as he stretched his hand toward the attorney, and Goliath stood up and rumbled as if the long silence was unusual with him and he now found it necessary to make a noise.

“Ten days then, you’re to give, and I’m satisfied,” David said as they turned and left the office.

“I don’t see how you expect to get any more evidence than you’ve got already, Davy,” the big man remarked after they were on their way to where their mules were stabled, preparatory to the start on the return journey.

“I don’t expect to get much,” David remarked with a grin that exposed his white teeth. Goliath looked at him steadily for a moment and then remarked: “Davy, you’re up to some dodge. I know it by the way you look.”

“Goliath, old boss, I am,” was all that the smaller man vouchsafed by way of explanation for the time being, and later actions proved that he had confessed the truth.

They drove away together; but on the following morning at a certain point where the trail split they separated, and Goliath, after a “So long! Good luck,” turned off on the home trail and David took to the road, philosophically, for the long tramp to Wallula.

David’s actions in Wallula were peculiar. He seemed intent on making numerous visits and always they were to men whom he knew he could trust and to none of them did he impart reasons for his sole request which invariably was, “I want to find out if Pinder and MacPharlane were in town on the night before that stage was robbed or on the day when the robbery took place, and I don’t want any one to know that I’m trying to get the information.”

The third man he confided in listened and made a calculation on his fingers.

“Nine days ago,” he remarked thoughtfully. “That would bring it on a Sunday night—week ago last Sunday. Um-m-mh! I think maybe—just maybe, I say—I can find out something from a chap I know. You see the Almoran Mine laid off three days just then on account of a broken main pump and the men were paid off. Most of ’em came to camp for a bust. One of ’em, Bill Wainwright, the foreman, is a poker fiend and he got pretty heavily trimmed in a game that lasted from nine o’clock Sunday night till ten o’clock Monday morning, and that game was in Big Pete’s saloon where most of the Shaughnessy gang hangs out. Get me?”

David wriggled with excitement.

“I get you so hard that if you’ll 

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