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HEN Lance Dunning entered the room ten minutes later, Dicksie stood at the telephone; but the ten minutes of that interval had made quite another creature of his cousin. The wires were down and no one from any quarter gave a response to her frantic ringing. Through the receiver she could hear only the sweep of the rain and the harsh crackle of the wind. Sometimes praying, sometimes fainting, and sometimes despairing, she stood clinging to the instrument, ringing and pounding upon it like one frenzied. Lance looked at her in amazement. “Why, God a’mighty, Dicksie, what’s the matter?”

He called twice to her before she turned, and her words almost stunned him: “Why did you not detain Sinclair here to-night? Why did you not arrest him?”

Lance’s sombrero raked heavily to one side of his face, and one end of his mustache running up much higher on the other did not begin to express 379