sidy grabbed him, lifted him bodily, and smashed him to the
floor of the car; but with the amazing tenacity and wonderful agility of
the trained gun-fighter, Buck managed to fire as he fell. The big bullet
grazed the top of Cassidy's head, and he fell unconscious across the
half-dead desperado.

Buck felt about for his gun, which had fallen from his hand; but already
the "bug-dust" was getting in its work. Sighing heavily, he joined the
messenger in a quiet sleep.

At Cimarron they broke the car open, revived the sleepers, restored the
outlaw to the Ohio State Prison, from which he had escaped, and the
messenger to Nora O'Neal.

JACK RAMSEY'S REASON

When Bill Ross romped up over the range and blew into Edmonton in the
wake of a warm chinook, bought tobacco at the Hudson's Bay store, and
began to regale the gang with weird tales of true fissures, paying
placers, and rich loads lying "virgin," as he said, in Northern British
Columbia, the gang accepted his tobacco and stories for what they were
worth; for it is a tradition up there that all men who come in with the
Mudjekeewis are liars.

That was thirty years ago.

The same chinook winds that wafted Bill Ross and his rose-hued romances
into town have winged them, and the memory of them, away.

In the meantime Ross reformed, forgot, the people forgave and made him
Mayor of Edmonton.

* * * * *

When Jack Ramsey called at the capital of British Columbia and told of a
territory in that great Province where the winter winds blew warm,
where snow fell only once in a while and was gone again with the first
peep of the sun; of a mountain-walled wonderland between the Coast Range
and the Rockies, where flowers bloomed nine months in the year and gold
could be panned on almost any of the countless rivers, men said he had
come down from Alaska, and that he lied.

To be sure, they did not say that to Jack,--they only telegraphed it one
to another over their cigars in the club. Some of them actually believed
it, and one man who had made money in California and later in Leadville
said he _knew_ it was so; for, said he, "Jack Ramsey never says or does
a thing without a 'reason.'"

At the end of a week this English-bred Yankee had organized the "Chinook
Mining and Milling Company, Limited."

This man was at the head of the scheme, with Jack Ramsey as Managing
Director.

Ramsey was a prospector by nature made proficient by practic