Biedenbach, with tears in his eyes, held that Wickson must die, and was quite relieved when we outvoted him and his horrible proposition.  On the other hand, we could not dream of allowing the young oligarch to depart.

“I’ll tell you what to do,” Ernest said.  “We’ll keep him and give him an education.”

“I bespeak the privilege, then, of enlightening him in jurisprudence,” Biedenbach cried.

And so a decision was laughingly reached.  We would keep Philip Wickson a prisoner and educate him in our ethics and sociology.  But in the meantime there was work to be done.  All trace of the young oligarch must be obliterated.  There were the marks he had left when descending the crumbling wall of the hole.  This task fell to Biedenbach, and, slung on a rope from above, he toiled cunningly for the rest of the day till no sign remained.  Back up the canyon from the lip of the hole all marks were likewise removed.  Then, at twilight, came John Carlson, who demanded Wickson’s shoes.

The young man did not want to give up his shoes, and even offered to fight for them, till he felt the horseshoer’s strength in Ernest’s hands.  Carlson afterward reported several blisters and much grievous loss of skin due to the smallness of the shoes, but he succeeded in doing gallant work with them.  Back from the lip of the hole, where ended the young man’s obliterated trial, Carlson put on the shoes and walked away to the left.  He walked for miles, around knolls, over ridges and through canyons, and finally covered the trail in the running water of a creek-bed.  Here he removed the shoes, and, still hiding trail for a distance, at last put on his own shoes.  A week later Wickson got back his shoes.

That night the hounds were out, and there was little sleep in the refuge.  Next day, time and again, the baying hounds came down the canyon, plunged off to the left on the trail Carlson had made for them, and were lost to ear in the farther canyons high up the mountain.  And all the time our men waited in the refuge, weapons in hand—­automatic revolvers and rifles, to say nothing of half a dozen infernal machines of Biedenbach’s manufacture.  A more surprised party of rescuers could not be imagined, had they ventured down into our hiding-place.

I have now given the true disappearance of Philip Wickson, one-time oligarch, and, later, comrade in the Revolution.  For we converted him in the end.  His mind was fresh and plastic, and by nature he was very ethical.  Several months later we rode him, on one of his father’s horses, over Sonoma Mountains to Petaluma Creek and embarked him in a small fishing-launch.  By easy stages we smuggled him along our underground railway to the Carmel refuge.