s own special business in life
to see that no knockout stuff was slipped into the horse's oats, that
no slippery gent got the show to put Little Saxon out of the game. He
even took the precaution to partition off a tiny room for himself in
the hay loft above Little Saxon's stall, where he spent the nights
dozing and snatching up the ancient shot gun down the muzzle of which
his enthusiastic fingers had rammed enough buck shot to explode the
piece and blow himself as well as any unhappy intruder into that land
from which there is no return.

Big Bill, acting foreman now, took upon himself the unremitting work of
making the racehorse fit. Nearly as good a man as Shandon with
animals, he continued through the winter the task that had been little
more than begun. The fact that the man who had first proposed the
races which were to be run off in the Spring, was a fugitive, accused
of a grave crime, had aroused much sensational talk and newspaper
babble, but it had increased rather than lessened interest and new
entries were being daily arranged. Big Bill assured those who cared to
ask that the race would be run, that Shandon would have come in and
been cleared of any charges against him long before June, and that
there would be no change in plans. And though he sometimes doubted the
statement he made so bluntly he let no single day pass without adding
to Little Saxon's education.

MacKelvey was taciturn. But he was not the man to give up a quest once
begun. He grew irritable under the sting of Sledge Hume's sneers and
Martin Leland's regular weekly enquiries; but he pushed his work
tirelessly. As is always the case when the law wants a fugitive there
were many conflicting and empty reports, that would have aided had they
been true but which only hampered since they were not. A report that
Wayne Shandon had been seen boarding a train in Reno was followed three
days later by two other rumours, one claiming that he was on a ranch
just out of San Jose, the other that he had been recognised ten days
ago in Los Angeles. Each report with the vaguest hint of truth in it
MacKelvey hunted down doggedly, and the wires into El Toyon from both
directions were kept busy. It was the opinion of many people that
Shandon had long ago made good his escape and had gone abroad; it was
held by many a mild mannered man or timid old maid that he was even now
the head of a lawless gang terrorising whatever near or distant city or
countr