"Ah! what have I always said to you about this one!" Marot remarked as Solange passed his shop on her way to her rooms one day. He was looking out at her and smirking at Madame Ricot, the neighborhood gossip and scold. "Is this what one calls a marriage? Rather is it that such a marriage indicates that a marriage was necessary—and arranged conveniently, is it not? For observe that this broken adventurer who, as I know, was kicked out of the army in disgrace, is not a real husband at all, as every one may see. It is reasonable to suppose, therefore, that the affair has been arranged to hide something, is it not?"

A hand that was like steel closed on the beefy neck of the butcher and a calm voice behind him spoke in his ear.

"Now here is a word for you, my friend, from De Launay, the lgionnaire, and you will do well to remember it! A tongue that is evil will win you an evil end and words that are not true will result in your throat being cut before you know it. Realize that, Marot, my friend, and say again that De Launay was kicked out of the army!"

"Death of a dog!" sputtered the butcher, twisting in the iron grasp on his neck. "I will slit thy belly——"

"Thou wilt do nothing but root in the mud as is thy nature," said De Launay and kicked him vigorously into the gutter where he did, indeed, plow the filth with his nose. Madame Ricot uttered a shrill shriek for the police, and Solange, who had been unconscious of it all, turned about to see De Launay standing on the sidewalk brushing his hands while the butcher rolled in the mud. At this moment a gendarme came running up.

"Take that carrion and lock him up!" said De Launay, calmly. "I accuse him of public indecency, spreading scandal and criminal slander. He has said that I, the General de Launay, was kicked out of the army for unmentioned crimes. I will prefer charges against him in the morning."

"Monsieur le gnral, it shall be done," said the gendarme, with a smart salute. He grabbed the groveling butcher and hoisted him from his wallow. "Come along with me, Marot! I have long had my eye on thee! And is there a charge against the woman, my general?"

Madame Ricot was gaping wide-mouthed and silent at the unexpected result of her appeal to the forces of the law. And now she shrank fearfully back toward the gathering crowd.

"There is no charge—as yet," said De Launay. "But she is suspected of being a procuress and a vile scold. If it is she who has been injuring respected reputations, I shall soon know it, and then——"

"I shall be at your service, my general," the gendarme assured him, and, with another salute, departed, jerking the roaring Marot with him. De Launay sauntered on, with his rolling walk, toward Solange, who turned and walked away from him so that he did not overtake her until they had come to her apartment.

"There is entirely too much gossip in this quarter," said De Launay, casually, as she wheeled about at the entrance to her rooms. "It is just as well that you are getting out of it."

"It is just as well," agreed Solange, angrily. "For if I remain here much longer the gossip that you arouse will ruin me."

"Again," said De Launay, rather dryly, "I apologize."

Solange was left to feel at fault. She knew that she had been unjust, but De Launay's casual ways and his very indifferent deference angered her. Yet it could not last much longer since they were to take a train for Le Havre that evening and sail upon the following day. De Launay had called regarding the final arrangements.

Her passports had been secured and her passage on the Astarte, of the Blue Star line, was arranged for. How this had been done she did not inquire, remaining in ignorance of efforts spent by De Launay in securing the intercession of the French and American military authorities in order that she might have suitable accommodations on the crowded liner, which was being used as a troopship. A high dignitary of an allied nation had had to postpone his sailing in order that Madame de Launay might travel in a first-class stateroom.

Even so, the girl, concerned chiefly with her own adventure, and strange to the conditions existing, suspected nothing. The little stateroom was none too luxurious, for the Astarte was not one of the best boats, and four or five years of war service had not improved her. And she had no notion that De Launay, even for such comfort as this, had paid an exorbitant price out of his own pocket. He had given her the rate of the second-cabin berth, a dingy little inside cubby-hole, which he himself occupied.

The voyage was long and slow and dull. The swarming troops and military men crowded the ship to embarrassing fullness and Solange kept mostly to her cabin. She saw little of De Launay, who had not the run of the upper decks as she had, though his rank was recognized and he was made free of the lounge where the military men congregated. She heard somewhat of him, however, and what she heard angered her still more. It was chiefly in the line of gossip and conjecture as to why Madame de Launay, who seemed to be distinguished because she was Madame de Launay, should be traveling alone, first class, while the famous soldier shared a stuffy hole in the wall with a Chicago merchant. The few women aboard, nurses, Y.M.C.A. workers, welfare workers on war missions, picked up the talk among the officers and passed their curiosity on to Solange through stewardesses and maids. Every one seemed to think it strange, and Solange acknowledged that it was strange—stranger than they thought. But the thing that rankled was the fact that the assiduous care of the stewardess, her very obsequiousness, seemed to emanate from De Launay. It was because she was De Launay's wife that she was a figure of importance—although she pictured him as a discredited mercenary who was even now, probably, indulging his bestial appetite for liquor in the officers' lounge and boasting of his exploits to a congenial audience.

Her one consoling thought was that it could not last much longer. True, New York would not mean the last of him since he was to accompany her to her destination, but that should not take long. Once at Sulphur Falls, which she understood to be her final railroad station, he could be relegated to his proper place.

Something like this did happen, though not in the measure she anticipated. They landed in New York on a chill, rainy day, and De Launay appeared at the gangway with his usual rolling gait, as though half intoxicated, eyes half closed and indifferent. His bow was almost mocking, she thought, with the flash of irritation that he always aroused in her. Other passengers looked at him curiously and at herself with some wonder, whispers running among them. Behind her veil she flushed, realizing that her own personality was not so much the subject of interest as his. She was uncomfortably aware that he was a striking figure, tall and handsome in spite of his careless demeanor and slouching walk. It was all the more reprehensible that such a man should make so little of himself.

But De Launay led her through the customs with a word that worked like magic and soon had her in a taxicab. He took her to a small and good hotel, not at all conspicuous, and saw that she was properly taken care of and supplied with American currency. Then, as she turned to follow the bell boy to her rooms, he bowed again. But she hesitated a moment.

"May I ask," she said, with some contrition roused by his care of her, "where you are going?"

"To my usual haunts, mademoiselle," he answered, carelessly. "But I shall be within reach. To-morrow afternoon the train leaves for the West. I will see that everything goes well."

"See that it goes well with you," she answered, a little tartly, "if not for your own sake, then for mine."

"Things go—as they go, with me," he answered, with a shrug. Solange turned away, but she felt somewhat more kindly toward him.

In part this was due to the fact that she was no longer overshadowed by him. The hotel clerks knew nothing of him. As soon as he passed without the zone of military activities, he became nothing and no one. They only knew that they had been liberally tipped to afford Madame de Launay every service and comfort, and, as her appearance was striking and distinguished, they rendered the service with an impressive enthusiasm. From this point on De Launay took his rightful place as a mere appanage.

When they left New York Solange was apparently in full control and De Launay a mere courier. Used to short European trips, it did not occur to her that the price for which she secured drawing-room accommodations on the Twentieth Century Limited was ridiculously low, and as De Launay had proved capable of handling such matters, and she was a stranger, she gladly and unquestioningly left such things in his hands. He, himself, had a berth in some obscure part of the train and remained there. The maid and the porter of her car hovered around her with solicitude, and she became very favorably impressed with the kindliness and generosity of America, extended, apparently, without thought of reward.

At Chicago De Launay again showed himself in what she supposed was his true light. He had seen her to a hotel for the two or three hours they had to wait there and had escorted her back to her train again. While she was settling herself in her compartment she chanced to look out of the window before the train left the station and perceived her escort conversing with an individual who was not prepossessing. It was a short, broad man, dressed roughly, wearing boots covered by his trousers and with a handkerchief knotted about his neck. He wore a wide-brimmed, high-crowned felt hat, old and battered, its brim curled disreputably at all angles. She perceived that, after a few words together, this fellow and De Launay appeared to be on the best of terms, shaking hands cordially, conversing with much laughter and an occasional slap on the back. Finally the man, in the shelter of a truck loaded with baggage, produced a bottle from his hip pocket and offered it to De Launay who, with a preliminary salute, lifted it to his mouth. After which he wiped the neck of it with his hand and passed it back, the man duplicating his action.

The train was about to start and, with a few hilarious farewells, they parted and De Launay rolled in her direction while the other tramp strolled away at a gait very much like the general's. Two of a kind, she thought, bitterly; two ruffians who were hail-fellow-well-met—and she was married to one of them! A soldier of France, a distinguished general, to descend to this level! It was almost inconceivable.

But the train started and the long journey began.

Hour after hour the landscape flashed past the windows. Day faded to night, and Solange slept as best she could on the reeling train. In the morning she awoke to pass another weary time of gazing from the windows at the endless checkerboard of prairie farms rolling past, divided into monotonous squares by straight, dusty roads, each with its house and big red barn forming an exact replica of every other. She ate and dozed, tried to read a magazine but found the English more than usually difficult to understand, though ordinarily she read it with facility. Now her thoughts were in French and they persisted in coming back to her mission and to the man who accompanied her.

