guide him, and with no help against the enemies who seemed everywhere.
Now he saw that it was impossible. More, the incidents of the night
showed how swiftly those enemies were working, how sharp and
stiletto-like their weapons.

That Harry was innocent was certain,--to Robert Fairchild. There was
quite a difference between a joke which a whole town recognized as such
and a deliberate robbery which threatened the life of at least one man.
Fairchild knew in his heart that Harry was not built along those lines.

Looking back over it now, Fairchild could see how easily Fate had
played into the hands of the Rodaines, if the Rodaines had not
possessed a deeper concern than merely to seize upon a happening and
turn it to their own account. The highwayman was big. The highwayman
talked with a "Cousin-Jack" accent,--for all Cornishmen are "Cousin
Jacks" in the mining country. Those two features in themselves,
Fairchild thought, as he stumbled along in the darkness, were
sufficient to start the scheming plot in the brain of Maurice Rodaine,
already ugly and evil through the trick played by Harry on his father
and the rebuke that had come from Anita Richmond. It was an easy
matter for him to get the inspiration, leap out of the window, and then
wait until the robber had gone, that he might flare forth with his
accusation. And after that--.

Either Chance, or something stronger, had done the rest. The finding
of the stolen horse and the carelessly made cache near the mouth of the
Blue Poppy mine would be sufficient in the eyes of any jury. The
evidence was both direct and circumstantial. To Fairchild's mind,
there was small chance for escape by Harry, once his case went to
trial. Nor did the pounding insistence of intuitive knowledge that the
whole thing had been a deliberately staged plot on the part of the
Rodaines, father and son, make the slightest difference in Fairchild's
estimation. How could he prove it? By personal animosity? There was
the whole town of Ohadi to testify that the highwayman was a big man,
of the build of Harry, and that he spoke with a Cornish accent. There
were the sworn members of the posse to show that they, without
guidance, had discovered the horse and the cache,--and the Rodaines
were nowhere about to help them. And experience already had told
Fairchild that the Rodaines, by a deliberately constructed system, held
a ruling power; that against their word, his would be as nothing.
B