ped the bars into place. It was as
though he had flung them angrily into their sockets. Thornton went out
of the yard and to his waiting horse.

"She says to go away, to leave her there alone with Pollard," he
muttered dully. "And something's up. She said he'd kill her if he knew
that she was talking to me..."

He hesitated, his horse's tie rope in his hand, of half a mind to go
back, to force his way into Henry Pollard's house, to demand to know
what was wrong, to take the girl away if there were real danger to her.
But then the urgent pleading in her voice came back to him, her
insistence that he go, that with him gone there would no longer be any
danger for her. Slowly, regretfully, he swung into the saddle. He had
made up his mind. He would obey her at least in part, he would go where
he could read the paper she had given him, and then perhaps he would
understand.

"Any way," he said under his breath, "she's a real girl for you."

He rode swiftly the five hundred yards through the dark street which ran
as nearly parallel with the main street as two such crooked streets
could approximate parallelism, until he was behind the Here's How
Saloon. Here he dismounted and, leaving his horse with reins thrown over
his head to the ground, strode off toward the side door of the saloon.

Under the window he glanced in swiftly. Chance had it that the cover was
off of the little used billiard table and that two men, in shirt-sleeved
comfort, were playing. Both men he knew. They were Charley Bedloe and
his brother, the Kid.

The Bedloe boys were intent upon their game, the Kid laughing softly at
a miscue Charley had made. Charley was chalking his cue angrily and
cursing his luck and neither of them glanced toward the window.
Thornton, drawing back a little so that he would not be seen did they
happen to look his way, unfolded the paper Winifred had given him.

"Watch me play out my string, Charley!" he heard the Kid call
banteringly. Then he heard nothing more from the room, nothing to tell
him of another man not ten steps from him in the darkness, for his whole
mind had been caught by Winifred's first words.

"I have wronged you from the beginning," she had written. "I thought
that I had seen you that day on the trail behind me. You denied it. I
thought that you were lying to me. While you were out after the horses a
man, masked, came into the cabin and robbed me of the five thousand
dollars I was taking to Henry Pollard