gh her pretenses. At any other time he would have thrown open the
flood-gates of that ever-inundating anger of his and swept away all
such obliquities.

"I guess," he went on with slow patience "we know him best round here
as Charles Blanchard."

"Blanchard?" she echoed.

"Yes, Blanchard, the Blanchard we 've been looking for, for seven
months now, the Blanchard who chloroformed Ezra Newcomb and carried off
a hundred and eighteen thousand dollars."

"Newcomb?" again meditated the woman.

"The Blanchard who shot down the bank detective in Newcomb's room when
the rest of the bank was listening to a German band playing in the side
street, a band hired for the occasion."

"When was that?" demanded the woman.

"That was last October," he answered with a sing-song weariness
suggestive of impatience at such supererogative explanations.

"I was at Monte Carlo all last autumn," was the woman's quick retort.

Blake moved his heavy body, as though to shoulder away any claim as to
her complicity.

"I know that," he acknowledged. "And you went north to Paris on the
twenty-ninth of November. And on the third of December you went to
Cherbourg; and on the ninth you landed in New York. I know all that.
That's not what I 'm after. I want to know where Connie Binhart is,
now, to-day."

Their glances at last came together. No move was made; no word was
spoken. But a contest took place.

"Why ask _me_?" repeated the woman for the second time. It was only
too plain that she was fencing.

"Because you _know_," was Blake's curt retort. He let the gray-irised
eyes drink in the full cup of his determination. Some slowly
accumulating consciousness of his power seemed to intimidate her. He
could detect a change in her hearing, in her speech itself.

"Jim, I can't tell you," she slowly asserted. "I can't do it!"

"But I 've got 'o know," he stubbornly maintained. "And I 'm going to."

She sat studying him for a minute or two. Her face had lost its
earlier arrogance. It seemed troubled; almost touched with fear. She
was not altogether ignorant, he reminded himself, of the resources
which he could command.

"I can't tell you," she repeated. "I'd rather you let me go."

The Second Deputy's smile, scoffing and melancholy, showed how utterly
he ignored her answer. He looked at his watch. Then he looked back at
the woman. A nervous tug-of-war was taking place between her right and
left hand, with a twisted-up pa