Another long, almost endless day of blatant sun and baked, brown prairie, passing by almost imperceptible degrees into wide plains, flat and dry, cut by wire fences here and there, but no longer checkerboarded in a maddening monotony of pattern. No longer did the houses and red barns succeed one another at exact intervals. In fact they seemed to have almost disappeared and had changed their character, such of them as she saw. They were rough, unpainted board affairs, for the most part, with here and there a more pretentious edifice. But in any case they were scarce and far apart. Low, grass-roofed dugouts also were to be seen at times, but, generally speaking, the view presented almost nothing but an endless vista of rolling, baked plain, covered with scattering grass and dusty gray sage.

And then, far ahead, a dim blue line against the horizon, the mountains appeared. When she awoke in the morning they were rolling majestically through wild gorges under towering peaks clad in snow. Pines and firs shaded the slopes, and the biting, rare air of the peaks burned her lungs. She forgot De Launay, forgot the depression that had grown upon her with the realization of the immensity into which she was plunging, and felt her spirit soaring in exhilaration and hopes of success. Mountain born and bred, she reacted buoyantly to the inspiration of the environment. The preposterous nature of her quest, a realization of which had been growing upon her, as the endless miles unrolled before her, was forgotten. She felt at home and at ease in the rugged hills, capable of doing anything she set out to do, no longer fettered with the binding restrictions of civilization and no longer bound by the cold laws of probability.

She wanted to summon De Launay, to point out to him the glories of the landscape and to let its purity and strength sink into him for the salvation of his manhood. But he remained aloof, lost, she surmised, in the buffet, drinking illicit liquor with disreputable boon companions.

Then, in time, they passed the mountain rampart, though they never again got entirely out of sight of it, and descended into other desolate plains, broken here and there by patches of green and fertile land where villages and farms stood. Beside a leaden, surging inland sea, across a vast plain of alkali, plunging through enormous gorges cut out of the solid, towering rock, they entered mountains again, and again shot out onto barren plains, now, however, rusty brown and rough with broken and jagged lava. Another night was descending when, with defiant shrieks of the whistle, the train shot out upon a vast bench and, with flickering electric lights flashing past the windows, and glass reflecting back its blazing stack, it rolled with tolling bell into a station. The porter appeared.

"Sulphuh Falls, ma'am! Hoyeah's whah you gits off!"

Then De Launay lurched into view behind the porter and she felt a sudden revulsion against the thrill of interest and anticipation that had seized her.



CHAPTER VI

WHERE THE DESERT HAD BEEN

Solange awoke in the bustling, prosperous environment of Sulphur Falls, nestled in the flats below the canyon of the Serpentine, with a feeling of ease and comfort. She had expected to find some wild, frontier village, populated by Indians and cowboys, a desperate and lawless community, and, instead, encountered a small but luxurious hotel, paved streets, shops, people dressed much as they had been in New York. She knew nothing of the changes that had taken place with the building of the great irrigation dam and the coming of the war factories which belched smoke back at the foot of the canyon. She did not realize that, twenty years ago, there had been no town, nothing but limitless plains on which cattle and sheep grazed, a crude ferry and a road house. It was beyond her present comprehension that in a dozen years a city could have sprung up harboring twenty thousand souls and booming with prosperity. Nor did she reflect upon the possible consequences these unknown facts might have upon her search.

Everything was strange to her, and yet everything was what she was accustomed to. Comfort and even luxury surrounded her, and the law stalked the streets openly in the person of a uniformed policeman. That fact, indeed, spelled a misgiving to her, for, where the law held sway, a private vengeance became a different thing from what she had imagined it to be. Only De Launay's careless gibe as he had left her at the hotel held promise of performance. "To-morrow we'll start our private butchery," he had said, and grinned. But even that gibe hinted at a recklessness that matched her own and gave her comfort now.

De Launay, coming into the glittering new town utterly unprepared for the change that had taken place, had felt the environment strike him like a blow. He saw people like those on Broadway, walking paved sidewalks in front of plate glass under brilliant electric lights. He had come back to seek rest for his diseased nerves in the limitless ranges of his youth and this was what he found.

He had turned and looked back at the frowning canyon through which the train had come from the northeast. There were the mountains, forest clad and cloud capped, as of old. There was the great, black lava gulch of the Serpentine. It looked the same, but he knew that it was changed.

Smoke hung above the canyon where tall chimneys of nitrate plant and smelters belched their foulness against the blue sky. In the forests the loggers were tearing and slashing into all but the remnant of the timber. Down the gloomy gulch cut out of the lava ran a broad, white ribbon of concrete road. Lastly, and primary cause of all this change, where had once been the roaring falls now sprang a gigantic bow of masonry, two hundred feet in height, and back of it the canyon held a vast lake of water where once had run the foaming Serpentine. From the dam enormous dynamos took their impulses, and from it also huge ditches and canals led the water out and around the valley down below.

Where the lonely road house had stood at the ford across the Serpentine, and the reckless range riders had stopped to drink and gamble, now stood the town, paved with asphalt and brick, jammed with cottages and office buildings, theaters, factories, warehouses, and mills. Plate glass gleamed in the sun or, at night, blazed in the effulgence of limitless electricity.

Around the town, grown in a few years to twenty thousand souls, stretched countless acres of fenced and cultivated land, yielding bountifully under the irrigating waters. From east and west long trains of nickel-plated Pullmans pulled into a granite station.

The people spoke the slang of Broadway and danced the fox trot in evening clothes.

Southward, where the limitless desert had been, brown or white with alkali, one beheld, as far as eye could reach, orderly green patches of farmland, fenced and dotted with the dainty houses of the settlers.

But no! There was something more, beyond the farms and beyond the desert. It was a blue and misty haze on the horizon, running an uneven and barely discernible line about the edges of the bright blue sky. It was faint and undefined, but De Launay knew it for the Esmeralda range, standing out there aloof and alone and, perhaps, still untamed and uncivilized.

He felt resentful and at the same time helpless. To him it seemed that his last chance to win ease of mind and rest from the driving restlessness had been taken away from him. Only the mountains remained to offer him a haven, and those might be changed as this spot was.

The natural thing to do was to drown his disappointment in drink, and that is what he set out to do. He left Solange safely ensconced in the shiny, new hotel, whose elevators and colored waiters filled him with disgust and sought the darker haunts of the town.

With sure instinct for the old things, if they still existed, he hunted up a "livery and feed barn." He found one on a side street, near a lumber yard and not far from the loading chutes which spoke of a considerable traffic in beef cattle. He noted with bitterness a cheap automobile standing in front of the place.

But there were horses in the stalls, horses that lolled on a dropped hip, with heads down and eyes closed. There were heavy roping saddles hanging on the pegs, and bridles with ear loops and no throat latches. If the proprietor, one MacGregor, wore a necktie and a cloth cap, he forgave him for the sake of the open waistcoat and the lack of an outer coat.

MacGregor was an incident of little importance. One of more consequence was a good horse that roamed the open feed yard at the side of the barn. De Launay, seedy and disreputable, still had a look about him that spoke of certain long dead days, and MacGregor, when he was asked about the horse, made no mistake in concluding that he had to deal with one who knew what he was about.

The horse was MacGregor's, taken to satisfy a debt, and he would sell it. The upshot of the affair was that De Launay bought it at a fair price. This took time, and when he finally came out again to the front of the barn it was late afternoon.

Squatted against the wall, their high heels planted under them on the sloping boards of the runway, sat two men. Wide, flapping hats shaded their faces. They wore no coats, although the November evenings were cool and their waistcoats hung open. Overalls of blue denim, turned up at the bottoms in wide cuffs, hid all but feet and wrinkled ankles of their boots which were grooved with shiny semicircles around the heels, where spurs had dented them.

One of them was as tall as De Launay, gaunt and hatchet faced. His hair was yellowish, mottled with patches of grayish green.

The other was sturdy, shorter, with curly, brown hair.

The tall one was humming a tune. De Launay recognized it with a shock of recollection. "Roll on, my little doggy!"

Without a word he sat down also, in a duplicate of their pose. No one spoke for several minutes.

Then, the shorter man said, casually, addressing his remarks to nobody in particular.

"They's sure a lotta fresh pilgrims done hit this here town."

The tall one echoed an equally casual chorus.

"They don't teach no sort of manners to them down-East hobos, neither."

De Launay stared impassively at the road in front of them.

"You'd think some of them'd sense it that a gent has got a right to be private when he wants to be."

"It's a —— of a town, nohow."

"People even run around smellin' of liquor—which is plumb illegal, Sucatash."

"Which there are some that are that debased they even thrives on wood alcohol, Dave."

Silence settled down on them once more. It was broken this time by De Launay, who spoke as impersonally as they.

"They had real cow hands hereaways, once."

A late and sluggish fly buzzed in the silence.

"I reckon the sheep eat 'em outa range and they done moved down to Arizona."

The gaunt Sucatash murmured sadly:

"Them pilgrims is sure smart on g'ography an' history."

"An' sheep—especially," said the one called Dave.

"Ca ne fait rien!" said De Launay, pronouncing it almost like "sinferien" as he had heard the linguists of the A.E.F. do. The two men slowly turned their heads and looked at him apparently aware of his existence for the first time.

Like MacGregor, they evidently saw something beneath his habiliments, though the small mustache puzzled them.

