n hand to drive him back he did not for
a single day give over his search. He went then down to the railroads.
Banff knew him and came to know just as much of his story as it could
guess from the eternal question in his heart and now and then on his
lips, and from the fact that he had money. Vancouver knew him, coming
and going where a man might search such quarry as his, in gambling
halls, high and low, in cafes, at hotels. For he had had a hint that
perhaps Ygerne and the men with her had gone on to Vancouver.

In January he drew heavily against his account in the bank of Lebarge.
The money, or at least a great part of it, went to a detective agency
in Vancouver, another in Victoria, another even as far east as Quebec.
Money went also to New Orleans and brought him no little information of
the earlier lives of Ygerne Bellaire and Marc Lemarc, together with the
assurance that neither of them had returned to the South.

Thus he learned the story which he had refused to hear from her own
lips, the reason of her flight from New Orleans. Having no parents
living, she had lived in the household of her guardian, a merchant
named Jules Bondaine. She had had trouble with Bondaine, the cause of
the affair not being clearly understood except by Bondaine himself, the
girl and, perhaps, Marc Lemarc, her cousin. The confidential agency in
the southern city to which Drennen had turned apprised him of these
facts and let him draw his own deductions: It was known that Lemarc was
a suitor for the girl's hand; that Bondaine had seemed very strongly to
favour Lemarc; that Bondaine was high-handed, Ygerne Bellaire
high-tempered; that, at a time when Mme. Bondaine and her two daughters
were away from home over night, Bondaine and the girl had a hot
dispute; that that night, while in the library, Ygerne Bellaire shot
her guardian; that he would in all probability have died had it not
been for the opportune presence of Marc Lemarc, even the household
servants being out; that that night Ygerne Bellaire left New Orleans
and had not been heard of since by Bondaine or the authorities.

"Appearances would indicate," ran a little initialled note at the end
of the report, "that Bondaine and Lemarc had been in some way trying to
coerce Miss Bellaire and that she had shot her way out of the
discussion. It is to be inferred, however, that she made up with her
cousin, as he disappeared the same night and (merely rumoured) was seen
with her upo