uch
sense as that one."

"Let's see the others."

"I chucked them into the waste paper basket. One came by the morning mail
yesterday and one by the afternoon. I'm no mind reader, and I've got no
time to guess fool puzzles."

Curly observed that the waste paper basket was full. Evidently it had not
been emptied for two or three days.

"Mind if I look for the others?" he asked.

Bolt waved permission. "Go to it."

The young man emptied the basket on the floor and went over its contents
carefully. He found three communications from the unknown writer. Each of
them was printed by hand on a sheet of cheap lined paper torn from a
scratch pad. He smoothed them out and put them side by side on the table.
This was what he read:

HEARTS ARE TRUMPS
WHEN IN DOUBT PLAY TRUMPS
PLAY TRUMPS _NOW_

There was only the one line to each message, and all of them were plainly
in the same hand. He could make out only one thing, that someone was
trying to give the sheriff information in a guarded way.

He was still puzzling over the thing when a boy came with a special
delivery letter for the sheriff. Bolt glanced at it and handed the note to
Curly.

"Another _billy doo_ from my anxious friend."

This time the sender had been in too much of a hurry to print the words.
They were written in a stiff hand by some uneducated person.

The Jack of Trumps, to-day

"Mind if I keep these?" Curly asked.

"Take 'em along."

Flandrau walked out to the grandstand at the fair grounds and sat down by
himself there to think out what connection, if any, these singular
warnings might have with the vanishing of Cullison or the robbery of the
W. & S. He wasted three precious hours without any result. Dusk was
falling before he returned.

"Guess I'll take them to my little partner and give her a whack at the
puzzle," he decided.

Curly strolled back to town along El Molino street and down Main. He had
just crossed the old Spanish plaza when his absorbed gaze fell on a sign
that brought him up short. In front of a cigar store stretched across the
sidewalk a painted picture of a jack of hearts. The same name was on the
window.

Fifty yards behind him was the Silver Dollar saloon, where Luck Cullison
had last been seen on his way to the Del Mar one hundred and fifty yards
in front of him. Somewhere within that distance of two hundred yards the