rd them at a speed that sounded
foolishly desperate.

"There's no sense in going like that," he said irritably. "I wonder
what they were doing. I'll find out."

He ran into the darkness and stood on the track between the rails,
flashing an electric torch toward the approaching speeders. But they
came on without a sign that they saw. He shouted. Fifty yards away
the noise of the engines burst into a louder torrent of sound, and he
had but time to leap out of their way as they whizzed past, the second
speeder so close to the first that he could do nothing to stop it.

Before Mahon, thoroughly angry, could think of anything worth doing,
Helen stood beside him, thrusting into his hand his Police revolver.
Almost with the touch he fired above the retreating speeders.

Two spurts of flame jabbed at him through the darkness in reply, and
Mahon jerked his wife to the ground.

"I think, dear," he said, as he gravely lifted her to her feet, "that
you shouldn't have come."

CHAPTER XXIII

RIFLES!

Mira and Blue Pete rested on the ground in the shadows of the clump of
spruce that concealed the entrance to their cave, watching the flicker
of the setting sun on the smooth surface of the sluggish river. Except
for moccasins and blankets they always wore now the Indian disguise in
which Torrance and his friends knew them. In the semi-darkness of the
trees the old corncob pipe sparked rapidly, sweeter to the halfbreed
than nectar, for Mira had held the match that lit it.

Night after night he was content to sit like that, her small hand
cuddled in his; but in the evening hours there were so many things to
do toward the fulfilment of their dream.

"Jest a coupla weeks more, Mira," he murmured. "Mebbe a few days
longer."

"And the last two horses?"

"I'll git 'em somehow. It gits harder every time the bohunks do
things, 'cause somebody's allus watchin'. But I never was fooled yet,
an' no tenderfoot's goin' to start. . . . Only I don't want no
shootin'."

"Perhaps he'll sell now when the time's so near."

Blue Pete laughed mirthlessly. "Yuh don't know Torrance. He said he
wudn't, an' that's better'n a million dollars to him."

"But you think he's going to give them to us when he's through?"

She leaned forward anxiously to catch a glimpse of his swarthy face in
the dim light, and he did not reply until he had considered it.

"If I was sartin! But if, when I'd lef' 'em to the las' minute, if he
too