illing to do
that little as he could. "I guess I can trust you," he said, and gave
her the second square of press-damp paper.

Like the first, it was addressed to the superintendent at Carbonate.
But this time the brown eyes flashed and her breath came quickly as
she read the vice-president's cold-blooded after-thought:

"Town-Marshal Biggin will arrive in Carbonate on Number 201 this
A.M. with a prisoner. Have our attorneys see to it that the man is
promptly jailed in default of bond. If he is set at liberty, as he
is likely to be, I shall trust you to arrange for his rearrest and
detention at all hazards.

"D."

V. THE LANDSLIDE

Virginia took the first step in the perilous path of the strategist
when she handed the incendiary telegram back to Jastrow.

"Poor Mr. Winton!" she said, with the real sympathy in the words made
most obviously perfunctory by the tone. "What a world of possibilities
there is masquerading behind that little word 'arrange.' Tell me more
about it, Mr. Jastrow. How will they 'arrange' it?"

"Winton's rearrest? Nothing easier in a tough mining-camp like
Carbonate, I should say."

"Yes, but how?"

"I can't prophesy how Grafton will go about it, but I know what I
should do."

Virginia's smile was irresistible, but there was a look in the deepest
depth of the brown eyes that was sifting Mr. Arthur Jastrow to the
innermost sand-heap of his desert nature.

"How would you do it, Mr. Napoleon Jastrow?" she asked, giving him the
exact fillip on the side of gratified vanity.

"Oh, I'd fix him. He is in a frame of mind right now; and by the time
the lawyers are through drilling him in the trespass affair, he'll be
just spoiling for a row with somebody."

"Do you think so? Oh, how delicious! And then what?"

"Then I'd hire some plug-ugly to stumble up against him and pick a
quarrel with him. He'd do the rest--and land in the lock-up."

Those who knew her best said it was a warning to be heeded in Miss
Virginia Carteret when her eyes were downcast and her voice sank to
its softest cadence.

"Why, certainly; how simple!" she said, taking her cousin's arm again;
and the secretary went in to set the wires at work in Winton's affair.

Now Miss Carteret was a woman in every fiber of her, but among her
gifts she might have counted some that were, to say the least,
super-feminine. One of these was a measure of discretion which would
have been fairly creditable in a