spicion he got what he deserved."

"Oh!" cried Amy, looking at him reproachfully.

"It's a fact," Bob insisted. "I know his connection with all this better
than you do, and his being on this road was no accident. It was to see
his orders carried out."

Ware was looking at him shrewdly.

"That fits," he declared. "I couldn't figure why my old friend Bill
didn't cut loose. But he's got a head on him."

"What do you mean?"

"Why, when he see Oldham dropped, what use was there of going to
shooting? It would just make trouble for him and he couldn't hope for no
pay. He just faded."

"He's a quick thinker, then," said Bob.

"You bet you!"

The two men laid Oldham's body under the shade. As they disposed it
decently, Bob experienced again that haunting sense of having known him
elsewhere that had on several occasions assailed his memory. The man's
face was familiar to him with a familiarity that Bob somehow felt
antedated his California acquaintance.

"We must get to the mill and send a wagon for him," Ware was saying.

But Amy suddenly turned faint, and was unable to proceed.

"It's perfectly silly of me!" she cried indignantly. "The idea of my
feeling faint! It makes me so angry!"

"It's perfectly natural," Bob told her. "I think you've shown a heap of
nerve. Most girls would have flopped over."

The men helped her to a streamlet some hundreds of yards away. Here it
was agreed that Ware should proceed in search of a conveyance; and that
Bob and Amy should there await his return.

XXXVI

Ware disappeared rapidly up the dusty road, Bob and Amy standing side by
side in silence, watching him go. When the lean, long figure of the old
mountaineer had quite disappeared, and the light, eddying dust, peculiar
to the Sierra country, had died, Amy closed her eyes, raised her hand to
her heart, and sank slowly to the bank of the little creek. Her vivid
colour, which had for a moment returned under the influence of her
strong will and her indignation over her weakness, had again ebbed from
her cheeks.

Bob, with an exclamation of alarm, dropped to her side and passed his
arm back of her shoulders. As she felt the presence of his support, she
let slip the last desperate holdings of physical command, and leaned
back gratefully, breathing hard, her eyes still closed.

After a moment she opened them long enough to smile palely at the
anxious face of the young man.

"It's all right," she said. "I'm all right.