. Then I'll
get him."

"But have you the right?" she asked quickly. "Knowing him a
lawbreaker, have you the right to allow him to go farther and farther,
just because in the end you hope to get him?"

He met her look with a smile which puzzled her.

"I'll answer your question when you define right and wrong for me," he
said quietly.

They grew silent together, watching the gradual sinking of day into
twilight and early dusk. Norton, for all his vaunted ravings, had
grown thoughtful; Virginia turning her eyes toward him while his were
staring out beyond the house-tops saw in them a look of deep, frowning
speculation. And through this look, like a little fire gleaming
through a fog, was another look whose meaning baffled her.

"What do you think of Patten?" he asked.

Startled by his abruptness, characteristic of him though it was to-day,
she asked in puzzled fashion:

"What do you mean?"

"Not as a man," he said, withdrawing his gaze from the sunset and
bestowing it gravely upon her. "As a physician. Do you size him up as
capable or as something of a quack?"

She hesitated. But finally she made the only reply possible.

"Of course you don't expect any answer, knowing that you should not
come to one member of a profession for an estimate of another. And,
besides, you realize that I know nothing whatever of Dr. Patten, either
as a man or as a physician."

He laughed softly.

"Hedging, pure, unadulterated hedging! I didn't look for that from
you. Shall I tell you what we both think of him? He is a farce and a
fake, and I rather think that I am going to run him out of the State
pretty soon. . . . What would you say of a doctor who couldn't tell
the difference between a wound made by a man bumping his head when he
fell and by a smashing blow with a gun-barrel? Patten doesn't guess
yet that it was the blow Moraga gave me the other night which came so
close to ringing down the sable curtains for me."

"Moraga?" she asked with quickened interest. "Not the same Moraga who
shot Brocky Lane?"

"The same little old Moraga," he assured her lightly. "You needn't
mention it abroad, of course; I don't think Galloway got a chance to
talk with him and we are not sure yet that he even knows Moraga was
here. But I know somebody put me out in the dark by hammering me over
the head; and Tom Cutter found blood on Moraga's revolver. But we
wander far afield. Coming back to Patten, do we agree that he is
som