securely gagged and, at his back, his wrists were so stiffly pinioned
that when he struggled to free them he felt the nasty bite of
metal--evidently a buckle.

Above him he made out a pair of eyes that glittered down on him with an
unpleasant truculence.

"Git up an' come on," ordered a voice. "Ye'll hev ter excuse me fer
takin' yore rifle-gun an' pistol."

Slowly Tom rose and went, prodded into amenability by the muzzle of a
rifle in the small of his back. When he had been thus goaded to the
point where his horse was hitched his captor stripped saddle, bridle
and halter of their straps and ropes, and set the beast free. Some of
the commandeered tethers he employed to truss his prisoner up in a
manner that left him as helplessly immovable as a mummy.

"Now I reckon ye'll hev ter wait fer me a leetle," said Bear Cat with
brutal shortness. "Thar's still one more back thar ter attend ter."

Carrying with him bridle-reins and stirrup-straps, he disappeared again
into the defile. Creeping for the second time with the best of his
Indian-like stealth to the edge of the fire-lighted clearing, he saw
Jake Kinnard standing, with his eyes on the embers, ten feet away from
the rifle that was propped against a tree.

With a leap that sounded crashingly in the dead bushes Turner
catapulted himself into the lighted area, and as the moonshiner
wheeled, his hand going instinctively out toward his weapon, he found
himself covered from a distance of two yards.

"Hands overhead!--an' no noise," came the sharp warning, and had he
been inclined to disobey the words there was an avid glitter in the
eyes of the sudden visitor discouraging to argument.

"Lay down betwixt them two saplin's thar," was the next order, and
foaming with futile rage, Jake glanced about wildly--and discreetly did
as he was told.

Ten minutes later Turner rose from his knees, leaving behind him a man
gagged and staked out, Indian fashion, with feet harnessed to one
tree-trunk and hands to another.

Lying mute and harrowed with chagrin, he saw his copper coil battered
into shapelessness and his mash vat emptied upon the ground. Then he
saw Bear Cat Stacy disappear into the shadows, trophy-laden.

Dawn was near once more before Turner reached the Quarterhouse, and
from the hitching-rack the last mount had been ridden away. Before him,
still muffled against outcry, plodded Black Carmichael, seething with a
fury which would ride him like a mania until he had a