The story, as we know it, begins on that sultry afternoon in August when young Ernest Hunter came into the village of Leadanfoot and dismounted wearily from his battered bicycle. A day of pedaling over the Scotch hills had made him regret, somewhat, his decision to visit Glasgow on his holiday trip. One of the numberless students who swarm over the English highways each summer, on cycles and afoot, he began to think that this side-trip over the border was, after all, a mistake.

But once inside the dark, cool little inn, with a mug of foaming cider at hand, these doubts fled and the world again seemed a very pleasant place. This Hunter, lengthy and stooping of figure, with a thin, humorous face, was a social type, and looked about now for possible company. Except for himself there was no one in the long, low room but the two men who stood near the open door, the stocky, aproned innkeeper and a white-whiskered, wrinkled old man with whom he was conversing. His cider finished, Hunter rose and lounged toward them, catching a few words of their talk.

“Thunder? No!” the innkeeper was exclaiming. “Who ever heard thunder like that?”

The other was nodding his agreement when their conversation was broken into by Hunter’s friendly voice.

“Thunderstorm here lately?” he asked. “I came through a bad one down at Carlisle, Wednesday. A messy sort of thing. Lightning fired a house there.”

The host contemplated him doubtfully before replying.

“It was not a thunderstorm we spoke of,” he told him. “There was a queer thing here—I don’t just know—McAndrews here heard it, and so did I.”

He paused, but Hunter was interested, and questioning him further, found that the subject of discussion was a series of strange detonations that had been heard throughout the village on the night before, a succession of deep-toned, rumbling explosions that seemed to come from the group of hills west of Leadanfoot. All in the village had heard the sounds, and most had set it down as distant thunder, but the innkeeper quite evidently disagreed.

“Like no thunder you ever heard,” he assured Hunter. “Boom—boom—boom—boom—boom! Regular, like a big cannon firing. I’ve heard enough thunder in my time, and this sound was not like it, not like it at all. Eh, McAndrews?”

The wrinkled oldster sagely nodded agreement.

“Maybe it was blasting you heard,” Hunter suggested. “Some farmer up there doing something of that kind, perhaps?”

For a moment the innkeeper contemplated him with that fine scorn with which the rural native regards a stranger ignorant of local geography. “Farmer up there!” he repeated, in the tone with which one would reject an unworthy statement. “Why, there’s not a house through all those hills. Too steep they are, and wild. I doubt if a single soul has lived there for the last ten years.”