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 clew to his thought or intention in his thin, stern face.

"I must attend to the horse," he said, going out quickly.

Mrs. Ellison followed him to the door, a sudden feeling of dread leaping and falling like a transient flame in her heart, the awakening of old memories, the movement of old fears. She had gone to that threshold before to see determined men ride away on desperate enterprises from which they never returned, their lips closed in hard lines, as Tom Simpson's lips were closed when he peered out at the distant things no other eyes than his could see. She looked after him as he led the horse away, growing dim in the gloom, toward the corral. There was a movement of birds in the orchard trees; the eastern rim of the world was faintly gray with dawn.

Some horses had come up; Tom could see them looming enlarged out of their natural bulk in the thinning dark. Waco's horses he took them to be, a rather long-necked and scrawny breed. He did not know what others had been left by the thieves, although he believed there were no fewer than fifteen or twenty head of the Ellison stock on the place. He unsaddled the horse he had ridden, threw hay into the mangers and opened the gate to the animals outside, then carried his sack of supplies to the bunk-house.

Tom found a little lamp on the deal table, a chair beside it, Waco's boots near by. There was a pencil and piece of paper sack on the table, the paper scribbled over with figures. Waco, too, had been computing speculative profits in bones.

There was evidence of struggle around the bunk where Waco had slept. The blankets were on the floor, the hay