rooping his head, and bringing under my eyes
again the hair that was like hers.

"Ah, that explains your ignorance. The man had not shown his hand at
that time. Now I am going to trust to your affection for Miss
Cunningham, to your presumable wish to save her from unhappiness, and
talk to you as though we had been allies instead of enemies. Perhaps I
may be a fool for my pains; but something seems to say to me----"

"Something says right. Go on!" he ejaculated, gruffly.

No doubt the very most dunder-headed of lawyers or detectives would have
told me that I was mad, thus deliberately to give all my good trumps
away to the treacherous, hired scoundrel whom I had been hunting down
with the dogged ferocity of a bloodhound. On principle, of course, I
_was_ all wrong, and I knew it; but still I went on.

I told him the strange story of the past few weeks from beginning to
end. I commenced with the part which concerned Farnham and Carson
Wildred alone. I did not pass over that which had to do with Karine, my
hopeless and unrequited love for her, my passionate anxiety to serve her
at all costs; and I ended by declaring my certainty that Carson Wildred
and Willis Collins were one and the same man.

"He is doubly a murderer," I said. "And yet, unless you and I together
can keep him from it, he will be your sister's husband."

"I'll kill him first!" exclaimed my companion.

"I think the trick can be done without resorting to such extreme
measures as that," I returned, "especially if you are willing to come
over from his camp to mine."

He looked at me sharply for a moment without answering, then he said:

"You seem pretty quick, I've noticed, in what you've just been telling
me at putting two and two together. Well, you say you were at the Santa
Anna Hotel the night the murder was committed ten years ago. You knew
there were two men mixed up in it. You remembered one of them; would you
remember the other?"

"He was a mere boy," I said, "and it's a long time ago. He must have
changed almost beyond recognition."

"He's just twenty-nine at present; I've good reason to know, as I'm he."

It was my turn to be astonished, but it was not policy to show it.
Therefore I merely said, "Oh, indeed!"

"You see," he went on dully, "that's where Wildred has had his pull over
me since he ran across me, by a piece of devil's own luck, in Canada
five years ago. As you say, I have changed; but his eyes are like
gimlets, they'd pierce