ow must be tied up. I wonder what we can find to do it
with?"

"My cloak?" Dorothy suggested. "It's an old one."

He shook his head.

"It's hard to tear that rain-proof stuff, and besides you'd get wet
going home. There's no sense in that. Isn't there something else?"

She blushed a little and turned away for a moment, during which she
slipped off her underskirt. Then, as Moran watched her cynically, she
tore it into strips. When she had thus made several stout bands, Wade
spoke again.

"You take the first throw or two about him," he directed, "and when you
have him partly tied you can take my gun and I'll finish the job. Start
with his feet, that's right. Now draw it as tight as you can. Put your
arms down back of you! Tie them now, Dorothy. That's fine! Here, you
take the gun. You know how to use it, if he struggles."

Wade tightened up the linen bands, and kicked forward a straight-backed
chair, into which he forced Moran and lashed him fast there, to all of
which the agent made no great protest, knowing that to do so would be
useless. He grunted and swore a bit under his breath, but that was all.
When he was well trussed up, the ranchman made a gag out of what was
left of the linen and his own handkerchief and strapped it into his
prisoner's mouth with his belt.

When the job was done, and it was a good one, he grinned again in that
slow, terrible way. A grin that bore no semblance to human mirth, but
was a grimace of combined anger and hatred. Once before, during the
fight at the ranch, Bill Santry had seen this expression on his
employer's face, but not to the degree that Dorothy now saw it. It
frightened her.

"Oh, Gordon, don't, please!" She closed her eyes to shut out the sight.
"Come, we must hurry away."

"Good night," Wade said ironically, with a last look at Moran.

He let Dorothy draw him away then, and by the time they reached the
street he was his old boyish self again. Aping Moran, he slipped his arm
around her waist, but she did not shrink from _his_ embrace, unexpected
though it was.

"Say, kid," he laughed mockingly. "Kiss me once, won't you?"

CHAPTER XIII

INTO THE DEPTHS

"Good Lord, Race! What's happened?"

Senator Rexhill, on the next morning, surprised that Moran did not show
up at the hotel, had gone in search of him, and was dumbfounded when he
entered the office.

Moran, in his desperate efforts to free himself, had upset the chair
into which he was tied, and be