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 cluded that Windy had been the leading spirit in that long and perilous pursuit, concerning which no man was able at that time, nor ever after, to draw one word out of Tom Laylander's mouth.

Tom got away from them at last, for gratitude is quickly expressed and done with, but hunger in the gizzard of a railroad man requires steak and onions to appease. He was going toward the court house in quest of Louise when he met her. They returned together to the hotel.

"I'm sorry, Tom," she said.

"I knew you would be, dovie," he replied.

"This ends it, I suppose?" she ventured. "They say up at the court house an appeal wouldn't do any good."

"It only begins it, Louise. He's won the first hand; that's all."

"Why, Tom,"—eagerly, a big hope lighting in her eyes, her hand on his arm—"what are you going to do? What is there you can do?"

Tom looked down into her eyes with a great tenderness in his pink, boyish face.

"I'm goin' to wait till the law gets through with my' herd, Louise," he replied, so much more unsaid than said, yet altogether clouded in his mysterious reticence.

"We'll talk it over at supper," she said, flitting off upstairs as light on her feet as Banjo Gibson had calculated her when he first saw her on McPacken's street.

Several railroad men collected quickly about Tom, many of them familiar with his name whom he never had seen before, or had forgotten as incidentals in the