top rising?" asked Holden.

Followed for the conspirators a disconcerting moment; for, when the
laughter had subsided, a lazy voice came from the back of the hall,
"He'll stop long enough to play with Apollo a little, I guess."

It was Gow Johnson who had spoken, and no man knew Terry O'Ryan better,
or could gauge more truly the course he would take. He had been in many
an enterprise, many a brush with O'Ryan, and his friendship would bear
any strain.

O'Ryan recovered himself from the moment he saw the back curtain, and
he did not find any fun in the thing. It took a hold on him out of
all proportion to its importance. He realised that he had come to
the parting of the ways in his life. It suddenly came upon him that
something had been lacking in him in the past; and that his want of
success in many things had not been wholly due to bad luck. He had been
eager, enterprising, a genius almost at seeing good things; and yet
others had reaped where he had sown. He had believed too much in his
fellow-man. For the first time in his life he resented the friendly,
almost affectionate satire of his many friends. It was amusing, it
was delightful; but down beneath it all there was a little touch of
ridicule. He had more brains than any of them, and he had known it in
a way; he had led them sometimes, too, as on raids against
cattle-stealers, and in a brush with half-breeds and Indians; as when
he stood for the legislature; but he felt now for the first time that
he had not made the most of himself, that there was something hurting to
self-respect in this prank played upon him. When he came to that point
his resentment went higher. He thought of Molly Mackinder, and he heard
all too acutely the vague veiled references to her in their satire. By
the time Gow Johnson spoke he had mastered himself, however, and had
made up his mind. He stood still for a moment.

"Now, please, my cue," he said quietly and satirically from the trees
near the wings.

He was smiling, but Gow Johnson's prognostication was right; and ere
long the audience realised that he was right. There was standing before
them not the Terry O'Ryan they had known, but another. He threw himself
fully into his part--a young rancher made deputy sheriff, who by the
occasional exercise of his duty had incurred the hatred of a small
floating population that lived by fraud, violence, and cattle-stealing.
The conspiracy was to raid his cattle, to lure him to pursuit, to am