ss, and finally
desisted with a regretful sigh.

"Was there ever----?" he began.

But Helen broke in with a sharp exclamation, which promptly drew him
to her side.

"This--this isn't a love letter at all," she cried amazedly.
"It's--it's--listen! 'Please have ten gallons of Brandy and twenty
Rye laid in the manger in my barn. Money enclosed. O'B!'"

Helen looked up at the man beside her. All her laughter had gone.
There was something like tragedy in her serious eyes.

Bill was staring at the paper.

"Why that's--that's an order for--liquor from O'Brien," he said, with
the air of having made a discovery.

His brilliancy passed the girl by. She merely nodded.

"How--how did it get there?" she ejaculated.

"Why, some one must have thrown it there," Bill declared deliberately.

Again the man's shrewdness lacked an appreciative audience. The girl
made no answer. She was thinking. She moved aside and leaned against
the rough trunk of the mighty pine. She was still staring at the
paper.

But her movement caught the man's attention, and the sudden
realization of the proximity of the pine recalled many things to his
mind. The pine. That was where he had seen Charlie, his first night in
the valley. That was where the police were watching him. That was
where he vanished. It was at the pine that O'Brien had warned him
Charlie had gone to collect "greenbacks"--dollars. That was O'Brien's
order, money enclosed. Charlie had found the order and money. Then,
when he was interrupted by his, Bill's, shout he had thrown the order
away.

The realization was like a douche of cold water, in spite of all he
had seen and knew. Then he did a thing he hardly understood the reason
of. It was the result of impulse--a sort of sub-conscious impulse. He
reached out and took the weather-stained paper from the girl's
yielding hands and deliberately tore it up.

"Why--why are you doing that?" Helen asked sharply.

Bill forced himself to a smile, and shrugged his shoulders.

"I don't know," he said. Then, after a pause: "I guess that order has
been filled." A bitterness found expression in the quality of his
smile. "I saw the liquor delivered at O'Brien's last night. I saw the
'runners' at work. Charlie was with them. Say, where d'you paint from?
Right here?"

Helen looked up into the man's face. The last vestige of levity had
passed from her. Her cheeks had paled, and she was striving
desperately to read behind the ill-fitting smile