The sound of laughter and a noise like skylarking came from the rear of the house and the back yard.  Then I suddenly heard Rutli’s heavy tread on the veranda, but it was slow, deliberate, and so exaggerated in its weight that the whole house seemed to shake with it.  Then from the window I beheld an extraordinary sight!  It was Rutli, swaying from side to side, but steadily carrying with outstretched arms two of the squatter party, his hands tightly grasping their collars.  Yet I believe his touch was as gentle as with the violets.  His face was preternaturally grave; theirs, to my intense astonishment, while they hung passive from his arms, wore that fatuous, imbecile smile seen on the faces of those who lend themselves to tricks of acrobats and strong men in the arena.  He slowly traversed the whole length of one side of the house, walked down the steps to the gate, and then gravely deposited them outside.  I heard him say, “Dot vins der pet, ain’t it?” and immediately after the sharp click of the gate-latch.

Without understanding a thing that had happened, I rightly conceived this was the cue for my appearance with my revolver at the front door.  As I opened it I still heard the sound of laughter, which, however, instantly stopped at a sentence from Rutli, which I could not hear.  There was an oath, the momentary apparition of two furious and indignant faces over the fence; but these, however, seemed to be instantly extinguished and put down by the enormous palms of Rutli clapped upon their heads.  There was a pause, and then Rutli turned around and quietly joined me in the doorway.  But the gate was not again opened until the arrival of my partisans, when the house was clearly in my possession.

Safe inside with the door bolted, I turned eagerly to Rutli for an explanation.  It then appeared that during his occasional visits to the garden he had often been an object of amusement and criticism to the men on account of his size, which seemed to them ridiculously inconsistent with his great good humor, gentleness, and delicacy of touch.  They had doubted his strength and challenged his powers.  He had responded once or twice before, lifting weights or even carrying one of his critics at arm’s length for a few steps.  But he had reserved his final feat for this day and this purpose.  It was for a bet, which they had eagerly accepted, secure in their belief in his simplicity, the sincerity of his motives in coming there, and glad of the opportunity of a little Sunday diversion.  In their security they had not locked the door when they came out, and had not noticed that he had opened it.  This was his simple story.  His only comment, “I haf von der pet, but I dinks I shall nod gollect der money.”  The two men did not return that afternoon, nor did their comrades.  Whether they wisely conceived that a man who was so powerful in play might be terrible in earnest; whether they knew that his act, in which they had been willing performers, had been witnessed by passing citizens, who supposed it was skylarking; or whether their employer got tired of his expensive occupation, I never knew.  The public believed the latter; Rutli, myself, and the two men he had evicted alone kept our secret.