"You-all been to France?" asked Dave. De Launay did not answer direct.

"There was some reputed bronk peelers nursin' mules overseas," he mused. "Their daddies would sure have been mortified to see 'em."

"We didn't dry nurse no mules, pilgrim," said Sucatash. "When did you lick Hindenburg?"

De Launay condescended to notice them. "In the battle of vin rouge," he said. "I reckon you-all musta won a round or two with the vin sisters, yourselves."

"You're sure a-sayin' something, old-timer," said Dave, with emotion. For the first time he saw the rosette in De Launay's buttonhole. "You done a little more'n caf fightin' though, to get that?"

De Launay shrugged his shoulders. "They give those for entertainin' a politician," he answered. "Any cow hands out of a job around here?"

Both of the men chuckled. "You aimin' to hire any riders?"

"I could use a couple to wrangle pilgrims in the Esmeraldas. More exactly, there's a lady, aimin' to head into the mountains and she'll need a couple of packers."

"This lady don't seem to have no respect for snow and blizzards, none whatever," was the comment.

"Which she hasn't, bein' troubled with notions about gold mines and such things. She needs taking care of."

"Ridin' the Esmeraldas this time o' year and doin' chores for Pop all winter strikes me as bein' about a toss-up," said the man called Sucatash. "I reckon it's a certainty that Pop requires considerable labor, though, and maybe this demented lady won't. If the wages is liberal——"

"We ought to see the lady, first," said Dave. "There's some lady pilgrims that couldn't hire me with di'monds."

"The pay's all right and the lady's all right. She's French."

"A mad'mo'selle?" they echoed.

"It's a long story," said De Launay, smiling. "You'd better see her and talk it over. Meantime, this prohibition is some burdensome."

"Which it ain't the happiest incumbrance of the world," agreed Sucatash. "They do say that the right kind of a hint will work at the Empire Pool Rooms."

"If they have it, we'll get it," asserted De Launay, confidently. "You-all point the way."

The three of them rose by the simple process of straightening their legs at the knees, and walked away.



CHAPTER VII

MAID MARIAN GROWN UP

The Empire Pool Room was an innocent enough place to the uninitiate. To those who had the confidence of the proprietor it was something else. There were rooms upstairs where games were played that were somewhat different from pool and billiards. There was also a bar up there and the drinks that were served over it were not of the soft variety. It seemed that Sucatash and Dave MacKay were known here and had the entre to the inner circles.

De Launay followed them trustfully. The only thing he took the trouble to note was at a rack in front of the place where—strange anachronism in a town that swarmed with shiny automobiles—were tethered two slumberous, moth-eaten burros laden with heavy packs, miners' pan, pick and bedding.

"Prospector?" he asked, indicating the dilapidated songsters of the desert.

The two cow hands looked at the beasts, identifying them with the facility of their breed.

"Old Jim Banker, I reckon. In for a wrastlin' match with the demon rum. Anything you want to know about the Esmeraldas he can tell you, if you can make him talk."

"Old Jim Banker? Old-timer, is he?"

"Been a-soakin' liquor and a-dryin' out in the desert hereaways ever since fourteen ninety-two, I reckon. B'en here so long he resembles a horned toad more'n anything else." This from Sucatash.

De Launay paused inside the door. "I wonder. Are there any more old-timers left hereaways?"

"Oh, sure. There's some that dates back past the Spanish War. I reckon 'Snake' Murphy—he tends bar for Johnny the Greek, who runs this honkatonk—he's one of 'em. Banker's another. You remember when them Wall Street guys hired 'Panamint Charlie' Wantage to splurge East in a private car scatterin' double eagles all the way and hoorayin' about the big mine he had in Death Valley?"

"No," said De Launay. "When was that?"

"Back in nineteen eight."

"I was in Algeria then. I'd never heard. But I remember Panamint. He and Jim Banker were partners, weren't they?"

"They was." Sucatash looked curiously at De Launay, wondering how a man who was in Algeria came to know so much about these old survivals. "Leastways, I've heard tell they was both of them prospectin' the Esmeraldas a whole lot in them days and hangin' together. But Panamint struck this soft graft and wouldn't let Jim in on it, so they broke up the household. You know—or maybe you don't—that Panamint was finally found dead in a cave in Death Valley and there was talk that Banker followed him there and beefed him, thinkin' he really had a mine. Nothin' come of it except to make folks a little dubious about Jim. He never was remarkable for popularity, nohow, so it don't amount to much."

"And Snake Murphy: he used to keep the road house at the ford over the river, didn't he?"

Once more Sucatash, fairly well informed on ancient history himself, eyed De Launay askance.

"Which he might have. That's before my time, I reckon. I was just bein' weaned when Louisiana was run out of the country. My old man could tell you all about it. He's Carter Wallace, of the Lazy Y at Willow Spring."

"I knew him," said De Launay.

"You knowed my old man?"

"But maybe he'd not remember me."

Sucatash sensed the fact that De Launay intended to be reticent. "Dad sure knows all the old-timers and their histories," he declared. "Him and old Ike Brandon was the last ranchers left this side the Esmeraldas, and since Ike checked in a year ago he's the last survivor. There's a few has moved into town, but mostly the place is all pilgrims and nesters."

They had climbed the stairs and come into the hidden sanctum of Johnny the Greek, and De Launay looked about curiously, noting the tables and the scattering of customers about the place, rough men, close cropped, hard faced and sullen of countenance, most of them, typical of the sort of itinerant labor that was filling the town with recruits and initiates of the I.W.W. There were one or two who were of cleaner strain, like the two young cowmen. Behind the bar was a red-faced, shifty-eyed man, wearing a mustache so black as to appear startling in contrast to his sandy hair. De Launay eyed him curiously, noting with a secret smile that his right arm appeared to be stiff at the wrist. He made no comment, however, but followed the two men to the bar where the business of the day began. It consisted of imbibing vile whisky served by the stiff-armed Snake Murphy.

But De Launay still had something on his mind. "You say Ike Brandon's dead?" he asked. "What became of his granddaughter?"

"Went to work," said Sucatash. "Dave, where's Marian Pettis?"

"Beatin' a typewriter fer 'Cap' Wilding, last I heard," said Dave.

"She was a little girl when I knew her," said De Launay, his voice softening a little with a queer change of accent into a Southern slur. Snake Murphy, who was polishing the rough bar in front of him, glanced quickly up, as though hearing something vaguely familiar. But he saw nothing but De Launay's thoughtful eyes and sober face with its small, pointed mustache.

"'Scuse me, gents," he murmured. "What'll it be?"

"A very little girl," said De Launay, absently looking into and through Murphy. "A sort of little fairy."

The lanky Sucatash looked at him askance, catching the note of sentiment. "Yeah?" he said, a bit dryly. "Well, folks change, you know. They grow up."

"Yes," said De Launay.

"And this Marian Pettis, she done growed up. I ain't sayin' nothin' against a lady, you understand, but she ain't exactly in the fairy class nowadays, I reckon."

De Launay, somewhat to his surprise, although he sensed the note of warning and dry enlightenment in Sucatash's words, felt no shock. He had had a sentimental desire to see if the girl of six had fulfilled the promise of her youth after nineteen years, had even dreamed, in his soberer moments, of coming back to her to play the rle of a prince, but nevertheless, he found himself philosophically accepting the possibility hinted at by Sucatash and even feeling a vague sort of relief.

"Who's Wilding?" he asked. They told him that he was a young lawyer of the town, an officer of their regiment during the war. They seemed to think highly of him.

De Launay had postponed his intended debauch. In spite of mademoiselle's conviction, his lapses from sobriety had been only occasional as long as he had work to do, and this occasion, after the information he had gathered, was one calling for the exercise of his faculties.

"If you-all will hang around and herd this here desert rat, Banker, with you when you can find him, and then call at the hotel for Mademoiselle d'Albret, I'll look up this lawyer and his stenographer. I have to interview her."

He left them then and went out, a bit unsteady, seedy, unprepossessing, but carrying under his dilapidated exterior some remains of the man he had been.

He reached Wilding's office and found the man, a young fellow who appeared capable and alert. He also found, with a distinct shock, the girl who had occupied a niche in his memory for nineteen years. He found her with banged and docked hair, rouged and bepowdered, clad in georgette and glimmering artificial silk, tapping at a typewriter in Wilding's office. He had seen Broadway swarming with replicas of her.

His business with Wilding took a little time. He explained that mademoiselle might have need of his legal services and certainly would wish to see Miss Pettis. The lawyer called the girl in and to her De Launay explained that mademoiselle was the daughter of her grandfather's former employee and that she would wish to discuss with her certain matters connected with the death of French Pete. The girl swept De Launay with hard, disdainful eyes, and he knew that she was forming a concept of mademoiselle by comparison with his own general disreputableness.

"Oh, sure; I jus' as soon drop in on this dame," she said. "One o' these Frog refygees, I s'pose. Well, believe me, she's come a long way to get disappointed if she thinks I'm givin' any hand-outs to granddad's pensioners. I got troubles of my own."

"We'll be at the hotel, Miss Pettis and I," said Wilding. "That will do, Miss Pettis."

