with a warning wave of his
hand. "Wait till I'm through, and then you call in the hull State o'
Californy, ef ye want."

The stranger's manner was so doggedly confident that Mrs. Wade sank
back tremblingly in her chair. The man put his slouch hat on his knee,
twirled it round once or twice, and then said with the same stubborn
deliberation:--

"The highwayman in that business was your husband--Pulaski Wade--and his
gang, and he was killed by one o' the men he was robbin'. Ye see,
ma'am, it used to be your husband's little game to rope in three or four
strangers in a poker deal at Spanish Jim's saloon--I see you've heard o'
the place," he interpolated as Mrs. Wade drew back suddenly--"and when
he couldn't clean 'em out in that way, or they showed a little more
money than they played, he'd lay for 'em with his gang in a lone part of
the trail, and go through them like any road agent. That's what he did
that night--and that's how he got killed."

"How do you know this?" said Mrs. Wade, with quivering lips.

"I was one o' the men he went through before he was killed. And I'd hev
got my money back, but the rest o' the gang came up, and I got away jest
in time to save my life and nothin' else. Ye might remember thar was one
man got away and giv' the alarm, but he was goin' on to the States by
the overland coach that night and couldn't stay to be a witness. I was
that man. I had paid my passage through, and I couldn't lose THAT too
with my other money, so I went."

Mrs. Wade sat stunned. She remembered the missing witness, and how she
had longed to see the man who was last with her husband; she
remembered Spanish Jim's saloon--his well-known haunt; his frequent and
unaccountable absences, the sudden influx of money which he always said
he had won at cards; the diamond ring he had given her as the result of
"a bet;" the forgotten recurrence of other robberies by a secret masked
gang; a hundred other things that had worried her, instinctively,
vaguely. She knew now, too, the meaning of the unrest that had driven
her from Heavy Tree Hill--the strange unformulated fears that had
haunted her even here. Yet with all this she felt, too, her present
weakness--knew that this man had taken her at a disadvantage, that she
ought to indignantly assert herself, deny everything, demand proof, and
brand him a slanderer!

"How did--you--know it was my husband?" she stammered.

"His mask fell off in the fight; you know another mask was