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 her sleeping bulk large and assume significance unguessed when her mind was numbed by fatigue and the strain of convoying the Killer through Two Moons' Main Street. As the girl lay in bed, drawing long, slow breaths—the conscious act of breathing assisted her to confirmation of the belief she really was awake—as she lay thus, her mind leaped to find deductions for the present out of the immediate past.

She was under a jail roof, or she had been when she went to sleep, and a groping hand identified the bed as the same in which she had laid herself down. Zang Whistler also was under the same roof, but behind bars; of that the girl was certain. This big-voiced sheriff with the suave manner of hospitality had spirited Zang from the breakfast table to a cell without even permitting Zang a farewell word with her. Then right away he had insisted she should go to bed.

Hilma's body suddenly stiffened under the thrust of a thought powerful as a blow. She was in jail—arrested!

There could be no doubt about it. The suave sheriff and his wife simply had conspired to effect the trick without a possible scene, first