Boss Shaughnessy! Haw! Haw! Haw!”

His laugh was drowned in the clattering of hoofs as the stage jumped forward, its wheels throwing up little clouds of dust and its momentum increasing as it reached the bend and disappeared around it. But David was left standing in the middle of the road with his mouth open and an expression of astonishment on his face.

“Shaughnessy—it was Tom Shaughnessy’s money that was looted, eh? Wonder why he sent—hang it all! I’ll bet there was something crooked in that holdup—just because it was Tom’s money! I wonder if there was real money in that package? Yes, of course there must have been, because the express agent wouldn’t have taken it on the blind. Um-um! Wonder if somebody who had been robbed by Shaughnessy, or some of his gang, didn’t know it was being shipped and played even?”

He thought of the numerous crooked deals and gouges perpetrated by the boss of Wallula and his associates, all of whom had once been driven from the camp of Sky Gap by the more reputable citizens, and of the longstanding feud between this gang, himself, his lifelong partner Goliath, and his new partner Hank Mills, and grinned cheerfully as he thought, “Well, if any poor cuss has played even with Shaughnessy he’s got my support. Luck to him!”

After again consulting his watch David leisurely struck back from the road, taking to the hillside in nearly the same place from which he had emerged, and climbed upward toward the crest. He paused after a few minutes and looked back toward the road that now lay considerably below and again his mind worked round the incident of the stage robbery.

“That would be the right place down there,” he ruminated as his keen gray eyes scanned the white line that wound beneath. “And a man standing here would have had a grand-stand seat all to himself to watch the whole show. Or, if the chap that turned that trick had wanted to find a place to have a good look at the stage before he held it up he could have stood here, seen her as she came around that stretch up above, and then have had time to get down to that point and throw his gun on Bill as she came round that bend.”

As if this thought proved interesting David began to scan the brush and ground near by and almost instantly stopped in an attitude of surprise and whistled a note of astonishment; for all unexpectedly he had blundered on to a place where a man evidently had rested for some time. Had David been asked if he were an expert trailer he would probably have denied such craft; 

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