The girl teetered out on her spiky heels, with a sway of hips.

De Launay turned back to the lawyer. "I've a little personal business you might attend to," he said. Wilding set himself to listen, resignedly, imagining that this bum would yield him nothing of profit.

In ten minutes he was staring at De Launay with amazement that was almost stupefaction, fingering documents as though he must awake from sleep and find he had been dreaming. De Launay talked on, his voice slightly thick, his eyes heavy, but his mind clear and capable.

Wilding went with him to a bank and, after their business there was finished, shook hands in parting with a mixture of astonishment, disapproval and awe.

De Launay, having finished the more pressing parts of his business, made straight for Johnny the Greek's. The two burros still stood there, eyes closed and heads hanging. He walked around them before going in. A worn, dirty leather scabbard, bursting at the seams, slanted up past the withers of one brute, and out of its mouth projected the butt of a rifle. The plate was bright with wear, and the walnut of the stock was battered and dull with age.

De Launay scratched the chin of the burro, was rewarded by the lazy flopping of an ear and then went in to his delayed orgy.

He had received a shock, as he realized he would, and for the moment all thought of Solange and his responsibility to her had vanished. He had come back home after twenty years, seeking solace in the scenes he had known as a boy, seeking, with half-sentimental memory, a little girl with bright hair and sweet face. He had come to find a roaring, artificial city on the site of the range, the friends of his youth gone, the men he had known dying out, his very trade a vanishing art. Instead of a fairy maiden, sweet and demure, a grown-up child as he had vaguely pictured her, he had found a brazen, painted, slangy, gum-chewing flapper, a modern of moderns such as would have broken old Ike Brandon's heart—as it doubtless had. The last of the old-timers were a bootlegging bartender and a half-crazy and wholly vicious prospector.

Writhing under the sting of futility and disappointment, even the rotten poison served by Johnny the Greek appealed to him. His old neurosis, almost forgotten in the half-tolerant, half-amused interest in Mademoiselle d'Albret's adventure which had occupied his activities during the past weeks, revived with redoubled force. Sick, shaken, and disgusted, he strode through the pool room and, with deliberation masking his avid desire for forgetfulness, climbed the stairs to the hidden oasis presided over by his old enemy, Snake Murphy.



CHAPTER VIII

GETTING DOWN TO BUSINESS

Mademoiselle was having a series of enlivening shocks. First came Wilding, with Miss Pettis. He was received by Solange in the mezzanine gallery of the hotel and she learned, for the first time, that De Launay was sending her a lawyer to transact her business for her. This made her angry, his assuming that she needed a lawyer, or, even if she did, that he could provide her with one. However, as she needed a divorce from her incubus, and Wilding practiced also in the Nevada courts, she thought better of her first impulse to haughtily dismiss him. As for Wilding, he began to conclude that he had gone crazy or else had encountered a set of escaped lunatics when he beheld Solange, slender and straightly tailored, but with hair hidden under a close-fitting little turban and face masked by a fold of netting.

Marian Pettis was another shock. The extraordinary De Launay, whom she had supposed lost in some gutter, and without whose aid she had been puzzled how to proceed on her quest, was evidently very much on the job. Here was a starting point, at least.

Although, behind her mask, her face registered disapproval of the girl, she welcomed her as cordially as possible. In her sweet, bell voice, she murmured an expression of concern for her grandfather and, when Marian bluntly said, "He's dead," she endeavored to convey her sorrow. To which Miss Pettis, staring at her with hard, bold eyes, as at some puzzling freak, made no reply, being engaged in uneasily wondering what "graft" the Frenchwoman was "on." Marian disliked being reminded of her grandfather's demise, having been largely responsible for it when she had run away with a plausible stranger who had assured her that she had only to present herself at Hollywood to become instantly famous as a moving-picture star, a promise that had sadly miscarried.

"But it was not so much of your grandfather as of my father that I wished to see you," mademoiselle explained, ignoring Marian's lack of response. "As for Monsieur Wilding, it is later I will require his services, though it may be that he can aid me not only in procuring a divorce from this husband, but in another matter also, Miss Pettis, and perhaps, Monsieur Wilding, you know how my father was murdered?"

Wilding shook his head but Marian nodded at once.

"Gee, yes!" she said. "I was a kid when he was croaked, but I remember it all right. There was a guy they called Louisiana, and he was one of those old-time gunmen, but at that he was some kid believe me! He took a shot at a fellow here in Sulphur Falls—that was before there was any town here at all—and they was givin' him the gate outa the neighborhood. Going to lynch him if they caught him, I guess. I don't remember much of it except how this guy looks, but I've heard the old man tell about it.

"He come ridin' out to our place all dressed up like a movie cow-puncher and you'd never have dreamed there was a mob about three jumps behind him. He sets in with us and takes a great shine to me. I was quite a doll in those days they tell me." She tossed her head as much as to say that she was still able to qualify for the description.

"Believe me, he was a regular swell, and you'd never in the world a thought he was what he turned out to be. Delaney, his name was, or something like that. Well, he plays with me and when he goes away I cried and wanted him to stay. I remember it just as vivid! He had on these chaps—leather pants, you know—and a Stetson slanting on his head, and a fancy silk neckerchief which he made into comical dolls and things. Oh! he sure made a hit with Marian!

"He swore he was comin' back, like young Lochinvar, and marry me some day, and I was all tickled to think he would do it.

"Then, would you believe it, the murdering villain rides away about half an hour before the mob comes and goes south toward the mountains. Next day or so, we pick up your father, shot something terrible, and this awful 'Louisiana' Delaney had done it, in cold blood and just to be killing something."

"Ah!" Mademoiselle stiffened and quivered. Her voice was like brass. "In cold blood, you say? Then he had no provocation? He was not an enemy of my father?"

"Naw. Your father didn't have no enemies. So far as I know, this Louisiana didn't even know him. He was a cattleman and they hated the sheepmen, you know, and used to fight them. Then, he was one of these gunmen, always shooting some one, and they used to be terrible. They'd kill some one just for the fun of it—to sort of keep in practice."

Mademoiselle shuddered, envisioning some bloodthirsty, evil thing, unspeakably depraved. But it was momentary. She spoke again in her metallic voice.

"That is well to know. I will look for this Louisiana."

"You ain't likely to find him. He never was seen or heard of around here no more. I've heard granddad call him 'the last of the gunmen,' because the country was settling up and getting civilized then. One thing sure, he never made good on that Lochinvar sketch, I can promise you."

"It is no matter. He will come back—or I will follow him. It is of another matter I would talk. There was something of a mine that my father had found."

"I've heard of that," said Wilding. "It's quite a legend around here. The Lunch Rock mine, they call it, and Jim Banker, the prospector, looks for it every year."

"But he ain't found it——"

A bell boy passed, singing out: "Call for Mad'mo'selle Dalbray! Call fer Mad'mo'selle Dalbray!" Mademoiselle rose and beckoned to him.

"Three men in the lobby wish to see yuh, miss!" the boy told her. "Said Mr. Delonny sent 'em."

"Monsieur de Launay! What next? Well, show them up here."

A few moments later Sucatash and Dave Mackay stalked on their high heels up the stairs and into the alcove of the mezzanine balcony, holding their broad hats in their hands. Sucatash gulped as mademoiselle's slender figure confronted him, and Dave's mouth fell open.

Behind them lurched another man, slinking in the background.

"What is it, messieurs?" asked Solange, her voice once more clear and sweet. The cow-punchers blushed in unison.

"This here Mr. Delonny done sent us here to see you, ma'am. He allows you-all wants a couple of hands for this trip you're takin' into the Esmeraldas. He likewise instigates us to corral this here horned toad, Banker, who's a prospector, because he says you'll want to see him about some mine or other, and, Banker, he don't know nothing about nothing but lookin' for mines: which he ain't never found a whole lot, I reckon, none whatever."

Solange smiled and her smile, even with veiled face, was something to put these bashful range riders at their ease. Both of them felt warmed to their hearts.

"I am very glad to see you," she said. "It is true that I require help, and I shall be glad of yours. It is kind of you to enter my employ."

Dave uttered a protest. "Don't you mention it, mad'moiselle. Sucatash and me was both in France and, while we can't give that there country any rank ahead of the U.S.A., we hands it to her frank, that any time we can do anything fer a mad'moiselle, we does it pronto! We're yours, ma'am, hide, hair an' hoofs!"

"Which we sure are," agreed Sucatash, not to be outdone. "That's whatever!"

"And here is this minin' sharp," said Dave, turning about and reaching for the shrinking Banker. "Come here, Jim, and say howdy, if you ain't herded with burros so long you've forgotten human amenities that a way. Mad'mo'selle wants to talk to you."

Banker emerged from behind them. He, too, held his hat in hand, an incredibly stained and battered felt atrocity. His seamed face was nut brown under constant exposure to the sun. His garments were faded nondescripts, and on his feet were thick-soled, high-lacing boots. He gave an impression of dry dinginess, like rawhide, and his eyes were mean and shifty. He might have been fifty or he might have been older; one could not tell.

Mademoiselle was uncertain. She hardly knew enough to question this queer specimen, and so she turned to Marian Pettis.

