out of his saucer, as history sayeth George Washington himself once
did!

_Tuesday the Twentieth_

I knew that old hen-hawk meant trouble for me--and the trouble came, all
right. I'm afraid I can't tell about it very coherently, but this is how
it began: I was alone yesterday afternoon, busy in the shack, when a
Mounted Policeman rode up to the door, and, for a moment, nearly
frightened the life out of me. I just stood and stared at him, for he
was the first really, truly live man, outside Olie and my husband, I'd
seen for so long. And he looked very dashing in his scarlet jacket and
yellow facings. But I didn't have long to meditate on his color scheme,
for he calmly announced that a ranchman named McMein had been murdered
by a drunken cowboy in a wage dispute, and the murderer had been seen
heading for the Cochrane Ranch. He (the M. P.) inquired if I would
object to his searching the buildings.

Would I object? I most assuredly did not, for little chills began to
play up and down my spinal column, and I wasn't exactly in love with the
idea of having an escaped murderer crawling out of a hay-stack at
midnight and cutting my throat. The ranchman McMein had been killed on
Saturday, and the cowboy had been kept on the run for two days. As I was
being told this I tried to remember where Dinky-Dunk had stowed away his
revolver-holster and his hammerless ejector and his Colt repeater. But I
made that handsome young man in the scarlet coat come right into the
shack and begin his search by looking under the bed, and then going down
the cellar.

I stood holding the trap-door and warned him not to break my
pickle-jars. Then he came up and stood squinting thoughtfully out
through the doorway.

"Have you got a gun?" he suddenly asked me.

I showed him my duck-gun with its silver mountings, and he smiled a
little.

"Haven't you a rifle?" he demanded.

I explained that my husband had, and he still stood squinting out
through the doorway as I poked about the shack-corners and found
Dinky-Dunk's repeater. He was a very authoritative and self-assured
young man. He took the rifle from me, examined the magazine and made
sure it was loaded. Then he handed it back.

"I've got to search those buildings and stacks," he told me. "And I can
only be in one place at once. If you see a man break from under cover
anywhere, when I'm inside, _be so good as to shoot him_!"

He started off without another word, with his big army