cleared the air and steadied the
intruder as if Music Mountain itself had been lifted off his
nerves.

He tried again: "Where are you, Shike?" he growled. "What's this stuff
on the floor?" he continued, shuffling his way ostentatiously to the
other side of the room. But his noise-making was attended with the
utmost caution. He had dropped, like a shot, flat on the floor and
crawled, feeling his way, to the opposite side of the room, only to
find, after much trouble, that the bed in the darkness was there, but
it was empty. De Spain rose. For a moment he was nonplussed. An inside
room remained, but Scott had said there was no bed within it. He felt
his way toward the inner door. This was where he expected to find it,
and it was closed. He laid a hand gingerly on the latch. "Where are
you, Shike?" he demanded again, this time with an impatient expletive
summoned for the occasion. A second fearful snore answered him. De
Spain, relieved, almost laughed as he pushed the door open, though
not sure whether a curse or a shot would greet him. He got neither.
And a welcome surprise in the dim light came through a stuffy pane of
glass at one end of the room. It revealed at the other end a man
stretched asleep on a wall bunk--a man that would, in all likelihood,
have heard the stealthiest sound had any effort been made to conceal
it, but to whose ears the rough voices of a mountain cabin are mere
sleeping-potions.

The sleeper was destined, a moment later, to a ruder awakening than
even his companion outlaws ever gave him. Lying unsuspectingly on his
back, he woke to feel a hand laid lightly on his shoulder. The
instinct of self-preservation acted like a flash. His eyes opened and
his hands struck out like cat's paws to the right and left: no knife
and no revolver met them. Instead, in the semidarkness a strange face
bent over him. His fists shot out together, only to be caught in a
vise that broke his arms in two at the elbows, and forced them back
against his throat. Like lightning, he threw up his knees, drew
himself into a heap, and shot himself out, hands, arms, legs, back,
everything into one terrific spring. But the sinewy vise above only
gave for the shock, then it closed again relentlessly in. A knee, like
an anvil, pushed inexorably into his stomach and heart and lungs.
Another lay across his right arm, and his struggling left arm he could
not, though his eyes burst with the strain from their sockets, release
from wher