aked with dust. But even then he was not prepared
for the sight which met him when he entered the shack. Seconds must
have passed while he stood staring from the threshold, for Fat Joe came
puffing back from his fruitless chase in time to see him bend and lift
a black-robed, lifelessly limp body from the floor and stagger with it
toward a bunk. Fat Joe's steady flow of profanity, oddly, double
vicious in his thin, complaining voice, was checked short. He, too,
stood and stared from the doorway--stood and lifted his nose and
sniffed.

"Seems to be our night for callers," he remarked with bad mildness;
"and, say, this one's got a peach of a load, ain't he?"

Then Garry Devereau's head rolled over, ghastly loose and slack, and
the plump one caught sight of a ragged gash in the senseless man's
temple.

"So-o, that's it?" he droned, and his complaining voice was deadly
again. "So that's it! But he wasn't so far gone that he couldn't put
up a tidy little battle, was he? Funny about that, too, but I could
always do my best little jobs of man-handling when I was about
half-over myself."

His pale eyes swept the floor; he pounced forward and recovered a sheaf
of blue-prints from a corner.

"This, I take it," he muttered, "was what they was arguing about when
we busted in. Steve, them's our bridge estimates--and there wa'n't no
copies of 'em, either. It wouldn't take us more than two weeks to
replace 'em neither--not more'n two precious, priceless weeks. I'm
only hopin' now that when our other caller, who seems to want them more
than we do, calls again, I'll be here myself to entertain him, with tea
or somethin'. I'd plumb hate to seem so inhospitable as not to be
home, twice hand-runnin', to visitors."

Fat Joe's round face was congested with murderous rage before he had
finished, but Steve seemed hardly to have heard him at all. He had
finally straightened out that sickeningly slack figure upon his own
bunk. He was listening now to his heart, and at a jerk of his head Fat
Joe joined him at the bedside. The latter's thick fingers were as
delicate, as competent, as a skilled physician's might have been. He,
too, listened and peeled back the unconscious man's eyelids. He shook
his head, dubiously.

"Maybe that was a tidy little battle, while it lasted," he stated, "but
it ain't deuce high alongside this fight we've got on our hands right
now. For he's just as near over as I'd care to see a man, unless it