booming, for all that the astonishment had
not yet left his eyes.

"Cold feet," he rumbled. "Cold feet! Me!" And suddenly his gust of
mirthless laughter made petty the other's insolence. "Wickersham, I've
broken better crooks than you'll ever be. A man has to have a big
heart to be a big crook and you--and you--well, sometimes I wonder
whether there wasn't some sort of an oversight in that line, when they
put you together."

He couldn't have explained why the thought came to him at that moment
any more than he understood his swiftly malicious impulse to use it;
but all in a flash there came back to him a recollection of that day
when he and Caleb had burst through the hedge to find the boy, Stephen
O'Mara, pummeling a bigger prostrate boy who shrieked under the earnest
thoroughness of that pummeling. Allison, too, rose to his feet.

"I only wanted to give you a chance," he stated dryly. "I reckon I can
take care of myself. I always could. And you--well, you know as well
as I do what sort of a scrap that--that woods-rat can put up, or you
ought to. He gave you a sort of a demonstration, once, if I remember
correctly. I stick! I never was overly squeamish. But don't fool
yourself, Archie, don't fool yourself. If we light, we're fighting
with a regular guy, your insinuation to the contrary. I merely wanted
you to realize what I know now. We'll think we've been in a battle
before we come to a finish!"

His hand was on the door knob when the door itself flashed open.
Dexter Allison's daughter hesitated, surprised, on the threshold. Her
eyes, brilliantly alight, leaped from her father's face to that of the
man half toward her and back again.

"Oh," she exclaimed uncertainly, "I didn't know you were busy. I saw
the light. I'd been over to Uncle Cal's, just for a minute. I wanted
to tell you--good night!"

CHAPTER XIII

THIS LITERARY THING

It was dark, the night of that second day, when Stephen O'Mara came
quietly up to the open door of his own lighted shack and stopped for a
moment to gaze in at the two men whose faces were touched by the glow
of the lamp on the table. There had been more than one moment in those
forty-eight hours which had elapsed since he had lifted that
black-robed, inert figure from the floor in which Steve had wondered
whether Garry Devereau would even await his return to Thirty-Mile; more
than once he had smiled whimsically to himself, during the trip back
up-river