lived and could yet laugh; none came.

When it seemed as if an hour must have passed Nan felt her way
noiselessly home. She regained her room as she had left it, through
her east window, and, throwing herself across her bed, fell into a
heavy sleep.

* * * * *

Day was breaking when the night boss, standing in the doorway at the
Calabasas barns, saw a horseman riding at a leisurely pace up the
Thief River road. The barnman scrutinized the approaching stranger
closely. There was something strange and something familiar in the
outlines of the figure. But when the night-rider had dismounted in
front of the barn door, turned his horse loose, and, limping stiffly,
walked forward on foot, the man rubbed his eyes hard before he could
believe them. Then he uttered an incredulous greeting and led Henry de
Spain into the barn office.

"There's friends of yours in your room up-stairs right now," he
declared, bulging with shock. De Spain, sitting down, forbade the
barnman to disturb them, only asking who they were.

When he had asked half a dozen more leisurely questions and avoided
answering twice as many, the barnman at de Spain's request helped him
up-stairs. Beside himself with excitement, the night boss turned,
grinning, as he laid one hand on the door-knob and the other on de
Spain's shoulder.

"You couldn't have come," he whispered loudly, "at a better time."

The entryway was dark, and from the silence within the room one might
have thought its occupants, if there were such, wrapped in slumber.
But at intervals a faint clicking sound could be heard. The night man
threw open the door. By the light of two stage dash-lamps, one set on
the dresser and the other on a window-ledge, four men sat about a
rickety table in a life-and-death struggle at cards. No voice broke
the tense silence, not even when the door was thrown broadly open.

No one--neither Lefever, Scott, Frank Elpaso, nor McAlpin--looked up
when de Spain walked into the room and, with the night man tiptoeing
behind, advanced composedly toward the group. Even then his presence
would have passed unnoticed, but that Bob Scott's ear mechanically
recorded the limping step and transmitted to his trained intelligence
merely notice of something unusual.

Scott, picking up his cards one at a time as Lefever dealt, raised his
eyes. Startling as the sight of the man given up for dead must have
been, no muscle of Bob Scott's b