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284 "Is it?" Carruthers supposed it was, but promptly forgot the whole matter under discussion as he went to hang over the Twins' double bed. "Sure they look like me, Sylvia?" he wanted to know.

Steele, fancying that his secret was safe in his own breast, had gone from Indian City, where the Carruthers were, to Summit City to look in on Hurley and Turk. He found them both doing well and left, saying bluntly to both of them as he went out:

"Take a good vacation while you're at it; your pay goes on just the same."

He had not stopped with the Hurleys over twenty minutes. But Rose had said to her husband before Steele had ridden out of sight:

"I wonder who the girl is, Ed?"

Again was Steele ready to forget Joe Embry in the demands made against him by the present. But such oblivion must be brief, so long as he held his unchanged opinion of the man and so long as events in a rough and rapidly developing community hinted at lawlessness. So it was that Joe Embry came back prominently into his thought.

Since that night in the gambling house at Boom Town the paths of the two men had not crossed; again Embry seemed to have passed out of the new town's affairs. But when, just seven days after the roulette game of which men still talked, two messages came close together over Steele's telephone, he explained two unfortunate episodes by the one word, "Embry!"