ad been back there in the mountains? she wondered.

"Less than an hour," he assured her. "What business I have can be done
in fifteen minutes if it can be done at all. But, in the meantime, what
will you do?"

"Oh," said Gloria, "I'll just poke around. It will be fun to see what
kind of people live here."

He put the horses in the stable, watered and fed them himself, and came
back to her outside the front double doors. She had dropped down on a
box in the sun; he thought that there was a little droop to her
shoulders. And small wonder, he admitted, with a tardy sense of guilt.
All these hours in the saddle----

"Tired much?" he asked solicitously.

The shoulders straightened like a soldier's; she jumped up and whirled
smilingly.

"Not a bit tired," she told him brightly.

"That's good. But I could get a room for you at the hotel; you could lie
down and rest a couple of hours----"

Gloria would not hear to it; if she did want to lie down she'd go out
under one of the trees and rest there. She trudged along with him to the
post-office; she watched as Mark called for and got a registered parcel.
Further, she marked that the postmaster appeared curious about the
package so heavily insured until over Mark's shoulder he caught a
glimpse of her, and that thereafter, craning his neck as they went out,
he evidenced a greater interest in her than in a bundle insured for
three thousand dollars. She was smiling brightly when Mark King hurried
off to his meeting with old Loony Honeycutt.

Honeycutt's shanty, ancient, twisted, warped, and ugly like himself,
stood well apart from the flock of houses, as though, like himself even
in this, it were suspicious and meant to keep its own business to
itself. Only one other building had approached it in neighbourly
fashion, and this originally had been Honeycutt's barn. Now it had a
couple of crazy windows cut crookedly into its sides and a stovepipe
thrust up, also crookedly, through the shake roof, and was known as the
McQuarry place. Here one might count on finding Swen Brodie at such
times as he favoured Coloma with his hulking presence; here foregathered
his hangers-on. An idle crowd for the most part, save when the devil
found mischief for them to do, they might be expected to be represented
by one or two of their number loafing about headquarters, and King
realized that his visit to Loony Honeycutt was not likely to pass
unnoticed. What he had not counted on was finding Swe