They ploughed through the burdocks, the prickly burrs causing Johnny Kent to stride high and wide. The stranger lay as he had fallen. The light revealed him as a powerfully built man of middle age with reddish hair and a stubbled growth of beard. The dilapidated shirt and trousers were stained with earth and grass, and held together by a leather belt. His captors were about to scrutinize him more closely when he opened his eyes, groaned, and raised himself upon his elbow with an unexpected display of vitality. Bidding Johnny Kent stand by with the lantern, O’Shea caught up the hickory club and flourished it as a hint that unconditional surrender was advisable.
The prisoner blinked stupidly at the lantern and made no effort to rise. His aspect was not in the least ferocious. O’Shea could scarcely believe that this was the madman who had threatened to sink his teeth in him and discommode his windpipe. Rough-featured he was and unkempt beyond words, but he conveyed a most incongruous impression of kindly and harmless simplicity, and O’Shea was the more amazed to hear him mutter in his hoarse, curiously thickened accents:
“Can you spare a chew of tobacco, shipmate?”
“Well, I’ll be jiggered,” exclaimed Johnny Kent, absently feeling for his trousers’ pockets which were not there. “You certainly did tame him a whole lot, Cap’n Mike.”
“’Tis a riddle I cannot fathom at all,” was the reply.
Indignation got the upper hand of the engineer’s generous impulse and he explosively demanded of the stranger:
“What do you mean by tryin’ to set fire to my barn, you addle-headed, misbegotten, murderous son of a sculpin? I wish Cap’n Mike had knocked the block clean off you.”
The queer visitor showed no resentment, but smiled in an amiable sort of fashion and rubbed a large, red welt just above his right ear. Never a word did he say, although the twain plied him with questions. His demeanor was as friendly as if they had done him some signal service.
“If you can’t talk, maybe ye can walk,” gustily shouted O’Shea. “We will clap ye under hatches for to-night and investigate by daylight. We have caught an odd fish this time, Johnny.”
“Prod him into the wood-shed and lock him up,” grumbled the other. “He’s plumb twistified in his mental works, and I can’t make head or tail of him.”