sobs racked him. Deserted,
terrified, he called upon the only friend he knew.

"Ma! Please, Ma!"

Munn lifted him up. Dick Roamer helped him, and between them they
drew him to the door, his heart-broken calls and cries piercing
every corner of the room.

They whisked him out of Mrs. Brenner's sight as quickly as they could.
The other men piled out of the door, blocking the last vision of her
son, but his bleating cries came shrilling back on the foggy air.

Mart closed the door. Mrs. Brenner stood where she had been when
Tobey had first felt the closing of the trap and had started to run.
She looked as though she might have been carved there. Her light
breath seemed to do little more than lift her flat chest.

Mart turned from the door. His eyes glittered. He advanced upon her
hungrily like a huge cat upon an enchanted mouse.

"So you thought you'd yelp on me, did you?" he snarled, licking his
lips. "Thought you'd put me away, didn't you? Get me behind the bars,
eh?"

"Blood!" moaned the old woman in the corner. "Blood!"

Mart strode to the table, pulling out from the bosom of his shirt a
lumpy package wrapped in his handkerchief. He threw it down on the
table. It fell heavily with a sharp ringing of coins.

"But I fooled you this time! Mart wasn't so dull this time, eh?" He
turned toward her again.

Between them, disturbed in his resting-place on the table, the big
bruised yellow butterfly raised himself on his sweeping wings.

Mart drew back a little. The butterfly flew toward Olga and brushed
her face with a velvety softness.

Then Brenner lurched toward her, his face black with fury, his arm
upraised. She stood still, looking at him with wide eyes in which a
gleam of light showed.

"You devil!" she said, in a whispering voice. "You killed that man!
You gave Tobey the watch and the axe! You changed shoes with him!
You devil! You devil!"

He drew back for a blow. She did not move. Instead she mocked him,
trying to smile.

"You whelp!" she taunted him. "Go on and hit me! I ain't running!
And if you don't break me to bits I'm going to the sheriff and I'll
tell him what you said to me just now. And he'll wonder how you got
all that money in your pockets. He knows we're as poor as church mice.
How you going to explain what you got?"

"I ain't going to be such a fool as to keep it on me!" Mart crowed
with venomous mirth. "You nor the sheriff nor any one won't find it
where I'm going to put it!"

Th