. "Don't you worry
none about his going before we say so. But I want to know what the
play is."

Judith told him. Carson shook his head.

"Think of that?" he muttered. "Why, a man that would do a trick like
that oughtn't to be let live two seconds. Only," and he wrinkled his
brows at her, "where does Poker Face come in? We ain't got no call to
suspicion he's in on it."

"You watch him, just the same, Carson. We know that somebody here has
been working against us. Some one who turned Shorty loose. Maybe it
isn't Poker Face, and maybe it is."

"He plays a crib game like a sport an' a gentleman," muttered Carson.
"He beat me seven games out'n nine last night!" And, still with that
puzzled frown in his eyes, he went to watch Poker Face and the new man.
To have one of the men for whom he was responsible suspected hurt old
Carson sorely. And Poker Face, the man with whom he delighted to play
a game of cards--it was almost as though Carson himself had come under
suspicion.

"You're going to stick around just a little while, stranger," Bud Lee
was saying quietly to a shifty-eyed man in the corral. "Just why, I
don't know. Orders, you know."

"Orders be damned," snarled the newcomer. "I go where I please and
when I please."

He set a foot to his stirrups. A lean, muscular hand fell lightly upon
his shoulder and he was jerked back promptly. Lee smiled at him. And
the shifty-eyed man, though he protested sharply, remained where he was.

[Illustration: A lean, muscular hand fell lightly upon his shoulder and
he was jerked back promptly.]

A thin, saturnine man whose lips never seemed to move, a man with
dead-looking eyes into which no light of emotion ever came, watched
them expressionlessly from where he stood with Carson. It was Poker
Face.

"No," Poker Face answered, to a sharp question from the persistent
Carson.

"Sure, are you?"

"Yes."

At last word came from Judith. Carson and Lee were to bring both of
the suspected men to the house. Doc Tripp, wiping his hands on a
towel, his sleeves up, bestowed upon the two of them a look of
unutterable contempt and hatred.

"You low-lived skunks!" was his greeting to them.

"Easy, Doc," continued Judith from her desk. "That won't get us
anywhere. Who are you?" she demanded of the man standing at Lee's side.

"Me?" demanded the man with an assumption of jauntiness. "I'm Donley,
Dick Donley, that's who I am!"

"When did you get here?"

"'B