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 ing as if to draw and defend. The girl's face was pale, her eyes were great with the horror of the thing she had heard.

"Oh, Mr. Barrett!" she said, a shocked note of lamentation in her tone. "You must not think—I can't bear to have you think—that anybody here—that it was with the knowledge of anybody here"

"Not at all," said Barrett, lying only with his lips, his heart cold in its charity toward another member of that house.

"You would be almost justified, it was so diabolically conceived. If that's Dale Findlay's notion of a joke, I think it's time he practiced his pleasantries on another range!"

"Joke?" Barrett repeated, feeling his heart sink to his heels.

He knew something of the lengths to which men of that calling would go to have their jokes. Could this carefully worked out scheme, carried to a head with so much hard riding and planning in distant parts, have been nothing more in the beginning than a cowpuncher jest? He recalled Manuel's warning, and turned to him sharply.

"Was it a joke—did you know it was a joke?" he demanded.

"No-o-o, señor!" said Manuel, forcefully, solemnly, shaking his head slowly. "It was not a joke!"

"Dale told Manuel it was nothing but a joke—that's what he told you, Manuel?"

"He told me, Mees Alma."

"They didn't expect it to end that way, they only