h
way she was riding, and finally volunteered to go with her, assuring her
smilingly that he had nothing of importance to do, and adding gravely,
that he would feel safer if she were not out alone in this rough
country.

So he rode with her and after an hour of swift galloping out toward the
mountains, for the most part in silence, they came back to the town.
Pollard left her at his own gate and rode back through the street, "to
see a man." But he returned almost immediately and for the rest of the
day did not leave the house. It was a long day for the girl, filled with
restlessness and a sense of being spied upon, of being watched almost
every moment by her uncle. And before the day was done, there had come
with the other emotions a little thrill of positive, personal fear.

It was midafternoon. The silence here at this far end of the street hung
heavy and oppressive. She had gone up and down stairs half a dozen
aimless times, eager for something to do. The long hours had been hers
for reflection, and after weighing the hundred little incidents of these
last few weeks, now there was no faintest shadow of a doubt that Henry
Pollard was at least guilty of criminal complicity in a scheme to send
an innocent man to the penitentiary if not to the gallows; she was more
than half persuaded that Pollard was in some way seeking to shield
himself by using Thornton as a scapegoat; she had got to the point where
she began to wonder if Henry Pollard and Ben Broderick shared share and
share alike both in the profits of these crimes and in their actual
commission.

She came down stairs for a book, having at last finished the one in her
room, resigned to inactivity for another day, perhaps for two or three
days, until her uncle's watch upon her movements was less keen and
suspicious. She reflected that if she read something she might coax her
thoughts away from considerations which he could not understand in
their entirety, and which terrified her when she thought that she did
understand.

In her quest she passed down the hall and to Pollard's office at the
front of the house. The room was by no means private; she had gone into
it many times before; sometimes it was used as a sitting room. She had
thought that her uncle was in it, but when she came to the open door she
saw that it was empty.

She went to the long table at which Pollard wrote his few letters. Upon
one end of it, at the far end from the pen and ink, were some book