“Sam,” says Bill, “I suppose you’ll think I’m a renegade, but I couldn’t help it.  I’m a grown person with masculine proclivities and habits of self-defence, but there is a time when all systems of egotism and predominance fail.  The boy is gone.  I have sent him home.  All is off.  There was martyrs in old times,” goes on Bill, “that suffered death rather than give up the particular graft they enjoyed.  None of ’em ever was subjugated to such supernatural tortures as I have been.  I tried to be faithful to our articles of depredation; but there came a limit.”

“What’s the trouble, Bill?” I asks him.

“I was rode,” says Bill, “the ninety miles to the stockade, not barring an inch.  Then, when the settlers was rescued, I was given oats.  Sand ain’t a palatable substitute.  And then, for an hour I had to try to explain to him why there was nothin’ in holes, how a road can run both ways, and what makes the grass green.  I tell you, Sam, a human can only stand so much.  I takes him by the neck of his clothes and drags him down the mountain.  On the way he kicks my legs black-and-blue from the knees down; and I’ve got to have two or three bites on my thumb and hand cauterized.

“But he’s gone”—­continues Bill—­“gone home.  I showed him the road to Summit and kicked him about eight feet nearer there at one kick.  I’m sorry we lose the ransom; but it was either that or Bill Driscoll to the madhouse.”

Bill is puffing and blowing, but there is a look of ineffable peace and growing content on his rose-pink features.

“Bill,” says I, “there isn’t any heart disease in your family, is there?”

“No,” says Bill, “nothing chronic except malaria and accidents.  Why?”

“Then you might turn around,” says I, “and have a look behind you.”

Bill turns and sees the boy, and loses his complexion and sits down plump on the ground and begins to pluck aimlessly at grass and little sticks.  For an hour I was afraid for his mind.  And then I told him that my scheme was to put the whole job through immediately and that we would get the ransom and be off with it by midnight if old Dorset fell in with our proposition.  So Bill braced up enough to give the kid a weak sort of a smile and a promise to play the Russian in a Japanese war with him as soon as he felt a little better.

I had a scheme for collecting that ransom without danger of being caught by counterplots that ought to commend itself to professional kidnappers.  The tree under which the answer was to be left—­and the money later on—­was close to the road fence with big, bare fields on all sides.  If a gang of constables should be watching for any one to come for the note, they could see him a long way off crossing the fields or in the road.  But no, sirree!  At half-past eight I was up in that tree as well hidden as a tree toad, waiting for the messenger to arrive.

Exactly on time, a half-grown boy rides up the road on a bicycle, locates the pasteboard box at the foot of the fence-post, slips a folded piece of paper into it, and pedals away again back toward Summit.