nted to the distant Barker. "I didn't want you to tell him. I
thought it better for one partner to keep a secret from two than for the
two to keep it from one. Why didn't you tell me of your experience last
night?"

"I am afraid it was for the same reason," said Demorest, with a faint
smile. "And it sometimes seems to me, Jim, that we ought to imitate
Barker's frankness. In our dread of tainting him with our own knowledge
of evil we are sending him out into the world very poorly equipped, for
all his three hundred thousand dollars."

"I reckon you're right," said Stacy briefly, extending his hand. "Shake
on that!"

The two men grasped each other's hands.

"And he's no fool, either," continued Demorest. "When we met Steptoe on
the road, without a word from me, he closed up alongside, with his hand
on the lock of his rifle. And I hadn't the heart to praise him or laugh
it off."

Nevertheless they were both silent as the object of their criticism
bounded down the trail towards them. He had seen the funeral pyre. It
was awfully sad, it was awfully lovely, but there was something grand
in it! Who could have thought Stacy could be so poetic? But he wanted to
tell them something else that was mighty pretty.

"What was it?" said Demorest.

"Well," said Barker, "don't laugh! But you know that Jack Hamlin? Well,
boys, he's been hovering around us on his mustang, keeping us and that
pack-mule in sight ever since we left. Sometimes he's on a side trail
off to the right, sometimes off to the left, but always at the same
distance. I didn't like to tell you, boys, for I thought you'd laugh
at me; but I think, you know, he's taken a sort of shine to us since he
dropped in last night. And I fancy, you see, he's sort of hanging round
to see that we get along all right. I'd have pointed him out before
only I reckoned you and Stacy would say he was making up to us for our
money."

"And we'd have been wrong, Barker boy," said Stacy, with a heartiness
that surprised Demorest, "for I reckon your instinct's the right one."

"There he is now," said the gratified Barker, "just abreast of us on the
cut-off. He started just after we did, and he's got a horse that could
have brought him into Boomville hours ago. It's just his kindness."

He pointed to a distant fringe of buckeye from which Jack Hamlin had
just emerged. Although evidently holding in a powerful mustang, nothing
could be more unconscious and utterly indifferent than his at