her--"

"Just cut your remarks along those lines."

"Sheriff!" Again the voice from below.

"Yeh!"

"We 've found a cache down here. Must have been made in a hurry--two
new revolvers, bullets, a mask, a couple of new handkerchiefs and the
money."

Harry's eyes grew wide. Then he stuck out his hands.

"The evidence certainly is piling up!" he grunted. "I might as well
save my talking for later."

"That's a good idea." The sheriff snapped the handcuffs into place.
Then Fairchild shut off the pumps and they started toward the machine.
Back in Ohadi more news awaited them. Harry, if Harry had been the
highwayman, had gone to no expense for his outfit. The combined
general store and hardware emporium of Gregg Brothers had been robbed
of the articles necessary for a disguise,--also the revolvers and their
bullets. Robert Fairchild watched Harry placed in the solitary cell of
the county jail with a spirit that could not respond to the
Cornishman's grin and his assurances that morning would bring a
righting of affairs. Four charges hung heavy above him: that of
horse-stealing, of burglary, of highway robbery, and worse, the final
one of assault with attempt to kill. Fairchild turned wearily away; he
could not find the optimism to join Harry's cheerful announcement that
it would be "all right." The appearances were otherwise. Besides, up
in the little hospital on the hill, Fairchild had seen lights gleaming
as he entered the jail, and he knew that doctors were working there
over the wounded body of the fiddler. Tired, heavy at heart, his
earlier conquest of the night sodden and overshadowed now, he turned
away from the cell and its optimistic occupant,--out into the night.

It was only a short walk to the hospital and Fairchild went there, to
leave with at least a ray of hope. The probing operation had been
completed; the fiddler would live, and at least the charge against
Harry would not be one of murder. That was a thing for which to be
thankful; but there was plenty to cause consternation, as Fairchild
walked slowly down the dark, winding street toward the main
thoroughfare. Without Harry, Fairchild now felt himself lost. Before
the big, genial, eccentric Cornishman had come into his life, he had
believed, with some sort of divine ignorance, that he could carry out
his ambitions by himself, with no knowledge of the technical details
necessary to mining, with no previous history of the Blue Poppy to