he began. "I've
been meaning to see you and tell it ever since you made good in that
Fernendez matter. It wasn't your gameness. Anybody can be game. But it
looked to me like you were using the brains in the top of your head, and
that happens so seldom among law officers I wanted to have a talk with
you. Since yesterday I've been more anxious. For why? I got a letter
from my brother telling me Sheriff Collins showed him a locket he found
at the place of the T. P. Limited hold-up. That locket has in it a
photograph of my wife and little girl. For fifteen years I haven't seen
that picture. When I saw it last 'twas round my little baby's neck.
What's more, I haven't seen her in that time, either."

Mackenzie stopped, swallowed hard, and took a drink of water.

"You haven't seen your little girl in fifteen years," exclaimed Bucky.

"Haven't seen or heard of her. So far as I know she may not be alive
now. This locket is the first hint I have had since she was taken away,
the very first news of her that has reached me, and I don't know what
to make of that. One of the robbers must have been wearing it, the way I
figure it out. Where did he get it? That's what I want to know."

"Suppose you tell me the story, seh," suggested the ranger gently.

The cattleman offered O'Connor a cigar and lit one himself. For a minute
he puffed slowly at his Havana, leaning far back in his chair with eyes
reminiscent and half shut. Then he shook himself back into the present
and began his tale.

"I don't reckon you ever heard tell of Dave Henderson. It was back in
Texas I knew him, and he's been missing sixteen years come the eleventh
of next August. For fifteen years I haven't mentioned his name, because
Dave did me the dirtiest wrong that one man ever did another. Back in
the old days he and I used to trail together. We was awful thick, and
mostly hunted in couples. We began riding the same season back on
the old Kittredge Ranch, and we went in together for all the kinds of
spreeing that young fellows who are footloose are likely to do. Fact is,
we suited each other from the ground up. We frolicked round a-plenty,
like young colts will, and there was nothing on this green earth Dave
could have asked from me that I wouldn't have done for him. Nothing
except one, I reckon, and Dave never asked that of me."

Mackenzie puffed at his cigar a silent moment before resuming. "It
happened we both fell in love with the same girl, little Frances Cla