is
mornin', Shiny. He ain't slept much. You see the bulls got him right.
It's the death chair for him and no lifeboat in sight."

Clay leaned against the bars negligently. He spoke with a touch of
lazy scorn. "See those scars on his face, Shiny--the one on the cheek
bone and the other above the eye. Ask him where he got 'em and how."

Jerry cursed. He broke into a storm of threats, anger sweeping over
him in furious gusts. He had come to make sport of his victim and
Lindsay somehow took the upper hand at once. He had this fellow where
he wanted him at last. Yet the man's soft voice still carried the note
of easy contempt. If the Arizonan was afraid, he gave no least sign of
it.

"You'll sing another tune before I'm through with you," the
prize-fighter prophesied savagely.

The Westerner turned away and swung back to his upper berth. He knew,
what he had before suspected, that Durand was going to "frame" him if
he could. That information gained, the man no longer interested him.

Sullenly Jerry left. There was no profit in jeering at Lindsay. He
was too entirely master of every situation that confronted him.

Within the hour Clay was wakened from sleep by another guard with word
that he was wanted at the office of the warden. He found waiting him
there Beatrice and her father. The girl bloomed in that dingy room
like a cactus in the desert.

She came toward him with hands extended, in her eyes gifts of
friendship and faith.

"Oh, Clay!" she cried.

"Much obliged, little pardner." Her voice went to his heart like water
to the thirsty roots of prickly pears. A warm glow beat through his
veins. The doubts that had weighed on him during the night were gone.
Beatrice believed in him. All was well with the world.

He shook hands with Whitford. "Blamed good of you to come, sir."

"Why wouldn't we come?" demanded the mining man bluntly. "We're here
to do what we can for you."

Little wells of tears brimmed over Beatrice's lids. "I've been so
worried."

"Don't you. It'll be all right." Strangely enough he felt now that it
would. Her coming had brought rippling sunshine into a drab world.

"I won't now. I'm going to get evidence for you. Tell us all about
it."

"Why, there isn't much to tell that you haven't read in the papers
probably. He came a-shootin' and was hit by a chair."

"Was it you that hit him?"

"Wouldn't I be justified?" he asked gently.

"But did you?"

For a mo