"Miss Pettis, can you explain to him? I can hardly tell him what we wish to know. And, if the mine is found, half of it will be yours, you know."

"Mine! Lord sakes, I ain't counting on it. You gotta fat chance to find it. This bird, here, has been searchin' for it ever since the year one and he ain't found it. Say, Banker, this is Mad'mo'selle Dalbray. She's the daughter of that French Pete that was killed——"

"Hey?" said Banker, sharply.

"Ah, you know the yarn. You been huntin' his mine since Lord knows when. This lady is lookin' for it and she wants some dope on how to go about findin' it."

"An she expects me to tell her?" cried Banker, in a falsetto whine. "Yuh reckon if I knowed where it was I wouldn't have staked it long ago? I don't know nothin' about it."

"Well, you know the Esmeraldas, old Stingin' Lizard," growled Sucatash. "You can tell her what to do about gettin' there."

"I can't tell her nothin' no more than you can," said Banker. "She's got Ike Brandon's letters, ain't she? He told her where it was, didn't he? What's she comin' to me fer? I don't know nothin'."

"Were you here when my father was killed?" Solange asked, kindly. She felt sorry for the old fellow.

"Hey! What's that? Was I here? No'm, I wasn't here! I was—I reckon I was over south of the range, out on the desert. I don't know nothin' about the killin'."

He was looking furtively at her veil, his eyes shifting away and back to it, awed by the mystery of the hidden eyes. He was like a wild, shy animal, uneasy in this place and among these people so foreign to his natural environment.

Solange sighed. "I am sorry, monsieur," she said. "I had hoped you could tell me more."

He broke in again with his whining voice. "It was this here Louisiana, every one says."

"Louisiana! Yes——" Solange's tones became fierce and she leaned closer to the dry desert rat, who shrank from her. "And when I find him—when I find this man who shot my father like a dog——"

Her voice was tense and almost shrill, cutting like steel.

"I shall kill him!"

The dim, veiled face was close to Banker's. He raised his corded, lean hand to the corded, lean throat as though he was choking. He stared at her fixedly, his shifty eyes for once held steady. There was horror and fear in the back of them. He put one foot back, shifted his weight to it, put the other back, then the first again, slowly retreating backward, with his stricken eyes still on her. Then he suddenly whirled about and scuttled down the stairs as though the devil were after him.

Solange remained standing, puzzled.

"That is queer," she said. "Why is he frightened? I did not mean to startle him. I suppose he is shy."

"No. Just locoed, like all them prospectors," said Sucatash. "Furthermore, he's ornery, ma'am. Probably don't like this talk of killin'. They say he beefed Panamint Charlie, his partner, some years ago and I reckon he's a mite sensitive that a way."

"He doesn't seem to know where the mine is," said Solange. "Nor do you, mademoiselle?"

"Me?" said Marian, airily. "If I knew where that mine was, believe me, you'd be late looking for it. I'd have been settled on it long ago."

"I wish," said Solange, "that I knew what to do. Perhaps, if this unspeakable De Launay were here——"

"I can telephone the Greek's and see if he's there," suggested MacKay. Solange assented and he hurried to a telephone.

"It ain't likely he knows much that will help, mad'mo'selle," said Sucatash, also eager to aid, "but my old man was around here when these hostilities was pulled off, and it's possible he might help you. He could tell you as much as any one, I reckon."

"Your father?"

"Yes, ma'am. I recommend that you get your outfit together, except fer hosses, hire a car to take it out and start from our ranch at Willow Spring. It's right near the mountains and not far from Shoestring Canyon, which it's likely you'll have to go that way to get into the hills. And you'll be able to get all the hosses you want right there."

"That sounds as though it might be the wise thing to do," said Wilding.

Solange turned to him. "That is true. I thank Monsieur Sucatash. And, Monsieur Wilding, there is one thing you can do for me, besides the arrangements for that divorce. Can you not search the records to find out what is known of my father's death and who killed him?"

"But it appears that the killer was Louisiana."

"Yes—but who is Louisiana? Where did he go? That is what I must find out. Oh! If this depraved De Launay were of any benefit, instead of being a sorrow and disgust to me——"

At this moment Dave MacKay reappeared. Solange turned to him eagerly. "Did you find him, monsieur?"

"I sure did," said Dave, with disgust. "Leastways, I located him. That animated vat of inebriation has done went and landed in jail."



CHAPTER IX

BEHIND PRISON BARS

A somewhat intoxicated cow-puncher, in from the mountain ranges north of the town, intrigued De Launay when he returned to Johnny the Greek's. To be exact, it was not the cow-puncher, who was merely a gawky, loud-mouthed and uncouth importation from a Middle Western farm, broken to ride after a fashion, to rope and brand when necessary and to wield pliers in mending barbed wire, the sort of product, in fact, that had disillusioned De Launay. It was his clothes that the ex-lgionnaire admired.

They were clothes about like those worn by Sucatash and Dave Mackay. De Launay could have purchased such clothes at any one of a dozen shops, but they would have been new and conspicuous. The fellow wore a wide-brimmed hat, the wear of which had resulted in certain picturesque sags that De Launay considered extremely artistic. His boots were small and fairly new, and not over adorned with ornamentation. There was also a buckskin waistcoat which was aged and ripened. The other accessories were unimportant. Such things as spurs, bridle, and saddle De Launay had bought when he acquired a horse.

De Launay had imbibed enough of the terrible liquor served by Snake Murphy to completely submerge his everyday personality. He retained merely a fixed idea that he wished to return as far as possible in spirit to the days of nineteen years ago. To his befuddled mind, the first step was to dress the part. He was groping after his lost youth, unable to realize that it was, indeed, lost beyond recovery; that he was, in hardly a particular, the wild lad who had once ridden the desert ranges.

The more he drank, the firmer became the notion that, to him, instead of to this imitation of the real thing, rightfully belonged these insignia of a vanishing fraternity. He considered ways and means, rejecting one after another. He vaguely laid plans to wait until the fellow went to his quarters for the night, and then break in and steal his clothes. A better plan suggested itself; to ply him with drink until unconscious and then drag him somewhere and strip him. This also did not seem practical. Then he thought of inducing him to gamble and winning all his possessions, but a remnant of sense deterred him. De Launay, though he gambled recklessly, never, by any chance, won. In fact, his losings were so monotonous that the diversion had ceased to be exciting and he had abandoned it.

Finally, having reached a stage where the effort to think was too much for him, he did the obvious thing and offered to buy the fellow's clothes. The cow-puncher was almost as drunk as De Launay and showed it much more. He was also belligerent, which De Launay never was. Furthermore, he had reached the stage where he was suspicious of anything out of the ordinary. He thought De Launay was ridiculing him.

"Sell you my clo'es! Say, feller, what you givin' me?"

A bullet-headed, crop-haired, and lowering laborer, who was leaning against the bar, uttered a snorting laugh.

"Lamp de guys wit' de French heels an' de one wit' de sissy eyebrow on 'is lip, would youse? Dey's a coupla heroes wat's been to France; dey gets dem habits dere."

The sensitive cow hand glared about him, but the leering toughs who echoed their spokesman's laughter were not safe to challenge. There were too many of them. De Launay stood alone and, to him as to the others, that little pointed mustache was a mark of affectation and effeminacy.

"You better pull yer freight before I take a wallop at yuh," he remarked, loudly.

"Tell 'im to go git a shave, bo," suggested the bullet-headed man.

"I'll singe the eyebrow offa him myself if he don't git outa here," growled the cow hand, turning back to his liquor.

De Launay went back to his table and sat down. He brooded on his failure, and to him it seemed that he must have that hat, that waistcoat and those boots at any cost. The others in the room snickered and jeered as they eyed his sagging figure and closed eyes.

He finally got up and lurched out of the room. The door opened on a narrow stairway leading down to a sort of pantry behind the main billiard parlor on the ground floor. The stairway was steep and dark, and the landing was small and only dimly lighted by a dusty, cobwebbed square of window high up in the outer wall.

De Launay sat on the top step and resumed his brooding, his head sunk on his arms, which were folded on his knees. He felt a deep sense of injury, and his sorrow for himself was acute. He was only half conscious of his sufferings, but they were dully insistent, above the deadening influence of the liquor. There were some things he wanted and they continually ran through his mind in jumbled sequence. There was a pair of high heels, then there was a sort of vision of limitless, abandoned plain covered with yellowing grass and black sage clumps, and surmounted with a brilliant blue sky. Following this was a confused picture of a blackened, greasy waistcoat from which a dark, fathomless pair of eyes looked out. He wondered how a waistcoat could have a pair of eyes, and why the eyes should hold in them lights like those that flashed from a diamond.

Men came up the stairs and crowded roughly past him. He paid them no heed. Occasionally other men left the hidden barroom and went down. These were rougher. One of them even kicked him in passing. He merely looked up, dully took in the figure and sank his head again on his arms. Inside, newcomers advised Snake Murphy to go out and throw the bum into the street. As this might have led to inquiries, Snake decided to leave well enough alone until dark.

