as well lighted.

How could he have been expected to notice a very trifling incongruous
detail as he passed the log cabin? Indeed many a keener-eyed and
entirely valorous night watchman might have neglected to observe that
the leathern latch-string of the cabin's closed door was no longer
hanging outside.

CHAPTER VIII. CLIFFORD ARMYTAGE, THE OUTLAW

Dawn brought the wide stretches of the Holden lot into gray relief. It
lightened the big yellow stages and crept down the narrow street of the
Western town where only the ghosts of dead plays stalked. It burnished
the rich fronts of the Fifth Avenue mansions and in the next block
illumined the rough sides of a miner's cabin.

With more difficulty it seeped through the blurred glass of the one
window in this structure and lightened the shadows of its interior to
a pale gray. The long-handled frying-pan rested on the hearth where the
little girl had left it. The dishes of the overnight meal were still on
the table; the vacant chairs sprawled about it; and the rifle was in its
place above the rude mantel; the picks and shovels awaited the toil of a
new day. All seemed as it had been when the director had closed the door
upon it the previous night.

But then the blankets in the lower bunk were seen to heave and to be
thrust back from the pale face of Merton Gill. An elbow came into play,
and the head was raised. A gaze still vague with sleep travelled about
the room in dull alarm. He was waking up in his little room at the
Patterson house and he couldn't make it look right. He rubbed his eyes
vigorously and pushed himself farther up. His mind resumed its broken
threads. He was where he had meant to be from the moment he had spied
the blankets in those bunks.

In quicker alarm, now, he reached for his watch. Perhaps he had slept
too late and would be discovered--arrested, jailed! He found his watch
on the floor beside the bunk. Seven o'clock. He was safe. He could dress
at leisure, and presently be an early-arriving actor on the Holden lot.
He wondered how soon he could get food at the cafeteria. Sleeping in
this mountain cabin had cursed him with a ravenous appetite, as if he
had indeed been far off in the keen air of the North Woods.

He crept from the warm blankets, and from under the straw mattress--in
which one of the miners had hidden the pouch of nuggets--he took his
newly pressed trousers. Upon a low bench across the room was a battered
tin wash--basin, a b