ad rested,
and her purse, caught in the juniper bush close by, was sodden with
rain.

"The poor little kid!" he muttered, and with, a sudden impulse he turned
and looked toward the rock behind which the horse had stood. Help had
been that close, and she had not known it, unless----

"If anything happened there last night, she could have seen it from
here," he decided, and immediately put the thought away from him.

"But nothing happened," he added, "unless maybe she saw him ride out and
go on down the road. She was out of her head and just imagined things."

He slipped the soaked purse into his coat pocket, remounted and rode on
slowly, looking for the grip and half-believing she had not been
carrying one, but had dreamed it just as she had dreamed that a man had
been shot.

He rode past the bag without seeing it, for Lorraine had thrust it far
back under a stocky bush whose scraggly branches nearly touched the
ground. So he came at last to the creek, swollen with the night's storm
so that it was swift and dangerous. Lone was turning back when John Doe
threw up his head, stared up the creek for a moment and whinnied
shrilly. Lone stood in the stirrups and looked.

A blaze-faced horse was standing a short rifle-shot away, bridled and
with an empty saddle. Whether he was tied or not Lone could not tell at
that distance, but he knew the horse by its banged forelock and its
white face and sorrel ears, and he knew the owner of the horse. He rode
toward it slowly.

"Whoa, you rattle-headed fool," he admonished, when the horse snorted
and backed a step or two as he approached. He saw the bridle-reins
dangling, broken, where the horse had stepped on them in running. "Broke
loose and run off again," he said, as he took down his rope and widened
the loop. "I'll bet Thurman would sell you for a bent nickel, this
morning."

The horse squatted and jumped when he cast the loop, and then stood
quivering and snorting while Lone dismounted and started toward him. Ten
steps from the horse Lone stopped short, staring. For down in the bushes
on the farther side half lay, half hung the limp form of a man.

CHAPTER FIVE

A DEATH "BY ACCIDENT"

Lone Morgan was a Virginian by birth, though few of his acquaintances
knew it. Lone never talked of himself except as his personal history
touched a common interest with his fellows. But until he was seventeen
he had lived very close to the center of one of the deadliest feuds of