wrist with his hunting-knife."

"Why, the man's a hero!" cried the clergyman, with unction.

Mackenzie flung him a disgusted look. "We don't go much on heroes
out here. He's game, if that's what you mean. And able, too.
Bucky O'Connor himself isn't any smarter at following a trail."

"And who is Bucky O'Connor?"

"He's the man that just ran down Fernendez. Think I'll have a
smoke, sir. Care to join me?"

But the Pekin-Bostonian preferred to stay and jot down in his
note-book the story of the beartrap, to be used later as a sermon
illustration. This may have been the reason he did not catch the
quick look that passed without the slightest flicker of the
eyelids between Major Mackenzie and the young woman in Section 3.
It was as if the old officer had wired her a message in some code
the cipher of which was known only to them.

But the sheriff, returning at the head of his cohorts, caught it,
and wondered what meaning might lie back of that swift glance.
Major Mackenzie and this dark-eyed beauty posed before others as
strangers, yet between them lay some freemasonry of understanding
to which he had not the key.

Collins did not know that the aloofness in the eyes of Miss
Wainwright--he had seen the name on her suit-case--gave way to
horror when her glance fell on his gloved hand. She had a swift,