n the chase; and he must be free in order to
redeem himself.

That very night, straight from eaves-dropping at the bohunks' meeting,
he had crept back to Torrance's stable and found it locked. The
padlock in itself was nothing, but it implied suspicion--possibly
entangling precautions. And so he had slunk away.

A night's reflection had warned him how fortunate was the instinct that
held his hand. As Mira lay sleeping heavily beside him on their bed of
spruce, he had lived again the happy days of his unofficial Police
duties with Sergeant Mahon--on the prairie, at the barracks and the
Police post, but more vividly than all, in the fastnesses of the
Cypress Hills. He saw once more the kindly eye, felt the friendly
hand, heard the soft voice of the one man above his class who had
treated him as equal and friend. He saw again the old tobacco pouch
spilled on Inspector Barker's desk in the barracks at Medicine Hat.

He knew why Mahon had come north.

"I can't see him fail, Mira," he groaned. "He's did fer if he does.
We got to stay an' see him through."

"Perhaps he's after the horse-thief too."

Blue Pete started. Then his head sank in one arm. "We can't help him
thar, Mira. We can't be caught--yet. . . . An' the Sergeant wudn't
want to get us--yet."

"It'll be all over soon, Pete," she said more brightly. "Mr. Torrance
has promised us the horses when he goes."

"God fergive me fer keepin' yuh waitin', Mira!" he breathed, trying to
read in her face the forgiveness that meant more to him.

But she had turned away, and he did not see the tear on her lashes.

CHAPTER XVII

A PLOT DEFEATED

Torrance's pride was becoming a devastating thing; for the moment it
had run away with his sense of proportion and obliterated every
superstition. As he ran his eye expertly along the level of the steel
rails and saw that the trestle did not sink so much as a hair's
breadth, he wanted to shout it to the world. Had he not, at unguarded
moments, been held down by momentary flashes of the old dreads he would
have jumped on his little speeder and chugged away to the west to sing
his satisfaction to the hundred and one contractors who were looking
for him to open the way to their longest and heaviest trains of
supplies, growing longer and heavier as grade crept into the mountains.
He wanted to cry to them: "Run your trains--fifty cars at a time, if
the rest of the line will bear 'em. As for the Tepee trestle, i