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 Yet he was going. He was going, in the guise of Don Ruy Ortiz, to meet Falcon on his ship and learn from him, if he could, whether that prisoner of Chief Concha, mentioned in Montiano's letter, was Gilbert Barradell, Jolie Stanwicke's lover.

He believed that the letter afforded a definite lead towards solution of the Barradell mystery. Putting together all the facts that Almayne had made known to him and linking with these the hunter's conviction that Falcon had knowledge of Gilbert Barradell, it seemed possible—more than possible—that Montiano's letter supplied a clue. There was only one way to explore this clue, and he, Lachlan, alone was capable of the task.

So much was clear. Yet the question that he asked himself remained unanswered: the question why he, who had nothing to gain, was willing to risk so much to promote this girl's happiness.

Curiously, his thoughts turned to Almayne, to the unwillingness that the hunter had shown at the outset to tell him anything about Jolie Stanwicke or her affairs. He understood Almayne's attitude perfectly, for he had noted the same thing before this. Almayne, the elder McDonald's bosom friend, was obsessed by the fear that Lachlan would fall in love with some English girl, and the hunter saw this possibility as a threat to his old friend's hope that Lachlan would succeed him as head of the great Indian Confederacy which composed the Muskogee Empire and over which he ruled as High Chief or King.