the best antidote to snake-poison out," he said. "I swear it won't upset you. If it makes you sleepy, well, you're in the right place and safe enough."

She liked his utterance of the last words. They had a genuine ring. "But, if I drink, so must you!" she said. "And eat, too! Jack said I was to give you a meal if you came."

He smiled again, a large, humorous smile. "That's the kindest thing Jack Burton has ever done," he said, with warm approval. "I'll join you with pleasure, missis. This man-trapping business is hungry work for all of us."

Dot frowned a little. It did not please her to be reminded of his mission. Her former prejudice began to revive within her, his kindness notwithstanding.

"I don't like the thought of it myself," she told him abruptly. "But, of course, I'm only a 'new chum.'"

"What?" he said, pausing in the act of pouring himself out a drink. "That sounds as if you want that scoundrel Bill to get away."

She coloured in some confusion under his look. How could she expect to make a policeman understand? "No—no!" she said, with vehemence. "I'm not quite so soft as that. I'd shoot him myself if he came my way. But I hate to think of a dozen men all on the track of one. It really isn't fair."

He laughed, but without superiority. "And yet you'd swell the odds? Do you call that fair?"

Dot paused to collect her arguments. It seemed that possibly even this machine of justice carried a small fragment of sympathy in his soul. Certainly he was not the judicial automaton she had expected him to be.

"It's like this," she said. "I'd shoot him if he came my way because he has done us a lot of mischief, and I want to stop it. But I'd do it squarely. I wouldn't do it when he wasn't looking. And I wouldn't—ever—make it my profession to hunt down criminals and even employ black men to help. I think that's hateful. I couldn't live that way. I'd be above it."

"I see." He lifted his glass to her in a silent toast, and drank a deep draught. "Then if you chanced to know where he was, I take it you'd just settle him yourself, if you could. But you wouldn't in any case give him away to the police. Is that your point of view?"

"It isn't unreasonable, is it?" she said, with a touch of eagerness. "I mean, if you weren't what you are, 

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