himself than to the rest of us. "It beats me why these two old cowmen
should be here in this country, tangled up with buried gold-dust, and
being hunted like beasts for its possession. Old Hans was certainly in
his right mind or he wouldn't have known us; and if he told us right,
Hank Rowan has been murdered too. If Lyn is at Walsh, she may be able to
shed some light on this. But I'll swear I feel like a man groping in a
dark room."

"If Lyn is at Walsh," I asserted stoutly, "she got there since I left
this morning. I was there two days, and I wasn't in the background by
any means; and she's the sort of girl that isn't backward about hailing
a friend. We know one thing--the men that killed Rutter are the ones
that held us up, and got off with that money of mine. And say--how did
those fellows know I had that money and where I was carrying it? Good
Lord! it sounds like the plot of a dime novel."

It was a stubborn riddle for us to try and read. And our surroundings at
that particular moment were not the most favorable to coherent thought
or plausible theory-building. When a man has been robbed at the point of
a gun, and set afoot in the heart of an unpeopled waste, with a dead man
and a dying fire for company, his nerves are apt to get a little bit on
edge. Things that wouldn't tax your fortitude in daylight look like the
works of the devil when you have to face them in the black hours of the
night. None of us are so far removed from savagery that a few grains of
superstition don't lurk in our souls, all ready to bob up if the setting
is appropriate. If it should ever be my lot to take the Long Trail at
short notice, I hope it will be under a blue sky and a blazing sun. It
was hard to be philosophic, or even decently calm, standing there in the
sickly glow of the fading coals with old Hans mutely reminding us that
life is a tenuous thread, easily snipped.