clatter among the rocks. It was he who responded to the voice.

"What's up, MacDonald?"

He coolly joined the little group. MacDonald looked up, and when he saw
the new chief bending over him his eyes stared in unbounded wonder.

"Howland!" he gasped.

It was all he said, but in that one word and in the strange excitement
in the superintendent's face Howland read that which made him turn
quickly to the men, giving them his first command as general-in-chief of
the road that was going to the bay.

"Get out of the coyote, boys," he said. "We won't do anything more until
morning."

To MacDonald, as the men went out ahead of them, he added in a low
voice:

"Guard the entrance to this tunnel with half a dozen of your best men
to-night, MacDonald. I know things which will lead me to investigate
this to-morrow. I'm going to leave you as soon as I get outside. Spread
the report that it was simply a bad fuse. Understand?"

He crawled out ahead of the superintendent, and before MacDonald had
emerged from the coyote he had already lost himself in the starlit gloom
of the night and was hastening to his tryst with the beautiful girl,
who, he believed, would reveal to him at least a part of one of the
strangest and most diabolical plots that had ever originated in the
brain of man.

CHAPTER IX

THE TRYST

It still lacked nearly an hour of the appointed time when Howland came
to the secluded spot in the trail where he was to meet Meleese.
Concealed in the deep shadows of the bushes he seated himself on the end
of a fallen spruce and loaded his pipe, taking care to light it with the
flare of the match hidden in the hollow of his hands. For the first time
since his terrible experience in the coyote he found himself free to
think, and more than ever he began to see the necessity of coolness and
of judgment in what he was about to do. Gradually, too, he fought
himself back into his old faith in Meleese. His blood was tingling at
fever heat in his desire for vengeance, for the punishment of the human
fiends who had attempted to blow him to atoms, and yet at the same time
there was no bitterness in him toward the girl. He was sure that she
was an unwilling factor in the plot, and that she was doing all in her
power to save him. At the same time he began to realize that he should
no longer be influenced by her pleading. He had promised--in return for
her confidence this night--to leave unpunished those whom she wished to