used as the nightlock upon his doors. Thornton drew
back a little, step by step, slowly, silently, and stopped under the
pear trees. Now he was ten feet from the first of the front steps, ten
feet from the board walk.

When a man must trust everything to his ears for guidance his ears
may tell him much. Thornton knew when the bars were down and when the
door was opening very slowly. And then, suddenly, he knew that there
was a third person out here in the garden close to him, and that this
person ... man or woman? ... was moving with as great a slow caution as
himself and the other some one in the house. There was the crack of a
twig snapping underfoot ... silence ... slow cautious steps again.

The cowboy moved again, a bare two steps now, and stopped, his back
against the trunk of the largest of the pear trees, his eyes running
back and forth between the door he could not see and the moving some one
he could not see at the corner of the house. His widened nostrils had
stiffened, as though he would scent out these beings, and his eyes were
the alert eyes of an animal in the forest seeking its enemy through the
denseness of a black undergrowth.

The door was open, the soft step was at the threshold. The other step at
the corner of the house had stopped. In the new silence the cowboy could
hear his own deep, regular breathing. He could see nothing, he knew that
his body pressed against the tree trunk could not be seen, and his hands
were ready. He began to long for a pistol shot, for the spurt of red
fire, for anything that would mean certainty and would release the
coiled springs of his tense muscles.

But the still minutes dragged by and there was no certainty of anything
save that the some one at the door and the some one at the corner of the
house at Thornton's right were standing as still, as tense, as himself.
A little sense of the grim humour of this game three people were playing
in the dark, this Blind Man's Buff which he was waiting to understand,
drew his lips into a quick, fleeting smile.

Now at last came the first bit of certainty. The some one at the door
moved again, came to the steps and down into the garden, taking the
steps slowly, with long pauses between. This some one was a man. Dimly
Thornton saw the blur of the form, but more than his eyes his ears told
him that this tread, though guarded, was too heavy for a girl like
Winifred Waverly.

"Pollard," he told himself swiftly. "Not ten feet awa