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Suddenly in the silence he swore softly.

“What’s the matter?” said White.

The little nervous man replied, drawling out the words.

“It’s an ax,” he said. “We ought to have an ax.”

“That’s easy,” replied White. “We’ll pull up at the next house and send our young friend to borrow one.”

And they followed that plan. At a turn of the road we made out a house a few hundred yards above us on the slope of the hill. The car stopped and I went to borrow an ax.

I do not know how it happened that there was no dog about, for there are dogs at all these houses in the south. I looked outside, but there was no ax to be found. Then I looked in at the window.

There was a wood fire dying down in the fireplace, and a ladder leading to the loft. The person who lived there was evidently in his bed above. The man’s coat and boots were on the floor by the ladder, and beside the chimney there were some tools—a mattock, a hoe, and the ax for which I was looking. It was a hinged window secured on the inside by a button. The ax was safe from any method that I knew, and I went back to the hand car.