ked another helping. "They added to
it. I never knew what hunger was before. Bring on anything you've
got, and I'll tackle it. All except fish. I'm ashamed now to look a
fish in the face."

It was a long time before he had had enough. Then with a look of
seraphic contentment on his face he sat back, loosened his belt a
notch, and sighed with perfect happiness.

"Now fellows, fire away," he grinned, "and I'll tell you the sad story
of my life."

They needed no second invitation, for they had been fairly bursting
with eagerness and curiosity. Questions rained on him thick and fast.
Their fists clenched when he told them of the cruelties to which he had
been subjected. They were loud in admiration of the way in which he
had met and overcome his difficulties. They roared with laughter when
he told them of the alarm clock, and Tom himself, to whom it had been
no joke at the time, laughed now as heartily as the rest.

"So that's the way you got those ropes gnawed through when you were at
the farmhouse," exclaimed Frank, when Tom told them of the aid that had
come to him from the rats. "We figured out everything else but that.
We thought that you must have frayed them against a piece of glass."

"I used to hate rats," said Tom, "but I don't now. I'll never have a
trap set in any house of mine as long as I live."

"If you'd only known how safe it would have been to walk downstairs
that day!" mourned Frank.

"Wouldn't it have been bully?" agreed Tom. "Think of the satisfaction
it would have been to have had the bulge on that lieutenant who was
going to hang me. I wouldn't have done a thing to him!"

"Well, we got him anyway and that's one comfort," remarked Bart.

"To think that you were legging it away from the house just as we were
coming toward it," said Billy.

"It was the toughest kind of luck," admitted Tom. "Yet perhaps it was
all for the best, for then I might not have had the chance to get the
best of Rabig."

"Rabig?" exclaimed Frank, for the traitor had not yet been mentioned in
Tom's narrative.

"What about him?" questioned Billy eagerly.

"Hold your horses," grinned Tom. "I'll get to him in good time. If it
hadn't been for Rabig I wouldn't be here. I owe that much to the
skunk, anyway."

It was hard for them to wait, but they were fully rewarded when Tom
described the way in which he had trapped and stripped the renegade,
and left him lying in the woods.

"Bully boy!" exclaimed F