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N THE first rush of golden day the party came quietly into the town of Mesa, riding slowly in order that the noise of their approach might not warn the fugitives, whom Hopi asserted confidently would still be sound asleep in the accommodations offered by the town's one hotel.

It was to be termed a town only in courtesy, this Mesa: a straggling street of shacks, the halfway station between the railroad and the mining-camps secreted in the fastnesses of the Painted Hills, camps now abandoned, their very names faded out of the memory of mankind.

Midway in this string of edifices the hotel stood, an unpainted wooden edifice, mainly veranda and barroom as to its lower floor. Judith watched the windows of the second floor, and she alone of the four detected the face at one of them that showed for one brief instant and then was gone. It was the face of Alan Law.

Alighting with every precaution to avoid noise, the party left its horses "hitched to the ground" and 192