pear. They took the turn into an ill-kept,
dust-heavy road that had cast its blight of brown upon the reeds
bordering it. The woods became more and more dense and the road more
narrow. In some places the dust was crusted, as it had dried after the
last rain, and the men in the automobile could see that the wheels of
another machine and the hoofs of a galloping horse had plunged through
this crust but a short time before.

Around a bend in the road, going at full speed, Bassett sighted Harry
Marvin for the first time. He stood up beside the driver and hailed
him, but Harry did not even turn around. The beat of his horse's hoofs
drowned the sound. The deep lines of the runabout's wheels in the dust
held his gaze and his senses to one thing alone--the rescue of
Pauline. He urged the poor beast to its last tug of strength. Weak
and dizzy from his wound, he knew that he could go but a little way
afoot. The road's high, close-set wall of trees was broken for the
first time by a little clearing. Harry's passing glance showed him
that there was a house in the clearing. He was exhausted and a thirst,
but his eyes swept back to the wheel tracks on the road.

The runabout had gone on. Harry, without drawing rein, was about to
follow. But suddenly, weirdly, the rickety walls of the deserted house
gave forth a sound, a rattle and a crash, and from a shuttered window
beside the low-silled door bellied a sheet of smoke.

Harry reined the foaming horse and sprang off. Freed of his weight,
the animal staggered on a few paces and fell, panting, in the dust.

Harry did not see it. He was battering at the door of the burning
house.

Hicks could hardly be called a nervous or a timid man. He was
certainly not a coward, like Owen; but neither did he have the shrewd,
scheming mind which was the bulwark of the craven secretary's
weakness. At the moment when they discovered the young lovers safe at
the foot of the cliff after the escape from the balloon and rock ledge,
the two arch conspirators were two very different men. Owen was
shaking like a leaf in his terror of discovery, but thinking of a
hundred schemes to save himself. Hicks was deadly cool, and thinking
of just one thing--immediate and cold-blooded murder.

But now, although he thought he had killed Harry, although he knew he
had Pauline gagged and bound in the bottom of the runabout, Hicks was
afraid. He was afraid of the incompleteness of the thing. He was