Finally the cow-puncher, well loaded with more liquor than he could comfortably carry, decided to take an uncertain departure. He waved a debonair and inclusive farewell to all those about him, teetered a bit on his high heels, straddled an imaginary horse, and, with legs well apart and body balanced precariously, tacked, by and full, for the door.

Reaching it, he leaned against it, felt for the knob, turned it, carefully backed away from the door and opened it. Holding the edge, he eased himself around it and, balancing on the outer side, closed it again with elaborate care. Then he took a tentative step and lifted his hand from its support.

The next moment he tripped over De Launay and fell over his head, turning a complete flip.

De Launay came out of his trance with a start to find a hundred and seventy pounds of cow-puncher sprawling in his lap and clinging about his neck. His dull eyes, gummy with sleep, showed him a hat of sorts, a greasy waistcoat——

Calmly he took the cowboy by the neck and raised him. The fellow uttered a cry that was choked. De Launay pulled off his hat and substituted his own on the rumpled locks of the young man. He then swung him about as though he were a child, laid him over his knees and stripped from him his waistcoat.

His own coat was tossed aside while he wriggled into the ancient garment. He held the cowboy during this process by throwing one leg over him, around his neck, and clamping his legs together. The cowboy uttered muffled yells of protest.

He hauled the fellow's boots off without much trouble, but when it came to removing his own shoes there was a difficulty which he finally adjusted by rising, grasping the man by the neck again—incidentally shutting off his cries—and depositing him on the top step, after which he sat upon him.

It took only a second to rip the laces from his shoes and kick them off. Then he started to pull on the boots. But the noise had finally aroused those inside and they came charging out.

Fortunately for De Launay, Snake Murphy and his cohorts were so surprised to see the pose of the late guests that they gave him a moment of respite. He had time to get off of the cowboy and stamp the second boot on his foot. Then, with satisfaction, he turned to face them.

They answered the cowboy's protesting shout with a charge. De Launay was peaceful, but he did not intend to lose his prize without a fight. He smote the first man with a straight jab that shook all his teeth. The next one he ducked under, throwing him over his shoulder and down the stairs. Another he swept against the wall with a crash.

They were over him and around him, slugging, kicking, and pushing. He fought mechanically, and with incredible efficiency, striking with a snaky speed and accuracy that would have amazed any one capable of noting it. But they were too many for him. He was shoved from the step, crowded back, stumbling downward, losing his balance, struggling gamely but hopelessly, until, like Samson, he fell backward, dragging with him a confused heap of his assailants, who went bumping down the stairs in a squirming, kicking mass.

They brought up at the bottom, striking in all directions, with De Launay beneath, missing most of the destruction. The stair well was dark and obscure, but at the bottom was a narrow space where the battle waged wildly. De Launay managed to get to his hands and knees, but over him surged and swept a murmurous, sweating, reeking crowd who struck and battered each other in the gloom.

The door into the billiard parlor burst open and Johnny the Greek and renforcements rushed on the scene. But Johnny, not knowing what the fight was about and not being able to find out—the outraged cowboy had thrust himself before a hostile fist in the start of the encounter and now lay unconscious at the top of the stairs—proceeded to deal with what he imagined was impartiality. He simply added his weight to the combat. This naturally increased the confusion.

Such pandemonium was bound to attract attention. Still unable to comprehend the reason of the whole affair, De Launay was crawling between legs and making a more or less undamaged progress to the door, while his enemies battered one another. He had almost reached it, and was rising to his feet, when a new element was injected into the riot. A couple of uniformed policemen threw themselves into the mle.

De Launay saw only the uniforms. His wrath surged up. What were policemen doing in this country of range and sheriffs? What had they to do with the West? They stood for all that had come to the country, all the change and innovation that he hated.

He expressed his feelings by letting the first policeman have it on the point of the jaw. The second he proceeded to walk over, to beat back and to drive through the door, out into the big room and clear to the sidewalk. The man resisted, swinging his mace, but he found De Launay a cold, inhumanly accurate and swift antagonist, whom it was difficult to hit and impossible to dodge. Twice he was knocked down, and twice he leaped up, swinging his mace at a head that was never there when the club reached its objective.

The policeman whom De Launay had first knocked down had arisen quickly and, seeing his Nemesis now pursuing his comrade, ran to the rescue. De Launay could avoid a club in the hands of the man in front of him but that wielded by the man behind was another matter. It fell on his head just as he was driving the other policeman through the door into the street. It was a shrewd blow and he went to the ground under it.

While they waited for the patrol wagon, the two policemen tried to gather information about the cause of the fight, but they found Johnny the Greek somewhat reticent. The cowboy still was upstairs, held there by Snake Murphy. The others were more or less confused in their ideas. Johnny was chiefly anxious that the police should remove the prisoner and refrain from any close inquiry into the premises, so he merely stated that the fellow had come in drunk and had made an attack on some of the men playing pool. His henchman was seeing to it that the robbed and wronged cowboy had no opportunity to tell a story that would send the police upstairs.

Half conscious and wholly drunk, De Launay was carted to Sulphur Falls' imposing stone jail, where he was duly slated before a police sergeant for drunkenness, assault and battery, mayhem, inciting a riot, and resisting an officer in the performance of his duty. Then he was led away and deposited in a cell. Here he went soundly to sleep.

In the course of time he began to dream. He dreamed that he was on a raft which floated on a limitless sea of bunch grass, alkali and sagebrush, where the waves ran high and regularly, rocking the raft back and forth monotonously and as monotonously throwing him from side to side and against a mast to which he clung. Right in front of the raft, floating in the air above the waves, drifted a slender, veiled figure, and through the veil sparkled a pair of eyes which were bottomless and yet held the colors of the rainbow in their depths. Above this figure, which beckoned him on, and after which the raft drifted faster and faster, was a halo of sparkling hair, which caught and broke up the light into prismatic colors.

The raft sailed faster and faster, rotating in a circle until it was spinning about the ghostly figure, which grew more and more distinct as the raft gyrated more crazily. Raft, desert, waves and sky became confused, hazy, fading out, but the figure stood there as he opened his eyes and the stanchion thumped him in the ribs.

His sleep and his liquor-drugged mind came back to him and he found himself lying on his bunk in a cell, while Solange stood before him and a turnkey poked him in the ribs and rocked him to wake him up.

Sick, bruised and battered, he raised himself, swung his feet to the floor and sat up on the edge of the bed. He tried to stand, but his head swam and he became so dizzy that he feared to fall.

"Don't get up," said Solange, icily.

The turnkey went to the door. "I reckon he's all right now, ma'am. You got half an hour. If he gets rough just holler and we'll settle him."

"Is the charge serious?" asked Solange.

"It ought to be. He's a sure-enough hard case. But a fine and six months on the rocks is about all he'll get."

De Launay looked up sullenly. The turnkey made a derisive, threatening motion and, grinning, slammed the door behind him, locking it.

De Launay licked his dry lips. There was a pitcher of water on a stand and he seized it, almost draining it as he gulped the lukewarm stuff down his sizzling throat.

It strengthened and revived him. He got up from the bed and stood aside. Solange stood like a statue, but her eyes scorched him through her veil.

"So this is what a general of France has come to," she said. Words and tone burned him like fire. He said nothing, but motioned to the bed as the only seat in the cell.

He picked up the hat, the battered thing that had brought on this disaster, from the floor and, stooping, felt the sharp throb of his half-fractured skull. His weakened nerves reacted sharply, and he uttered a half-suppressed cry, raising his hand to the lump on his cranium.

Solange started. "They have hurt you?" she said, sharply.

De Launay took hold of himself again.

"Nothing to speak of," he answered, gruffly. "Will you sit down?"

She sat down, then. Through her veil he could not tell what her expression was, but he was uneasily conscious of the black pools that lurked there, searching his scarred soul to its depths, and finding it evil. He was in no condition to meet her, half drugged with stale alcohol, shaken to his inmost being by reaction against the poisoning of weeks, jumpy, imaginative, broken of mind and body.

His eyes did not meet hers squarely. They shifted, sidelong and bloodshot. But she might have read in them something of despair, something of sullenness, something of shame, but mostly she could have seen a plea for mercy, and perhaps she did.

If so, she did not yield to the plea—at first. In a cold, steely voice she told him what he was. In incisive French she rebaptized him a coward, a beast, a low and disgusting thing. Her voice, curiously beautiful even in rage, cut and dissected him and laid him bare.

She painted for him what a gentleman and a soldier should be and contrasted with it what he was. She sketched for him all the glory and the fame of the men who had led the soldiers of France, neither sparing nor exalting, but showing them to be, at least, men who had courage and command of themselves or had striven for it. She contrasted them with his own weakness and supineness and degradation. Then, her voice softening subtly, she shifted the picture to what he had been, to his days of unutterable lowness in the Legion, the five years of brutal struggle, fiercely won promotion. His gaining of a commission, the cachet of respectability, his years of titanic struggle and study and work through the hardly won grades of the army.

She made him see himself as something glorious, rising from obscurity to respect and influence; made him see himself as he knew he was not; made him see his own courage, which he had; his ability, which he also had; and, what it had not, great pride, noble impulses, legitimate ambition. When she painted the truth, he did not respond, but when she pictured credits he did not deserve he winced and longed to earn them.

