"I can't take issue with you here," he said with a raucous laugh. "And now, Chief, jest one thing more: Would you mind tellin' us whut your aim was in holdin' your nose over that there brush fire a bit ago?"
"My head has been giving me some trouble," I said. "I was curing myself with the aid of the smoke."
"One minute a nut and the next minute a ham," he murmured, half to himself. Dropping his pitchfork, he stretched his hands toward me. "I s'pose," he added, "it ain't no use to ask you when you got out?"
In a flash it came to me—I had often read that the victims of a certain form of mania imagined all others to be insane. My plain and straightforward answers to his vague and rambling interrogations had failed of the desired effect. Being themselves mad, they thought me mad. It was a horrifying situation.
I rose to my feet—I had been kneeling throughout this extraordinary interview—with a confused thought of eluding their clutches and fleeing from them. In imagination I already saw my murdered form hidden in the trackless wilds.
"No, you don't!" exclaimed the whiskered man, placing violent and detaining hands on me. "That's all right," he continued, as the son closed in on me: "I kin handle the little killdee by myself.... Now, sonny," he went on, again directing himself to me as I struggled and writhed, helpless in his grasp, "you come along with me!"
"Hold on!" called the son. "There's a lot of other stuff here—blankets and truck. He's been makin' quite a collection."
"Never mind," bade his parent, roughly turning me about and from behind propelling my resisting form violently forward. "I reckin they was gifts from the Mound Builders, too. We'll come back later on and sort out the plunder."
As I was shoved along I endeavoured to explain. I exclaimed; I cried out; I entreated them to stop and to hearken. My pleadings were of no avail and, I am constrained to believe, would have been of no avail even had not distress and agitation rendered me to an extent incoherent. My abductors only urged me onward through the woods at great speed.
"Gee! Hear him rave, dad!" I heard the son pant from behind me.