s rich a
haul as he could carry.

I was in doubt on what to do, for a while. But I eventually decided to
go in to Buckhorn and send a telegram to the owner of Casa Grande. I
felt sure, if Lady Allie was in Banff, that she'd be at the C. P. R.
hotel there, and that even if she had gone on to the Anglesey Ranch my
telegram would be forwarded to Wallachie. So I wired her: "Chinaman
left in charge has been selling ranch property. Advise me what action
you wish taken."

A two-day wait brought no reply to this, so I then telegraphed to the
hotel-manager asking for information as to her ladyship. I was anxious
for that information, I'll confess, for more personal reasons than
those arising out of the activities of Sing Lo.

When I went in for my house supplies on Friday there was a message
there from the Banff hotel-manager stating that Lady Newland had left,
ten days before, for the Empress Hotel in Victoria. So I promptly
wired that hotel, only to learn that my titled wanderer might be found
in San Francisco, at the Hotel St. Francis. So I repeated my message;
and yesterday morning Hy Teetzel, homeward bound from Buckhorn in his
tin Lizzie, brought the long-expected reply out to me. It read:

"Would advise consulting my ranch manager on the matter mentioned in
your wire," and was signed "Alicia Newland."

There was a sense of satisfaction in having located the lady, but
there was a distinctly nettling note in the tenor of that little
message. I decided, accordingly, to give her the retort courteous by
wiring back to her: "Kindly advise me of ranch manager's present
whereabouts," and at the bottom of that message inscribed, "Mrs.
Duncan Argyll McKail."

And I've been smiling a little at the telegram which has just been
sent on to me, for now that I come to review our electric intercourse
in a cooler frame of mind it looks suspiciously like back-biting over
a thousand miles of telegraph-wire. This second message from San
Francisco said: "Have no knowledge whatever of the gentleman's
movements or whereabouts."

It was, I found, both a pleasant and a puzzling bit of information,
and my earlier regrets at wasting time that I could ill spare betrayed
a tendency to evaporate. It was satisfying, and yet it was not
satisfying, for morose little doubts as to the veracity of the lady in
question kept creeping back into my mind. It also left everything
pretty much up in the air, so I've decided to take things in my own
hand an