tectives at work on that.

"Then this dispatch to Alice, I wonder if she had still left a
sneaking fondness for him! Who can read a woman's heart? It's like
judging the depth of water by its smoothness: all mere conjecture.
Half the women are liars, and the other half hide more than half the
truth under their silken breastplates. They fight with double-edged
lies as their keenest weapons.

"Unless Clayton was a very deep rascal, he certainly intended to go
on West. Where the devil is he? Kidnapped, and held till the swag
is safe? Dead? No!"

A guilty spasm of conscience suggested that the missing cashier
might have secreted the funds and fled, to make private terms later
from his hiding place, with the wary Hugh.

"He knew nothing, he suspected nothing of the Detroit land deal,"
finally decided Ferris. "It's just a case of plain, ordinary thief!"

The ambitious scoundrel had decided to conceal the finding of
Clayton's dispatches and carbon-book from all the local officials
of the company.

"Now to the practical," he muttered, as he spread out his girl
wife's fateful telegram.

"She will have surely received the Tacoma dispatches to the old
man before I can reach her now. The Associated Press, to-morrow,
will have a full account of the accident. His condition will be
telegraphed all over the country. But I'll instantly send a carte
blanche order to the Western Union man at Pasco for hourly reports."

The Gazetteer had furnished him the meager information that Pasco
was a little railroad junction town in Franklin County, Washington,
on the Columbia River. "The old man must have been delayed on his
way to meet Clayton."

"Now, for Alice!" The schemer's brow was damp with a cold moisture
as he muttered: "Old Hugh hated even to hear of Death. He tabooed
the subject like a Chinese mandarin.

"His will! Did he think to change that document after the formal
marriage? I have not yet delivered Senator Durham! Hugh may have
left this girl the whole property! Fool! That I did not take that
matter up! Who ever thinks of Death, the grim shadow, stealing
along at our side? I must kill off her lingering regard for 'Brother
Randall Clayton!' Shall I start?"

After half an hour's cogitation, Ferris had made up his plan of
operations. "I must let him drop! I cannot reach him. I will then
act on a certainty. She will report to me. I will clear all up here
and start West to-morrow night. But I will await her report and a
s