at her throat. A moment before she had tried
to kill him. And then he had looked up and had seen her like that! It
must have been some unaccountable trick in his brain that had flooded
her hair with golden fire at times.

His eyes followed a furrow in the white sand which led from where he
sat bolstered against the tree down to his pack and the rock. It was
the trail made by his body when she had dragged him up to the shelter
and coolness of the timber. One of his laws of physical care was to
keep himself trained down to a hundred and sixty, but he wondered how
she had dragged up even so much as that of dead weight. It had taken a
great deal of effort. He could see distinctly three different places in
the sand where she had stopped to rest.

Carrigan had earned a reputation as the expert analyst of "N" Division.
In delicate matters it was seldom that McVane did not take him into
consultation. He possessed an almost uncanny grip on the working
processes of a criminal mind, and the first rule he had set down for
himself was to regard the acts of omission rather than the one
outstanding act of commission. But when he proved to himself that the
chief actor in a drama possessed a normal rather than a criminal mind,
he found himself in the position of checkmate. It was a thrilling game.
And he was frankly puzzled now, until--one after another--he added up
the sum total of what had been omitted in this instance of his own
personal adventure. Hidden in her ambush, the woman who had shot him
had been in both purpose and act an assassin. Her determination had
been to kill him. She had disregarded the white flag with which he had
pleaded for mercy. Her marksmanship was of fiendish cleverness. Up to
her last shot she had been, to all intent and purpose, a murderess.

The change had come when she looked down upon him, bleeding and
helpless, in the sand. Undoubtedly she had thought he was dying. But
why, when she saw his eyes open a little later, had she cried out her
gratitude to God? What had worked the sudden transformation in her? Why
had she labored to save the life she had so atrociously coveted a
minute before?

If his assailant had been a man, Carrigan would have found an answer.
For he was not robbed, and therefore robbery was not a motif. "A case
of mistaken identity," he would have told himself. "An error in visual
judgment."

But the fact that in his analysis he was dealing with a woman made his
answer only partly s