flash of the other. He remembered, as if something was coming back
to him out of a dream, how the whimsical twistings of his sick
brain had made him see two faces instead of one. Yet he knew that
the first picture of his mysterious assailant, the picture painted
in his brain when he had tried to raise his pistol, was the right
one. He had seen her dark eyes aglow; he had seen the sunlit sheen
of her black hair rippling in the wind; he had seen the white
pallor in her face, the slimness of her as she stood over him in
horror--he remembered even the clutch of her white hand at her
throat. A moment before she had tried to kill him. And then he had
looked up and had seen her like that! It must have been some
unaccountable trick in his brain that had flooded her hair with
golden fire at times.

His eyes followed a furrow in the white sand which led from where
he sat bolstered against the tree down to his pack and the rock.
It was the trail made by his body when she had dragged him up to
the shelter and coolness of the timber. One of his laws of
physical care was to keep himself trained down to a hundred and
sixty, but he wondered how she had dragged up even so much as that
of dead weight. It had taken a great deal of effort. He could see
distinctly three different places in the sand where she had
stopped to rest.

Carrigan had earned a reputation as the expert analyst of "N"
Division. In delicate matters it was seldom that McVane did not
take him into consultation. He possessed an almost uncanny grip on
the working processes of a criminal mind, and the first rule he
had set down for himself was to regard the acts of omission rather
than the one outstanding act of commission. But when he proved to