himself out
as a Louisiana lumberman open to conviction on the subject of Minnesota
pine lands as an investment. But he had no means of knowing that
Broffin's momentary preoccupation was chargeable to a fruitless
interview lately concluded; or that in driving away to the house three
squares up the street he was bridging the narrow gap between a
man-hunter and his quarry--a gap which had suddenly grown into a chasm
for the man-hunter himself.

One more small coincidence will serve to total the items on the
Wednesday page. If Broffin had not stopped to look after the man who had
so nearly run him down, he might not have been crossing Main Street in
front of the Winnebago at the precise instant when Miss Grierson, with
young Dahlgren in the second seat of the trap, came around the square
and pulled up to let her horse drink at the public fountain.

"Who is that Bitter-Creekish-looking man crossing over to the Winnebago
House?" asked Miss Grierson of her seatmate, indicating Broffin with a
wave of the whip, and skilfully making the query sound like the voicing
of the idlest curiosity.

"Fellow named Broffin, from Louisiana," said Dahlgren, who, as assistant
editor of the _Daily Wahaskan_, knew everybody. "Says he's in the lumber
business down there, but, 'I doubt it,' said the carpenter, and shed a
bitter tear."

"Why do you doubt it?" queried Miss Grierson, neatly flicking a fly from
the horse's back with the tip of the whiplash.

"Oh, on general principles, I guess. You wouldn't say he had any of the
ear-marks of a business man."

"What kind of ear-marks has he got?" persisted Miss Grierson--merely to
make talk, as Dahlgren decided.

"I don't know. We were talking about him around at the club the other
night, and Sheffield--he's from Kentucky, you know--thought he
remembered the name as the name of a 'moonshine' raider he'd heard of
down in his home State."

"A moonshine raider? What is that?" By this time Miss Margery's
curiosity was less inert than it had been, or had seemed to be, at
first.

"A deputy marshal, you know; a sort of Government policeman and
detective rolled into one. He looks it, don't you think?"

Miss Grierson did not say what she thought, then, or later, when she set
Dahlgren down at the door of his newspaper office in Sioux Avenue. But
still later, two hours later, in fact, she gave a brief audience in the
Mereside library to a small, barefooted boy whose occupation was
sufficiently ind