? Not
for a single minute!" I exploded.

"Right you are, Jimmie!--I knew you'd be with me!" he agreed defiantly.
"We'll fight 'em till the last dog's too dead to bury. There's a hole
in the bottom of the sea, somewhere, and we'll find it before we're
through with that piratical outfit. Here's your conductor: you'll have
to go. Polly will follow you in a day or two. I had a handful of it
keeping her from going on this train; but, of course, that wouldn't do.
Put a good, stiff bone in your back, and remember that we shan't let
up, day or night--any of us--until you're free again. Good-by, old
man, and God help you!"

XXIII

Skies of Brass

The depressive journey from Colorado to the Middle West records itself
in memory as a dismal dream out of which there were awakenings only for
train-changings or a word of talk now and then with Cummings. The
deputy warden was a reticent man; somber almost to sadness, as befitted
his calling; but he was neither morose nor churlish. Underneath the
official crust he was a man like other men; was, I say, because he is
dead now.

On the final day of the journey I persuaded him to tell me how I had
been traced, and I was still human enough to find a grain of comfort in
the assurance that Agatha Geddis had not taken my money at the last
only to turn and betray me.

Barton, the Glendale wagon sales manager, was the one who was
innocently responsible. He had talked too much, as I had feared he
would. The clue thus furnished had been lost in St. Louis, but was
picked up again, some months later, by Cummings himself through the
police-record photograph in Denver.

Cummings admitted that he had followed Polly and me on our wedding
journey; that he had known where we were stopping, and had seen us in
the canyon-brink hotel.

"Why didn't you take me then?" I asked.

He explained gruffly that the requisition papers with which he was
provided were good only in Colorado, and that it was simpler to wait
than to go through all the red tape of having them reissued for
Arizona. Knowing that the wires were completely at his service, the
answer did not satisfy me.

"Was that the only reason?" I queried.

He turned his sober eyes on me and shook his head sorrowfully, I
thought.

"I was young once, myself, Weyburn--and I had a wife: she died when the
baby came. Maybe you deserve what's coming to you, and maybe you
don't; but that little woman o' yours will never have another