"And, after all this," she said wearily, at last, "you descend—to this? It would seem that one might even gauge the depths from which you rose by the length and swiftness of the fall. Is it that you have exhausted yourself in the effort that went before?"

De Launay stared at the floor with dull eyes.

"What would you expect of a lgionnaire?" he muttered.

"Nothing!" she cried, angrily. "Nothing from the lgionnaire! But, in the name of God, cannot one expect more than this from the man who wears the medaille militaire, the grand cross of the legion, who won a colonelcy in Champagne, a brigade at Verdun, a division at the Chemin des Dames, and who, as all know, should have had an army corps after the Balkan campaign? From such a man as that, from him, monsieur, one expects everything!"

De Launay twisted the unfortunate hat in his hands and made no reply for some minutes. Solange sat on the bed, one knee crossed over the other and her chin resting in her hand, supported on her elbow. Her head was also bent toward the floor.

"Mademoiselle," said De Launay, at last, "I think you have guessed the trouble with me." His manner had reverted to that of his rank and class, and she looked up in instant reaction to it. "I am all that you say except what is good. There is no doubt of that. I have been a soldier for nineteen years; have made it the work of my life, in fact. I know nothing else—except, perhaps, a little of a passing, obsolete trade of this fading West you see around you. I had hoped to win—had won, I thought, place and distinction in that profession. You know what happened. Perhaps I did not deserve more. Perhaps it was necessary to reduce us all. Perhaps I was wrong in despairing. But I had won my way by effort, mademoiselle, that exhausted me. I was too tired to take up again the task of battering my way up through the remaining ranks.

"There was nothing left to me. There is nothing for me to do. There is no one who can use me unless it be some petty state which needs mercenaries. I have served my purpose in the world. Why should I not waste the rest of my time?"

Solange nodded. "Then what you need is an object?" she said, reflectively. "Work?" she asked.

He shook his head. "I have no need of money. And why should I work, otherwise? I know nothing of trade, and there are others who need the rewards of labor more than I."

"Philanthropy—service?"

At this he grinned. "I am not a sentimentalist, but a soldier. As for service—I served France until she had no further use for me."

"Marriage; a family?"

He laughed, now. "I am married. As for the love that is said to mitigate that relation, am I the sort of man a woman would care for?"

Solange straightened up, and then rose from the bunk. She came and stood before him.

"If neither love, ambition nor money will stir you," she said. "Still, you may find an incentive to serve. There is chivalry."

"I'm no troubadour."

"Will you serve me?" she asked abruptly. He looked at her in surprise.

"Am I not serving you?"

"You are—after your own fashion—which I do not like. I wish your service—need it. But not this way."

He nodded slowly. "I will serve you—in any way you wish," he said.

Solange smiled under the veil, her mouth curving into beautiful lines.

"That is better. I shall need you, monsieur. You cannot, it is clear, serve me effectively by being thrown into jail for months. I must find the mine and the man who killed my father before that."

De Launay shook his head. "You expect to find the mine and the man, after nineteen years?"

"I expect to make the attempt," she replied, calmly. "It is in the hands of God, my success. Somehow, I feel that I shall succeed, at least in some measure, but the same premonition points to you as one who shall make that success possible. I do not know why that is."

"Premonition!" said De Launay, doubtfully. "Still—from Morgan la fe, even a premonition——"

The shrouding mask was turned upon him with an effect of question as he paused.

"Is entitled to respectful consideration," he ended. He sat thoughtfully a minute, his throbbing head making mental action difficult. "I see no hope of tracing the man—but one. Have you that bullet, mademoiselle?"

She took it out of the hand bag, shivering a little as she handed it to him.

"It is common—a thirty caliber, such as most hunters use. Yet it is all the clew you possess. As for the mine, there seems to be only one hope, which is, to retrace as closely as possible, the route taken by your father before he was shot. May I keep this?"

She nodded her assent, and he put it in his pocket. Solange was relieved to be rid of it.

"And now," he added, "I must get out of here."



CHAPTER X

THE GET-AWAY

"If you need money—to pay the fine," began Solange, doubtfully. He shook his head.

"I have a fancy to do this in my own way; the old-time way," he said. "As for money, you will have need of all you possess. The cowboy, Sucatash, is a type I know. You may take a message to him for me, and I think he will not refuse to help."

He gave her rapidly whispered instructions, her quick mind taking them in at once.

"And you," he finished, "when you are ready to start, will gather your outfit at Wallace's ranch near Willow Spring. From there is only one way that you can go to follow your father's trail. He must have come out of the Esmeraldas through Shoestring Canyon, therefore you must go into them that way. I will be there when you come."

Solange turned to the door and he bowed to her. She shook the grating and called for the turnkey. As she heard him coming she swung round and, with a smile, held out her hand to the soldier. His sallow face flushed as he took it. Her hand clung to his a moment and then the door swung open and she was gone.

De Launay took the bullet from his pocket and held it in his hand. He sat on his bunk and weighed the thing reflectively, balancing it on his palm. It was just such a bullet as might have been shot from any one of a hundred rifles, a bullet of which nothing of the original shape remained except about a quarter of an inch of the butt.

He wondered if, after nineteen years, there remained any one who had even been present when French Pete was found dying.

As for the mine, that was even more hopeless. No one had seriously attempted any prolonged search for the murderer, he assumed, knowing the region as it had been. Homicides were not regarded as seriously as in later days and a Basco sheep-herder's murder would arouse little interest. The mine, however, was a different thing, as he knew by the fact that even recent arrivals had heard of it. It was certain that, throughout all these years there had been many to search for it and the treasure it was supposed to hold. Yet none had found it.

Solange's premonition made him smile tolerantly. Still, he was pledged to the search, and he would go through with it. They would not find it, of course, but there might be some way in which he could make up the disappointment to her. He thought he could understand the urge that had led her on the ridiculous quest. A young, pretty, but portionless girl, with just enough money to support life in France for a few years, hopeless of marriage in a country where the women outnumbered the men by at least a million, would have a bleak future before her. He could guess that her high, proud spirit would rebel, on the one hand, at the prospect of pinching poverty and ignoble work and, on the other, from the alternative existence of the demimondaine.

Here, in America, she might have a chance. He could see to it that she did have a chance. With those eyes and that hair and her voice, the stage would open its arms to her, and acting was a recognized and respectable profession. There might be other opportunities, also.

But the vendetta she would have to drop. In the Basses Pyrnes one might devote a life to hunting vengeance, but it wouldn't do in the United States. If she found the man, by some freak of chance, what would she do with him? To expect to convict him after all these years was ridiculous, and it was not likely that he would confess. Though she might be certain, the only thing left to her would be the taking of the law into her own hands; and that would not do. He did not doubt her ability or her willingness to kill the man. He knew that she would do it, and he knew that she must not be allowed to do it. He shuddered to think of her imprisoned in some penitentiary, her bright hair cropped and those fathomless eyes looking out on the sun through stone walls and barred windows; her delicate body clothed in rough, shapeless prison garments. If there was to be any killing, she must not do it.

She would insist on vengeance! Very well, he had promised to serve her; he had no particular object in life; he was abundantly able to kill; he would do her killing for her.

Having settled this to his satisfaction and feeling a certain complacent pleasure in the thought that, if the impossible happened, he could redeem himself in her eyes by an act that would condemn him in the eyes of every one else, he lay down on his bunk and went to sleep again.

In the morning he was aroused by the turnkey and brought out of his cell. A couple of officers took charge of him and led him from the jail to the street, across it and down a little way to the criminal court building. Here he was taken into a large room just off the courtroom, to await his preliminary hearing.

The rest was almost ridiculously simple. He had had no plan, beyond a vague one of breaking from his guardians when he was led back to the jail. But he formed a new one almost as soon as he had seated himself in the room where the prisoners were gathered.

He was placed on a long bench, the end of which was near a door leading to the corridor of the building. A door opposite led into the dock. A number of prisoners were seated there and two men in uniform formed a guard. One of them spent practically all his time glancing through the door, which he held on a crack, into the courtroom.

The other was neither alert nor interested. The officer who had brought De Launay, and who, presumably, was to make the charge against him, remained, while his companion departed.

Among those gathered in the room were several relatives or friends of prisoners, lawyers, and bondsmen, who went from one to another, whispering their plans and proposals. One, a bulbous-nosed, greasy individual, sidled up to him and suggested that he could furnish bail, for a consideration.

De Launay's immediate guard, at this moment, said something to the uniformed policeman who sat near the center of the room. The other glanced perfunctorily in De Launay's direction and nodded, and the man stepped out into the hall.

De Launay whispered an intimation that he was interested in the bail suggestion. He arose and led the bondsman off to one side, near the outer door, and talked with him a few moments. He suggested that the man wait until they discovered what the bail would be, and said he would be glad to accept his services. He had money which had not been taken from him when he was searched.

The bondsman nodded his satisfaction at netting another victim and strolled away to seek further prey. De Launay calmly turned around, opened the outer door and walked into the corridor.

