boy’s courage. When his chance at a few words did come he chuckled: “Regular fool Winter! I knew he would act in just that absurd, reckless way.” Then he caught the look he wanted; it surely was a lovely, womanly[69] look; and it meant—what in thunder did it mean? As he puzzled, his pulses gave the same unaccountable, smothering leap; and he felt as the boy of twenty had felt, coming back from his first battle to his first love.

[69]

[70]

CHAPTER IV THE VANISHING OF ARCHIE

“In my opinion,” said Aunt Rebecca, critically eying her new drawing-room on the train to San Francisco; “the object of our legal methods seems to be to defend the criminal. And a very efficient means to this end is to make it so uncomfortable and costly and inconvenient for any witness of a crime that he runs away rather than endure it. Here we have had to stay over so long in Salt Lake we nearly lost our drawing-room. But never mind, you got your man committed. Did you find out anything about his gang?”

The colonel shook his head. “No, he’s a tough country boy; he has the rural distrust of lawyers and of sweat-boxes. He does absolutely nothing but groan and swear, pretending his wound hurts him. But I’ve a notion there are bigger people back of him. It’s most awfully good of you, Aunt Rebecca, to stick to me this way.”

“Of course, I stick to you; I’m too old to be[71] fickle. Did you ever know a Winter who wouldn’t stand by his friends? I belong to the old régime, Bertie; we had our faults—glaring ones, I dare say—but if we condoned sin too readily, we never condoned meanness; such a trick as that upstart Keatcham is doing would have been impossible to my contemporaries. You saw the morning papers; you know he means to eat up the Midland?”

[71]

“Yes, I know,” mused the colonel; “and turn Tracy, the president, down—the one who gave him his start on his bucaneering career. Tracy declines to be his tool, being, I understand, a very decent sort of man, who has always run his road for his stock-holders and not for the stock-market. A capital crime, that, in these days. So Keatcham has, somehow, by one trick or another, got enough directors since Baneleigh died to give him the control; though he couldn’t get enough of the stock; and now he means to grab the road to use for himself. Poor Tracy, who loves the road as a child, they say, will have to stand by and see it turned into a Wall Street foot-ball; and the equipment run down as fast 

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