head."

Slade scowled at his helpers. Lennon frowned back at him but followed up
the girl's lead.

"Once saw a man taken with apoplexy--stroke of paralysis, you know. Not
paralyzed are you? Try lifting your arms and legs?"

Slade glowered morosely, but caught the look of concern in Carmena's
face and stiffened with sudden alarm. She watched with an intent
scrutiny as he gingerly lifted one limb after another.

"Bunk!" he growled. "I ain't paralyzed. Needn't think you can con me."

"Wait--your face!" warned the girl. "It looked queer. Try smiling."

"No, it's all right now," said Lennon. "Sometimes these first strokes of
apoplexy paralyze only for a few moments."

Carmena changed her look of sympathy to one of sharp reproof.

"I don't think it's that at all. You've just been working on our
sympathies, Mr. Slade. Own up now. You took too much tizwin to know what
you were about. You came in here for a drink of water and fell against
the table corner."

The glaring eyes of the trader narrowed in a look of crafty calculation.
Lennon followed the man's thoughts by his expression. The effects of the
moonshine whiskey, of the blow under his ear, and of the suffocation had
not yet passed. They had left him lax and shaken and rather muddled. He
had been given his fill for one night. Carmena's reproaches disarmed
his suspicion that she and Lennon knew what he had been about. His
guilty anger at the two subsided into derision of their blindness.

"Well, what if I did git tanked up?" he growled. "It's my tizwin as much
as Dad's, ain't it? I'm going back to bed to sleep it off."

Lennon took the candle from Carmena.

"Permit me to carry the light for you, Slade. Your hand is too unsteady.
I'm not so sure about Miss Farley's explanation of your mishap. I still
believe you had a stroke--not as heavy a stroke as it might have
been--not fatal, you know, but heavy enough to put you down and out."

Slade was staggering to his feet. Lennon followed him to the room where
Farley lay sprawled in drunken slumber beside an empty whiskey jug. As
soon as Slade had dropped upon the bed Lennon took the candle back to
the living room. Carmena had gone.

He gathered up an armful of Navaho rugs and moved one of the heavy
chairs around to the doorway of the passage into the girl's room.

CHAPTER XV

CROOKED WAYS

At gray dawn Elsie started to go out into the living room. Midway of the
dusky passage her foot struck against a r