arranged an
eighth plate and drew up a chair before it.

"If that's for Jack," remarked Dick Wilbur, "you're wasting your time.
I know her and I know her type. She'll never come out to the table
to-night--nor to-morrow, either. I know!"

In fact, he knew a good deal too much about girls and women also, did
Wilbur, and that was why he rode the long trails of the mountain-desert
with Boone and his men. Far south and east in the Bahamas a great
mansion stood vacant because he was gone, and the dust lay thick on the
carpets and powdered the curtains and tapestries with a common gray.

He had built it and furnished it for a woman he loved, and afterward
for her sake he had killed a man and fled from a posse and escaped in
the steerage of a west-bound ship. Still the law followed him, and he
kept on west and west until he reached the mountain-desert which thinks
nothing of swallowing men and their reputations.

There he was safe, but some day he would see some woman smile, catch
the glimmer of some eye, and throw safety away to ride after her.

It was a weakness, but what made a tragic figure of handsome Dick
Wilbur was that he knew his weakness and sat still and let fate walk up
and overtake him.

Yet Pierre le Rouge answered this man of sorrowful wisdom: "In my part
of the country men say: 'If you would speak of women let money talk for
you.'"

And he placed a gold piece on the table.

"She will come out to the supper table."

"She will not," smiled Wilbur, and covered the coin. "Will you take
odds?"

"No charity. Who else will bet?"

"I," said Jim Boone instantly. "You figure her for an ordinary sulky
kid."

Pierre smiled upon him.

"There's a cut in my shirt where her knife passed through; and that's
the reason that I'll bet on her now."

The whole table covered his coin, with laughter.

"We've kept one part of your bargain, Pierre. We've seen your father
buried in the corner plot. Now, what's the second part?"

"I don't know you well enough to ask you that," said Pierre.

They plied him with suggestions.

"To rob the Berwin Bank?"

"Stick up a train?"

"No. That's nothing."

"Round up the sheriffs from here to the end of the mountains?"

"Too easy."

"Roll all those together," said Pierre, "and you'll begin to get an
idea of what I'll ask."

Then a low voice called from the black throat of the hall "Pierre!"

The others were silent, but Pierre winked at them, and made great
f