. You can't," he added, "be sure of anything
where a demented person is concerned. They never act according to logic
or reason, and it is impossible to make any deductions as to their
probable movements."

Lone nodded, not daring to trust his tongue with speech just then. If he
were to protect Lorraine later on, he knew that he must not defend her
now.

"Hawkins told me she had some sort of hallucination that she had seen a
man killed at Rock City, when she was wandering around in that storm,"
Warfield went on in a careless, gossipy tone. "Just what was that
about, Lone? You're the one who found her and took her in to the ranch,
I believe. She somehow mixed her delusion up with Fred Thurman, didn't
she?"

Lone made a swift decision. He was afraid to appear to hesitate, so he
laughed his quiet little chuckle while he scrambled mentally for a
plausible lie.

"I don't know as she done that, quite," he drawled humorously. "She was
out of her head, all right, and talking wild, but I laid it to her being
sick and scared. She said a man was shot, and that she saw it happen.
And right on top of that she said she didn't think they ought to stage a
murder and a thunderstorm in the same scene, and thought they ought to
save the thunder and lightning for the murderer to make his getaway by.
She used to work for the moving pictures, and she was going on about
some wild-west picture she thought she was acting a part in.

"Afterwards I told her what she'd been saying, and she seemed to kinda
remember it, like a bad dream she'd had. She told me she thought the
villain in one of the plays she acted in had pulled off a stage murder
in them rocks. We figured it out together that the first crack of
thunder had sounded like shooting, and that's what started her off. She
hadn't ever been in a real thunderstorm before, and she's scared of
them. I know that one we had the other day like to of scared her into
hysterics. I laughed at her and joshed her out of it."

"Didn't she ever say anything about Fred Thurman, then?" Warfield
persisted.

"Not to me, she didn't. Fred was dragged that night, and if she heard
about a man being killed during that same storm, she might have said
something about it. She might have wondered if that was what she saw. I
don't know. She's pretty sensible--when she ain't crazy."

Warfield turned his horse, as if by accident, so that he was brought
face to face with Lone. His eyes searched Lone's face pitiless