orning. The letter
tells him, too, that I am dead certain that Sledge Hume is the man the
law wants; it explains why, and authorises him to hire a detective
agency to run Hume down. Dear heart of mine, you are too brave to be
afraid for me now. You will get this letter out somehow? You will get
it to Brisbane for me? Once he is at work things are going to right
themselves. A man can't kill another and rob him of twenty-five
thousand dollars and not leave some sort of a trail behind him. Then
there is another message. I have not written it. Can you get word to
Big Bill to keep a close watch on Little Saxon? I'll ride him in the
spring."

"And you, Wayne? You can't stay here all winter!"

"I can, if there is anything to be gained by it. But we'll wait until
we hear from Brisbane. He'll find the evidence we want, dear. And
until then hadn't you rather think of me waiting here than lying in
jail?"

When she left him to take a devious way home the tears lay glistening
upon her cheek until the snow, beating in her face, washed them away.

CHAPTER XXIII

HELGA STRAWN PLAYS THE GAME

The winter which had begun unusually early, battled fiercely for eight
weeks in the mountain fastnesses, and went down in grumbling defeat
before an early spring. And, as the stern face of the Sierra was
hidden under the snow that robed the higher peaks in royal ermine and
drifted sixty feet in the deeper canons, so was the vital thing in the
lives of Wayne Shandon and Wanda Leland covered by silence and secrecy.
Each day was tense and eager to them; to the world whose prying eyes
could not penetrate through the barricade of winter it was as though
those lives were stagnating.

Wanda delivered Wayne's letter safely and promptly to Brisbane, the San
Francisco lawyer. She took her mother into the secret, she told her
mother everything now, for the close companionship of last winter had
borne its fruit of warm sympathy, and the two women went out of the
valley, ostensibly to spend a few weeks shopping and visiting in San
Francisco. The letter never left the girl's person until, in a private
room, it was placed in the hands of Brisbane.

Brisbane's wise old eyes looked at her shrewdly from behind the mask of
his clean shaven face, the greatest poker face, men said, that had ever
gone its inscrutable way up and down the city of fogs and wet winds.
He had asked his few questions in an absent-minded sort of fashion
which