"Lord, ma'am!" he faltered, "you can't afford to take it that-er-way lest you've got your place full of 'em!"
"Oh! Mr. Greeley. They think, the club thinks I have something to do with the raid? Why I did not know, until some one told me, that there had been one. Come, I want you to see what I am hiding!"
She motioned her guest to the doorway of the lean-to.
"Look!" she whispered.
For a moment Greeley did not recognize the wan, helpless creature huddled on the bed; so small, so pitiful was the unconscious man that he seemed a stranger. Then in amaze and half terror, Tod breathed:
"Mart Morley! What you—doing—to—him?"
Marcia Lowe's eyes were full of tears, and her trembling lips were hardly able to frame the words: