on," she explained.

"Oh! Jack Burton is your brother, is he?" He contemplated her
thoughtfully for a second or two. "Well, I seem to have turned up
at the right moment," he said.

"Yes." She leaned forward with flushed face upraised. "And I haven't said
'Thank you' yet. I'm so grateful to you. I can't tell you how grateful."

"Don't!" he said. "Don't! Drink this instead! Drink to the lucky chance
that sent me your way! I'm proud to have been of use to you."

She took the glass unwillingly. "I'm sure I shall hate it."

"It's the best antidote to snake-poison out," he said. "I swear it won't
upset you. If it makes you sleepy, well, you're in the right place and
safe enough."

She liked his utterance of the last words. They had a genuine ring. "But,
if I drink, so must you!" she said. "And eat, too! Jack said I was to
give you a meal if you came."

He smiled again, a large, humorous smile. "That's the kindest thing Jack
Burton has ever done," he said, with warm approval. "I'll join you with
pleasure, missis. This man-trapping business is hungry work for all of
us."

Dot frowned a little. It did not please her to be reminded of his
mission. Her former prejudice began to revive within her, his kindness
notwithstanding.

"I don't like the thought of it myself," she told him abruptly. "But, of
course, I'm only a 'new chum.'"

"What?" he said, pausing in the act of pouring himself out a drink. "That
sounds as if you want that scoundrel Bill to get away."

She coloured in some confusion under his look. How could she expect to
make a policeman understand? "No--no!" she said, with vehemence. "I'm not
quite so soft as that. I'd shoot him myself if he came my way. But I hate
to think of a dozen men all on the track of one. It really isn't fair."

He laughed, but without superiority. "And yet you'd swell the odds? Do
you call that fair?"

Dot paused to collect her arguments. It seemed that possibly even this
machine of justice carried a small fragment of sympathy in his soul.
Certainly he was not the judicial automaton she had expected him to be.

"It's like this," she said. "I'd shoot him if he came my way because
he has done us a lot of mischief, and I want to stop it. But I'd
do it squarely. I wouldn't do it when he wasn't looking. And I
wouldn't--ever--make it my profession to hunt down criminals and even
employ black men to help. I think that's hateful. I couldn't live that
way. I'd be above it."

"I see." He