with me, at, all, at all! . . . Say, Steve,
how do you pronounce C-e-c-i-l-e?"

Steve pronounced it for him, dully inattentive, but the flood-gates of
speech were opened for Joe.

"That's the way I would of handled it myself," he averred, "but I
wanted to be certain sure. It ain't exactly genteel to call a lady out
of her name, any way you look at it. And not that I've reached that
state of exceedin' intimacy, as you might say, either. I just aim to
be prepared, that's all."

He fell to whistling after that, and almost immediately his thin tenor
was rolling ahead of them, through the black alley between the pines,
to continue in soulful reiteration until the construction camp clearing
loomed up ahead. And there, twice within a hundred yards, with the
long bunk houses already visible, the weird hoot of an owl fluted
through the darkness. At its third repetition Fat Joe's song hushed;
he cocked his head on one side to listen, and shot a glance at Steve,
but he knew that the latter had not heard. And when that night-bird's
call rose again, clear and measured and louder than before, Fat Joe
tightened the reins above the fagged team; he shot forward suddenly and
laid the whip across their tired flanks as they cleared the last
breastwork of trees.

Steve's head was jerked backward by the abruptness of their first
plunge; and then he saw what Fat Joe had seen a second before. High up
on the hillside there was a light glowing from the windows of the shack
which served the chief engineer of the East Coast job as office and
domicile, too. While Fat Joe laid on the whip a man came hurtling past
the outflung door, sprang to his feet and, running low to the ground,
disappeared into the blackness of the brush. Joe swung the horses up
in a galloping curve and with one catlike leap, incredibly light for a
man of his chunky build, was down from the seat and crashing through
the bushes on the trail of that fugitive whose noisy flight had already
become a faint crackle in the distance.

Flame poured from Fat Joe's revolver. Two whiplike reports shattered
the night quiet before Stephen O'Mara moved. Then he lifted himself
heavily from the seat. Something nuzzled his shoulder while he stood
listening to the diminishing tumult of the pursuit; and even before he
turned he knew what it was. He paused a moment to stroke the soft nose
of the black horse standing there with reins a-trail. It was Ragtime,
wet with lather and c