He walked rapidly to the street entrance, out to the sidewalk, and down the street. At the first corner he turned. Then he hurried along until he saw what he was looking for. This was Sucatash, lounging easily against a lamp-post while De Launay's horse, saddled and equipped, stood with head hanging and reins dangling just before him at the curb.

A close observer would have noticed that a pair of spurs hung at the saddle horn and that the saddle pockets bulged. But there were no close observers around.

De Launay came up to the horse while, as yet, there had been not the slightest indication of any hue and cry after him. This he knew could obtain for only a short time, but it would be sufficient.

Sucatash, against the lamp-post, lolled negligently and rolled a cigarette. He did not even look at De Launay, but spoke out of a corner of his mouth.

"How'd you make it, old-timer?"

"Walked out," said the other, dryly.

"Huh? Well, them blue bellies are right bright, now. You'll find pack hosses and an outfit at the spring west of the Lazy Y. Know where it is?"

De Launay nodded as he felt the cinch of the horse's saddle.

"But how the deuce will you get them there? It's nearly ninety miles."

"We got a telephone at pa's ranch," said Sucatash, complacently. "Better hit the high spots. There's a row back there, now."

De Launay swung into the saddle. "See you at Shoestring, this side the Crater," he said, briefly. "Adios!"

"So long," said Sucatash, indifferently. De Launay spurred the horse and took the middle of the road on a run. Sucatash looked after him reflectively.

"That hombre can ride a whole lot," he remarked. "He's a sure-enough, stingin' lizard, I'll say. Walked out! Huh!"

A few moments after De Launay had rounded a corner and disappeared with his ill-gotten habiliments, excited policemen and citizens came rushing to where Sucatash, with nothing on his mind but his hat, strolled along the sidewalk.

"Seen an escaped prisoner? Came this way. Wasn't there a horse here a minute ago?" The questions were fired at him in rapid succession. Sucatash was exasperatingly leisurely in answering them.

"They was a hoss here, yes," he drawled.

"Was it yours?"

"Not that I know of," answered Sucatash. "Gent came along and forked it. I allowed it was hisn and so I didn't snub him down none. Was he the gent you was lookin' for?"

"Which way did he go?"

"He was headin' south-southeast by no'th or thereabouts when I last seen him," said Sucatash. "And he was fannin' a hole plumb through the atmosphere."

They left the unsatisfactory witness and rushed to the corner around which De Launay had vanished. Here they found a man or two who had seen the galloping horse and its rider. But, as following on foot was manifestly impossible, one of them rushed to a telephone while others ran back to get a police automobile and give chase.

De Launay, meanwhile, was riding at a hard pace through the outlying streets of the town, heading toward the south. The paved streets gave way to gravel roads, and the smoke of the factories hung in the air behind him. Past comfortable bungalows and well-kept lawns he rushed, until the private hedges gave place to barbed-wire fences, and the cropped grass to fields of standing stubble.

The road ran along above and parallel to the river, following a ridge. To one side of it the farms lay, brown and gold in their autumn vesture. At regular intervals appeared a house, generally of the stereotyped bungalow form.

De Launay had passed several of these when he noticed, from one ahead of him, several men running toward the road. He watched them, saw that they gesticulated toward the cloud of dust out of which he rode, and turned in his saddle to open the pockets back of the cantle. From one he drew belt and holster, sagging heavily with the pistol that filled it. From the other he pulled clips loaded with cartridges. Leaving the horse to run steadily on the road he strapped himself with the gun.

The men had reached the road and were lined up across it. One of them had a shotgun and others were armed with forks and rakes. They waved their weapons and shouted for him to stop. He calmly drew the pistol and pulled his horse down in the midst of them.

"Well?" he asked as they surged around him. The man with the shotgun suddenly saw the pistol and started to throw the gun to his shoulder.

"We got him!" he yelled, excitedly.

"Got who?" asked De Launay. "You pointing that gun at me? Better head it another way."

His automatic was swinging carelessly at the belligerent farmer. The man was not long in that country, but he was long enough to know the difference between a shotgun and an automatic forty-five. He lost his nerve.

"We're lookin' for an escaped convict," he muttered. "Be you the feller?"

"Keep on looking," said De Launay, pleasantly. "But drop that gun and those pitchforks. What do you mean by holding up a peaceable man on the highroads?"

The rattled farmer and his cohorts were bluffed and puzzled. The automatic spoke in terms too imperative to be disregarded. Capturing escaped prisoners was all very well, but when it involved risks such as this they preferred more peaceful pursuits. The men backed away, the farmer let the shotgun drop to the ground.

"Pull your freight!" said De Launay, shortly. They obeyed.

He whirled his horse and resumed his headlong flight. He had gained fifty yards when the farmer, who had run back to his gun, fired it after him. The shot scattered too much to cause him any uneasiness. He laughed back at them and fled away.

Other places had been warned also, but De Launay rushed past them without mishap. The automatic was a passport which these citizens were eager to honor, and which the police had not taken into account. To stop an unarmed fugitive was one thing, but to interfere with one who bristled with murder was quite another.

A new peril was on his trail, however. He soon heard the distant throb of a motor running with the muffler open. Looking back along the road, he could see the car as it rounded curves on top of the ridge. All too soon it was throbbing behind him and not half a mile away.

But he did not worry. Right ahead was a stone marker which he knew marked the boundary of Nevada. Long before the car could reach him he had passed it. He kept on for two or three hundred yards at the same pace while the car, forging up on him, was noisy with shouts and commands to stop. He slowed down to a trot and grinned at the men who stood in the car and pointed their revolvers at him. His pistol was dangling in his hand.

"You gents want me?" he asked, pleasantly. His former captor sputtered an oath.

"You're shoutin' we want you," he cried. "Get off that horse and climb in here, you——"

De Launay's voice grew hard and incisive.

"You got a warrant for my arrest?"

"Warrant be hanged! You're an escaped prisoner! Climb down before we let you have it!"

"That's interesting. Where's your extradition papers?"

The officer shrieked his commands and imprecations, waving his pistol. De Launay grinned.

"If you want to test the law, go ahead," he said. "I'm in Nevada as you know very well. If you want to shoot, you may get me—but I can promise that I'll get you, too. The first man of you that tightens a trigger will get his. Go to it!"

An officer who is on the right side of the law is thereby fortified and may proceed with confidence. If he is killed, his killer commits murder. But an officer who is on the wrong side of the law has no such psychological renforcement. He is decidedly at a disadvantage. The policemen were courageous—but they faced a dilemma. If they shot De Launay, they would have to explain. If he shot them, it would be in self-defense and lawful resistance to an illegal arrest. Furthermore, there was something about the way he acted that convinced them of his intention and ability. There were only three of them, and he seemed quite confident that he could get them all before they could kill him.

The officer who had been his guardian thought of a way out.

"There's a justice of the peace a mile ahead," he said. "We'll just linger with you until we reach him and get a warrant."

"Suit yourselves," said De Launay, indifferently. "But don't crowd me too closely. Those things make my horse nervous."

They started the car, but he galloped easily on ahead, turning in his saddle to watch them. They proceeded slowly, allowing him to gain about forty yards. The officer thought of shooting at him when he was not looking, but desisted when he discovered that De Launay seemed to be always looking.

They had proceeded only a short distance when De Launay, without warning, spurred his horse into a run, swinging him at the same time from side to side of the road. Turned in his saddle, he raised his hand and the staccato rattle of his automatic sounded like the roll of a drum. The startled officers fired and missed his elusive form. They had their aim disarranged by the sudden jolt and stoppage of the car. De Launay had shot the two front tires and a rear one to pieces.

The discomfited policemen saw him disappearing down the road in a cloud of dust from which echoed his mocking laugh and a chanted, jubilant verse that had not been heard in that region for nineteen years:

"My Louisiana! Louisiana Lou!"



CHAPTER XI

JIM BANKER HITS THE TRAIL

When Jim Banker, the prospector, hurried from the hotel, he was singularly agitated for a man merely suffering from the shyness of the desert wanderer in the presence of a pretty woman. His furtive looks and the uneasy glances he cast behind him, no less than the panicky character of his flight, might have aroused further question on the part of those he left, had they been in a position to observe the man.

He made no pause until he had gained the comparative seclusion of Johnny the Greek's place, which he found almost deserted after the riot of which De Launay had been the center. Johnny had succeeded in getting rid of the officers without the discovery of his illicit operations, and Snake Murphy was once more in his place ready to dispense hospitality. Few remained to accept it, however, the imminent memory of the police having frightened all others away. A liberal dispensation of money and the discovery that De Launay's coat and shoes were of excellent make and more valuable than those he had lost, had secured the silence of the man whom De Launay had robbed, and he had departed some time since.

Banker sidled into the upstairs room and made his way to the end of the bar, where he called huskily for whisky. Having gulped a couple of fiery drinks, he shivered and straightened up, his evil eyes losing their look of fright.

"Say, Murph," he whispered, hoarsely. "They's the devil to pay!"

"How come?" asked Murphy, yawning.

"You remember French Pete, who was killed back in nineteen hundred?"

"The Basco? Sure I do. I got a reminder, hain't I? Louisiana done shot me up before he went out an' beefed Pete—if he did beef him."