who, having taken a man's
coat, takes his cloak, also. There seemed to be no limit to the
colonel's kindliness and chivalric generosity; and more than ever he
doubted the old cattle king's complicity, even by implication, in any of
the mysterious fatalities which had fallen upon the rank and file of the
irrigation company's industrial army.

Strolling out under the electric globes, he found that his colloquy with
the colonel had cost him a possible chance of a _tete-a-tete_ with Elsa.
She was swinging gently in her own particular corner hammock; but this
time it was Bigelow, instead of Wingfield, who was holding her tiny
coffee cup. It was after Ballard had joined the group of which the
sweet-voiced Aunt June was the centre, that Miss Craigmiles said to her
coffee-holder:

"I am taking you at your sister's valuation and trusting you very fully,
Mr. Bigelow. You are quite sure you were followed, you and Mr. Ballard,
on the day before the dynamiting of the canal?"

"No; I merely suspected it. I wasn't sure enough to warrant me in
calling Ballard's attention to the single horseman who seemed to be
keeping us in view. But in the light of later events----"

"Yes; I know," she interrupted hastily. "Were you near enough to
identify the man if--if you should see him again?"

"Oh, no. Most of the time he was a mere galloping dot in the distance.
Only once--it was when Ballard and I had stopped to wrangle over a bit
of deforesting vandalism on the part of the contractors--I saw him
fairly as he drew rein on a hilltop in our rear."

"Describe him for me," she directed, briefly.

"I'm afraid I can't do that. I had only this one near-by glimpse of him,
you know. But I remarked that he was riding a large horse, like one of
those in your father's stables; that he sat straight in the saddle; and
that he was wearing some kind of a skirted coat that blew out behind him
when he wheeled to face the breeze."

Miss Craigmiles sat up in the hammock and pressed her fingers upon her
closed eyes. When she spoke again after the lapse of a long minute, it
was to ask Bigelow to retell the story of the brief fight in the
darkness at the sand arroyo on the night of the explosion.

The Forestry man went over the happenings of the night, and of the day
following, circumstantially, while the growing moon tilted like a silver
shallop in a sea of ebony toward the distant Elks, and the groups and
pairs on the broad portico rearranged themselves c