“Shut your mouth,” said Mac Strann bluntly.  “I need quiet now.”

For they were now close to the house.  Mac Strann brought his horse to a jog trot and cast a semi-circle skirting the house and bringing him behind the barns.  Here he retreated to a little jutting point of land from behind which the house was invisible, and there dismounted.

Haw-Haw Langley followed example reluctantly.  He complained:  “I ain’t never heard before of a man leavin’ his hoss behind him!  It ain’t right and it ain’t policy.”

His leader, however, paid no attention to this grumbling.  He skirted back behind the barns, walking with a speed which extended even the long legs of Haw-Haw Langley.  Most of the stock was turned out in the corrals.  Now and then a horse stamped, or a bull snorted from the fenced enclosures, but from the barns they heard not a sound.  Now Mac Strann paused.  They had reached the largest of the barns, a long, low structure.

“This here,” said Mac Strann, “is where that hoss must be.  They wouldn’t run a hoss like that with others.  They’d keep him in a big stall by himself.  We’ll try this one, Haw-Haw.”

But Haw-Haw drew back at the door.  The interior was black as the hollow of a throat as soon as Mac Strann rolled back the sliding door, and Haw-Haw imagined evil eyes glaring and twinkling at him along the edges of the darkness.

“The wolf!” he cautioned, grasping the shoulder of his companion.  “You ain’t goin’ to walk onto that wolf, Mac?”

The latter struck down Haw-Haw’s hand.

“A wolf makes a noise before it jumps,” he whispered, “and that warnin’ is all the light I need.”

Now their eyes grew somewhat accustomed to the dark and Haw-Haw could make out, vaguely, the posts of the stalls to his right.  He could not tell whether or not some animal might be lying down between the posts, but Mac Strann, pausing at every stall, seemed to satisfy himself at a glance.  Right down the length of the barn they passed until they reached a wall at the farther end.

“He ain’t here,” sighed Haw-Haw, with relief.  “Mac, if I was you, I’d wait till they was light before I went huntin’ that wolf.”

“He ought to be here,” growled Mac Strann, and lighted a match.  The flame spurted in a blinding flash from the head of the match and then settled down into a steady yellow glow.  By that brief glow Mac Strann looked up and down the wall.  The match burned out against the calloused tips of his fingers.

“That wall,” mused Strann, “ain’t made out of the same timber as the side of the barn.  That wall is whole years newer.  Haw-Haw, that ain’t the end of the barn.  They’s a holler space beyond it.”  He lighted another match, and then cursed softly in delight.  “Look!” he commanded.

At the farther side of the wall was the glitter of metal—­the latch of a door opening in the wooden wall.  Mac Strann set it ajar and Haw-Haw peered in over the big man’s shoulder.  He saw first a vague and formless glimmer.  Then he made out a black horse lying down in the centre of a box stall.  The animal plunged at once to its feet, and crowding as far as possible away against the wall, turned its head and stared at them with flashing eyes.