away--as far as San Francisco.

"By Jove!" I exclaimed aloud, with a rushing of blood to my brain that
pulsed to bursting in the little veins at my temples. "_The Santa Anna
Hotel!_"

"Do you know it, Mr. Stanton?" enquired Bennett, evidently surprised at
my sudden vehemence.

"I was there once many years ago," I said. "The name has brought back an
old association to my mind which I had thought was lost."

I knew now where I had seen those strange light eyes of Carson
Wildred's, and what was the deed with which they had connected
themselves in my mind. After all, perhaps, I had not come to America for
nothing!

My memory travelled back over a space of ten years. I had then come back
to San Francisco after an expedition into distant wilds with a party of
friends shooting grizzlies in the Rockies. I had stopped at the Santa
Anna Hotel, a small hostelry lately built, having an English landlord,
and therefore greatly frequented by Englishmen.

On the night of my arrival there had been a serious disturbance in the
house. Three men who had been stopping at the place got quarrelling over
a game of cards which they were playing in a private parlour. Two, who
were the hosts, and were entertaining the third, had set upon him with
intent to kill, being accused of cheating. I and several of my friends
had run out from the billiard-room, hearing a yell for help, just in
time to see a man in evening dress stagger, bleeding, from the opposite
door. "I'm killed! That devil has murdered me!" he exclaimed, and fell
forward on his face.

At Bennett's mention of the Santa Anna Hotel the whole scene had come up
before me as vividly as though it had been enacted but yesterday. The
open door, showing a brilliantly-lighted interior; cards scattered on
the carpet; a young man--almost a boy--standing, as if frozen with
horror, by an overset table; a large bowie knife, common to the country,
apparently fallen from his right hand to the floor.

At the door itself an older man, who had followed the victim, no doubt
with the intention of keeping him from making an outcry or escaping into
the hall. But he had been too late, and the expression of his face as he
met our eyes was hideous. Though the knife had to all appearance been
used by his companion, it was at _him_ that the murdered man had
pointed before he fell and died. _He_ was the one apostrophised as
"that devil" by the death-stricken wretch; and though he had had a high,
aquiline n