t
cast at the stake, Mr. Trimm saw, pinned flat against the broad strap of
his suspenders, a shiny, silvery-looking disk. Having pitched the shoe,
the smith moved over into the shade, so that he almost touched the clump
of undergrowth that half buried Mr. Trimm's protecting boulder. The
near-sighted eyes of the fugitive banker could make out then what the
flat, silvery disk was, and Mr. Trimm cowered low in his covert behind
the rock, holding his hands down between his knees, fearful that a gleam
from his burnished wristlets might strike through the screen of weed
growth and catch the inquiring eye of the smith. So he stayed, not
daring to move, until a dinner horn sounded somewhere in the cluster of
cottages beyond, and the smith, closing the doors of his shop, went away
with the three yokels.

Then Mr. Trimm, stooping low, stole back into the deep woods again. In
his extremity he was ready to risk making a bid for the hire of a
blacksmith's aid to rid himself of his bonds, but not a blacksmith who
wore a deputy sheriff's badge pinned to his suspenders.

* * * * *

He caught himself scraping his wrists up and down again against the
rough, scrofulous trunk of a shellbark hickory. The irritation was
comforting to the swollen skin. The cuffs, which kept catching on the
bark and snagging small fragments of it loose, seemed to Mr. Trimm to
have been a part and parcel of him for a long time--almost as long a
time as he could remember. But the hands which they clasped so close
seemed like the hands of somebody else. There was a numbness about them
that made them feel as though they were a stranger's hands which never
had belonged to him. As he looked at them with a sort of vague curiosity
they seemed to swell and grow, these two strange, fettered hands, until
they measured yards across, while the steel bands shrunk to the thinness
of piano wire, cutting deeper and deeper into the flesh. Then the hands
in turn began to shrink down and the cuffs to grow up into great, thick
things as cumbersome as the couplings of a freight car. A voice that Mr.
Trimm dimly recognized as his own was saying something about four
million dollars over and over again.

Mr. Trimm roused up and shook his head angrily to clear it. He rubbed
his eyes free of the clouding delusion. It wouldn't do for him to be
getting light-headed.

* * * * *

On a flat, shelving bluff, forty feet above