the end by
chartering a cab and going to anybody and everybody who could by any
possibility cash my checks, leaving a disgraceful trail of the bank
paper in dives and gambling dens and night resorts without
number--driven to this because all respectable sources were closed at
that time in the evening.

Returning to the hotel only a few minutes before the critical hour, I
went directly to her rooms, carrying the money in a small hand-bag that
I had bought for the purpose. I found her waiting for me, gowned and
hatted as if for a journey. She was standing before a mirror, dabbing
her neck with a powder-puff--histronic to the last; she was showing me
how she had to resort to this to cover up the marks of my assault. I
have failed in my picture of her if I have not portrayed her as a woman
of moods and lightning changes. There was no trace of the late
volcanic outburst in her manner when she greeted me and handed me a
sealed and stamped envelope addressed to the Denver chief of police.

"You got the money?" she said quietly. "I knew you would." And then
with a sudden passion: "Oh, Bertie! if you weren't such a cold-blooded
fish of a man!--but never mind; it's too late now."

I placed the small hand-bag on the table, pocketed the fateful letter,
and backed toward the door. "If there is nothing else," I said.

"Oh, but there is!" she put in quickly. "I want you to get a cab and
take me to the station. I'm leaving for California. Don't you want to
go with me?"

"God forbid!" I exclaimed, and it came out of a full heart. Then I
went down to order the cab.

She was curiously silent on the short drive down Seventeenth Street to
the Union Station, sitting with the little hand-bag on her knees and
breathing as they say the Australian pearl fishers breathe before
taking the deep-sea dive. In the station she stood at a window in the
women's room and waited while I purchased her ticket for San Francisco
and paid for the sleeper section which had evidently been reserved some
time in advance.

It is perhaps needless to say that I did not buy my own California
ticket at the same time, though the train she was taking was the one I
had planned to take. My journey could be postponed; and in the light
of what had happened, and what was now happening, I was beginning to
understand that my runaway trip to the Pacific Coast was no longer
necessary, on one account, at least. But in any event, wild horses
couldn't have dra